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Old 12-27-2017, 07:19 PM   #8
Peter Goldsbury
 
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Dojo: Hiroshima Kokusai Dojo
Location: Hiroshima, Japan
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Re: Moral and Ethical issue (warning topic on intimate violence)

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Anonymous User wrote: View Post
I have been studying Aikido for almost 15 years now and over the last 12 -- 14 months I have really progressed where I am, for now, focused on the nonphysical study of Aikido. This includes the study of violence, physics and for one of a better term spiritual aspects.

During the study of violence I have come to a point that I am having difficulty understanding, that is, violence that manifests as rape, murder, torture, sexual assault etc.

I am asking for others on this forum how the above violence fits into Aikido principles and how the individual (being the victim of the violence or a close family member) is able to process the violence through Aikido principles.

I thank all who contribute in advance as I know this topic is a very hard one for some and in general.

Thank you very much.
Hello,

I have been studying aikido for nearly fifty years now and have certainly studied violence. However, I did not embrace aikido as a spiritual art: while at university I met a Japanese student, who had a 3rd dan and who wanted to continue training—and things developed from there. I trained because I liked doing so—and found aikido sufficiently attractive to decide to come and live here permanently, so I could study the art within its home culture, so to speak. This was a major step, really, considering that next to my parents in the family grave in the UK lies an uncle of mine I never knew, who I believe died as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II, but this was never talked about.

Living here as a resident requires a really deep study of the language and culture and this is where a ‘westerner’ (for want of a better term) is at a disadvantage: there is a vast amount of learning and unlearning to be done and some of this is so deep that it can affect one’s sense of identity as a person.

All my teachers have been Japanese and those living outside Japan struggled to find a home in an alien culture. (My struggle has been from the opposite direction.) They were sufficiently at home with the spiritual aspects of the art that they very rarely saw the need to talk about it, especially on the tatami. They simply referred to aikido as a Japanese budo, but left unexplained the meaning and cultural implications of this term: it was for the students to do the explorations themselves, to the extent that they needed to, not for them to explain it.

I have spent a substantial part of my life studying spirituality, especially mystical theology as this is understood in the Christian church. On the other hand, since I knew / know all the ‘aikido’ members of the Ueshiba family except Morihei, I was led through aikido to the study of the Omoto religion and its links with Buddhism and Shinto. Of course, there is much common ground, but there are also vast differences.

I have studied spirituality probably sufficiently for several lifetimes, and I do not explain any of these aspects of the art to my own students, who are all Japanese in any case and do not need any explanations from me. They have a vague idea of the difference between a jutsu and a do, but I doubt whether any of them practice aikido because they think it is a spiritual art. In any case, they would never tell me if they did, and so I am left to deduce their motivations for training from the way they behave in the dojo. They keep coming to the dojo and progress up through the grading system, so I assume that what I am teaching them—or rather, what they are learning from me (the two are not the same) is of some value.

University students who practice aikido as a club activity tend to do it more intensely than students in a ‘general’ dojo and this fact led to an incident that directly concerns the violent aspects of training. You must be aware that there are some basic waza that can be extremely dangerous if executed very hard and with no awareness of your uke’s real situation. I put it this way because some senior students at the university medical club thought that one of their juniors was lazy or malingering, because he did not execute flying ukemi with the same zest as his dojo buddies. (In fact, I taught him English and he told me that he found aikido very attractive, but he found ukemi quite frightening.) Well, I heard that during a summer camp this student was subjected to repeated ukemi from shiho-nage and that this led to a fatal conclusion: he died the following day from brain damage caused by severe concussion.

In the UK, this would have led to a major court case, but this did not happen here. In fact, the boy’s parents began to practice the art as a way of understanding what happened to their son—who was bright and would probably have gone on to become a successful doctor. The university paid out a large sum in compensation, but the point I want to make here is that none of the students who threw the boy admitted any individual responsibility for their collective actions, which on another interpretation amounted to severe bullying. It was as if the student had been given a stark choice: train in the way that the traditions of the club required, or leave. The university banned the club for one semester, but nothing really changed as a result of this incident.

One of the features of Christian moral theology is that sin is never explained away: people do evil things and this has to be accepted and dealt with. Similarly, I do not think there is much point in studying a martial art in the belief that one can practice a ‘spiritual’ art, if this means ignoring the potential violence that goes with it. This is one thing that none of my Japanese teachers ever attempted to do. They never tried to process the potential violence in aikido by denying its existence.

Best wishes,

Last edited by Peter Goldsbury : 12-27-2017 at 07:24 PM.

P A Goldsbury
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