Thread: Tanaka Bansen
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Old 06-08-2007, 01:47 PM   #21
lamech
Dojo: Aikido Tendokai
Location: Toronto
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 6
Canada
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Re: Tanaka Bansen

In a valiant attempt to combat the thread-drift, I'd like to follow up on my earlier post. I had the chance to ask my Sensei (Yumi Nakamura), and the timing was in fact such that Tanaka Bansen was teaching in Osaka when she started there, and Kawahara Yukio Shihan was, in her words, "the most senior student" at the dojo at the time. As I said, since then both of them have moved to Canada, where they maintain a close relationship. I'm not sure if the earlier poster who talked about a Kawahara Shihan giving seminars in Hiroshima was talking about the same person -- I'm pretty sure the Kawahara Shihan I'm talking about only travels back to Japan to give a seminar (in Osaka, I thought) once a year around the winter holiday. He's also pretty steadfast in his commitment to basic principles and linear efficiency in his technique; whether that jives with people's "angular" experience of Tanaka Bansen, I couldn't say.

In any case, Yumi Sensei described herself as being in Tanaka Bansen's lineage, and that's a piece of info I didn't definitively have before. But, it's still unclear how much of the aikido we practice comes from which influence; our dojo also has senior students/teachers who have or had relationships with Yamada Sensei, Tamura Sensei and Kanai Sensei, so I'm sure there's some kind of blend going on that would be hard to untangle--and wouldn't that be the case with many/most dojos in North America these days? How much of an earlier generation's aikido can we hope to reliably and/or "purely" reconstruct, anyway? Is that what we should be striving toward? Food for thought.

Last edited by lamech : 06-08-2007 at 01:50 PM. Reason: (fixed a typo)
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