Quote:
Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:
You know, this is a fascinating set of questions, and I really hope someone like Professor Peter Goldsbury will write something about this in his column, or directly in this thread. In fact, anyone who has insight into this (Robert John?) could lend some clarity here: I think the ideas about teaching, having a "school", and tradition are so radically different at their core between Japanese (Chinese, East Asian in general?) and Western cultures that it does not really make sense to phrase the questions the way you did. The answer would be trivial and meaningless in terms of explanation :-)
My take on it is that there is no concept of an "absolute" in East Asian culture, so there is no premise of a core set of skills that must be passed on to someone. Very much related, there is no concept of "sharing" without "social competition", which leads to the need by each person to "steal" what s/he can from the circumstances that present themselves. If one takes the above to one possible logical conclusion; namely, that people teach, demonstrate, or show something to others in order to live, rather than in order to build something universally approachable, then the existance of omote and ura, the social niceties and gokui, and emphasis on personal "shugyo" rather than group "sharing" of knowledge, become clear (in this interpretation of reality). It also makes sense of the extreme difficulty and wariness in building trust, and reticence, that one sees in East Asian societies, and how groups of like-minded individuals tend to be small rather than encompassing.
Against this background, with such incentives and constraints, splitting off, existence of differences, patchy knowledge and skills, searching for and application of niche knowledge, is natural and economically sound.
For someone (and there are more and more of such people) to break out of this mould is astounding!!!
Regards, Gernot
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Gernot,
I appreciate your reply and insight.
My position was not meant to compare Eastern with Western mentality. I understand the concept of 'stealing' technique, as well as sharing/social competition. I am witnessing something different in this conversation.
The original question is why pre-war technique is not included in modern Aikido. My position is that the founder chose NOT to include those techniques, either because they needed to be eliminated or because he refined them; that is meant to read he taught what he wanted to transmit up until the day he died.
I meant to further elaborate that stream with identifiying the different flavors of Aikido as we know them today. My position on this subject is such; Shioda and Tomiki CHOSE to break away from O'sensei at a point in time when it was necessary for them to do so. They didn't just stick around and 'steal' techniques in order to increase their bag of tricks. When they left, they named their system Aikido and they honored the founder. My point is that there was a conscious decision to end transmission between student and teacher; so how then can that system be deemed complete? Thus begets the question of whether or not the teachings of an incompletely transmitted system is what the founder originally intended as Aikido, since he is indeed considered the founder.