Quote:
Dan Harden wrote:
Of course two of equal power can "pull off" a demonstration if they are both vested in making the waza look like the waza. Its why I mentioned differentiating between classic jujutsu, aikijujutsu, or any art where you "do" a waza, and then compare it to judo/ jujutsu or even push hands where you are only "vested" in winning over the other guy.
In that venue both would be trying to be fully -on.
So in a complete sense-there is no way someone with good structure, and with good power and experience in using it is going to attack a teacher and said teacher be able to pull off anything that looks like that demo-isn't gonna happen.
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Hey Dan, just to be clear, I wasn't disagreeing with you earlier. I agree with everything you wrote here. However, since we're here on Aikiweb (and supposed to be talking about Aikido in particular) I try to limit my scope accordingly. A lot of time I think some of my comments get mis-understood as defending the status quo or for saying how things "should be" when I'm actually talking about how things are. I think that as Aikido exists there is a decent amount of collusion in the outcome. To attack/take ukemi as you describe (while completely valid and actually more along the lines of how I attempt to train) is outside of the paradigm of Aikido. OSensei (while perhaps not as clear about his waza as we would have liked) was pretty clear about what he expected from his attackers. Big, simple, and (arguably) over-committed attacks were what he expected. Now again, to be clear, I'm not saying this is how I train, or what I think is the right way to even get at "aiki". I've stated plenty of times that what I'm doing isn't Aikido anymore, in no small part because of the change in the interaction between uke and nage. Akuzawa talks about being effectively ostracized from his DR dojo as he became harder and harder to throw (presumably, by doing something similar to what you describe above). Even there, it was outside of the training paradigm. Just look at the extent that Tomiki was erased from Aikido's history for introducing and promoting a non-cooperative *aspect* to what he was teaching.
Finally, I think it's helpful to distinguish the (potential) differenced between:
- what Aikido is today
- what we *think* the founder may have intended it to be
- what we personally *think* it should be, or how it should be trained
- and what we want our own personal training (aikido or not) to be
For me, each of those four things is very different.