Thread: "Competition"
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Old 06-27-2013, 04:02 PM   #33
Chris Li
 
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Re: "Competition"

Quote:
Corky Quakenbush wrote: View Post
Yep!

if you say so, but still, what about the many ways of saying competition is "okay in Aikido" that can be mistranslated into "strictly prohibited?"

If you are saying the Founder of Aikido is guilty of hypocrisy, I wouldn't argue with that - but which do you think he really believed? And if he believed competition in aikido was okay but allowed himself to be quoted in print in a book he conceivably wanted to be seen around the world saying the opposite, that kind of makes the Founder a bull$#!T artist, doesn't it?
Well, there are a number of places where he was...flexible with the truth - but that's another discussion.

If you're read my other posts you'll see that I'm not arguing that he was secretly in favor of comptetion. In this very thread, I said:

Quote:
I think that it's fairly clear that he was opposed to competitive matches for a number of reasons.
OTOH, we have him participating in "matches" on a number of occassions, and endorsing "matches on others - so it seems clear that an argument for an absolute prohibition would be pretty difficult to make.

It seems to me that he made general statements against compteition, but his actual behavior was not quite that strict on a case-by-case basis. Pretty typical for Japanese, really...

Best,

Chris

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