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Old 04-29-2008, 03:39 AM   #40
Paul Sanderson-Cimino
Dojo: Yoshokai; looking into judo
Join Date: Mar 2003
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Re: Functional Origins of Aikido/Daito-Ryu Techniques

Quote:
Demetrio Cereijo wrote: View Post
That's an interesting video. However, while it suggests perhaps the kinesthetic origins of that technique, I'm not sure if it shows its -functional- origins. Perhaps that's a good sword technique, but is it a good throwing technique? To use a somewhat facetious example, you could take a very good tennis swing, and then convert it into a punch. It might not be a very good punch.

Quote:
Demetrio Cereijo wrote: View Post
I ran into this video a while ago, and also found it potentially relevant. Ikkyo as a means of exposing the side to a weapon strike. I remember something like this came up when (after reading Chris Hein's arguments about weapons in aikido) I tried some tanto-using randori with a friend.

Quote:
Rupert Atkinson wrote: View Post
I think like you think ... but I just did it without having a clue and started trying to figure it all out. Dunno how far I am down the road but few try to figure things out and instead wait for instruction that ... never comes. And that was my 500th post ...
I agree that it's important to give these things some thought.

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
Intellectual understanding is overrated (my interest therein notwithstanding). It is a DO. The point of the art is to do it.
I could imagine a performance art "do" of aikido, sure. Really, you could do that with any set of movements at all: practice them for their own sake. There is nothing wrong with this. (Kyudo comes to mind.) However, with budo, I tend to follow the late Furuya-sensei's formula of do/jutsu/gaku. Aikido is a Way: a Way centered around fighting techniques. Now, these fighting techniques are not just practiced for their own sake, any more than someone learns about old black-powder rifles for the sake of making an army. But if I were a gun enthusiast whose passion was old black-powder rifles, I'd want to learn how to use them just like a historic user would have.

While I think we might have different perspectives on aikido, maybe this kind of inquiry could still be interesting to you at least as an idle curiosity. I don't see any reason for fighting over it.

Quote:
Demetrio Cereijo wrote: View Post
Similar problems, similar answers all across the world.
More and more, I think that goals, rather than techniques, define arts. E.g., sumo wrestlers are not bad American wrestlers, they're just aiming for a different goal: knocking someone down or pushing them out of a ring as a "fall" rather than a pin or what-have-you. I think that if you gave a set of judo rules to a bunch of untrained people and locked them in a room for fifty years, you'd probably end up recreating at least most of the curriculum. They're just good methods for throwing someone in a jacket.

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Chris Hein wrote: View Post
If the techniques chosen for Aikido were centerd on weapon taking, it seems that the techniques should start with nage grabbing and uke, and not nage being grabbed.

Looking at the forms, it seems that the majority of them come from uke grabbing, and nage responding to the grab.
(...)
Looking at Nikyo through rokyo, you can see an emphasis on wrist technique. The MMA crowd will quickly tell you that getting a wrist lock on someone is hard to do, and not too effective. They are correct. Not that wrist locks cannot be done, and not that wrist technique can't work, but they are, to use a cliche', low percentage.

However when clearing your weapon hand those wrist techniques are 100% indispensable. We train this sort of thing at my school, and those techniques come up constantly, they seldom have the finish as is seen in the forms, but they always work beautifully.

While I agree that the techniques work wonderfully for weapon taking, the forms, would suggest that they are more likely weapon retention.
I'll say it again: I think this theory has real promise.

Quote:
Michael Douglas wrote: View Post
Weapons (more importantly the possibility of weapons) make arm-twisty stuff most applicable even where it might be less applicable in strictly unarmed combat.
As noted above, I think this is a pretty likely theory for the functional origins of the techniques that were used to create aikido.

Last edited by Paul Sanderson-Cimino : 04-29-2008 at 03:49 AM.
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