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Old 09-23-2008, 09:52 AM   #5
Mike Sigman
Location: Durango, CO
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 4,123
United_States
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Re: Using ki-skills for "aiki" in Daito-Ryu

Quote:
Dan Harden wrote: View Post
Hi Mike
Yes I got that. It just isn't news...to me. It would be the same as me discoving connection and aiki in the ICMA and what your reply would be to me.
Well, it's just proof from another angle. It's also interesting to watch yet another martial-arts guy with obvious access to the same basic ki/qi/jin/kokyu skills. The real question in my mind when I saw this yet-another example on YouTube was "just how the hell many people in Japan have these skills that we don't know about?" and "how many actually had these skills in the old days?". Ellis and I have mused about this on the side and I defer to his opinions, since I don't have a strong feel for the broader Japanese martial-arts communities the way that he does.

I began to have a suspicion that I was underestimating how much of this knowledge was in JMA's during the first year I started posting on AikiWeb for info (what... 3-4 years ago?) and too much information came in from different sources (which caused me to stick around and dig some more). When I started seeing video like this one of Kuroda:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXsMSoXrNgo

and then this current one of Nishikido's and other similar ones, I knew we were in trouble. This stuff is much more widely spread in Japan than we thought. Donn Draeger's vague misunderstandings about how much ki and kiai, etc., was in Japan were probably, in my opinion, because he wasn't shown how to do these things. He, like most of us, was under the impression that there wasn't much there. Heck.... there seems to be plenty there, it's just that only a few are shown. Again, Ellis would be the one to talk about that.

The point is that all this stuff is actually alive and well in Japan... the West is just way behind grasping this fact. The interesting thing is that the total skills of these things take years to fully develop, so watching the very sluggish attitude of "someday I'm going to take a weekend workshop on this stuff and add it to my already-fine martial arts" is pretty interesting. Gives me the grins.

FWIW

Mike
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