Quote:
George S. Ledyard wrote:
It's my understanding that folks not training at the Hombu dojo in Tokyo had a bit of an axe to grind with the folks from the big city. I think that the deshi at the headquarters dojo tended to be a bit full of themselves as being the ones at what they perceived as the center of things.
This rivalry, if you will, was especially pronounced with the folks at Iwama who believed that they were at the center of things. But to a lesser extent you could see that the folks in Osaka or at Shingu were also discounted to a degree by the folks in Tokyo. I imagine that this would have been REALLY irritating to someone who had been with O-Sensei from the beginning watching all the young egos at work at headquarters.
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The rivalry actually goes quite deep. I have mentioned somewhere before that K Chiba, in his obituary of Morihiro Saito, called Saito Sensei an example of
Mito-kishitsu (水戸気質), an example of a concept that has a long history in Japan. I myself have seen a similar rivalry (actually, a sense of being separate, in another world rather than actual rivalry) between Tokyo (previously Edo, the place of residence of daimyo and their samurai) and Osaka (the base of the lower-ranked merchant class, despised for their ability to make more money than samurai ever could). By comparison, the US is very large and I wonder to what extent there is any popular belief that residence in a particular city has an influence on the character of the residents. (I do not just mean the 'country vs. city' divide, but something more specific).
As I suggested in the column, Ueshiba was born in a sleepy rural backwater, but did not stay there for much of his life. Later in his life he preferred Iwama, but he still seems to have been quite happy in Tokyo, at least up until 1935/1936. One would also have to add that Kisshomaru, whether in Tokyo, Iwama or elsewhere, carried on his shoulders a heavy weight of responsibility--and expectation, like being married into a family with a hundred mothers-in-law.