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Jesse Lee wrote:
I know a very senior aikidoka that trained as a yudansha with Chiba. He told a story of one occasion where Chiba thought this person's attack was too noncommittal. Chiba slapped this person once really hard across the face and screamed at him/her to come at him with everything.
This person tried hard to hospitalize Chiba with the next strike. Chiba absorbed it, and the whole thing flowed so effortlessly and beautifully, to hear this person tell it.
The reason I remember that story is, this person said that Chiba, while probably crazy, definitely saved him/her ten years of training. The flow of the next technique, after that brutal slap, revealed the next plateau on the path to mastery.
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Well, that's one way to rationalize an act of humiliation by your instructor.
The proper responses for an instructor to a tentative attack by a student are either: 1) choose a new uke; or 2) show the student how to attack well. I prefer the second, since it fits well with the aikido approach of learning through demonstration, imitation, and repetition
I've never met Mr. Chiba, let alone taken a class from him, but I know two people whom he purposefully injured. Both are experienced yudansha, and neither of them "deserved it". An instructor who humiliates and purposely injures his or her students and visitors to his or her dojo is a menace and a disgrace to aikido and the martial arts.
I have trained in aikido as a student of Saotome-sensei since 1984, and I have never seen him either humiliate or intentionally injure another aikidoka, whether that person was a student of his or not. On the contrary, Saotome-sensei has suspended people from teaching or training (or both) when those people have injured or "merely" intimidated junior students.
Based on my observations, this is true for other martial arts as well. I also studied Uechi-ryu karatedo in a dojo setting from 1977 to 1989. I spent three months in Okinawa in 1981 studying at Kanei Uechi-sensei's dojo and a smaller dojo run by one of his senior students, Mr. Nakamatsu. The training was hard in every sense of the word. But the only time I ever saw an intentional injury occur, it involved an arrogant American visitor who let it be known that he had come to Uechi-sensei's dojo to test for ni-dan, and to find out how tough the Okinawans were.
He found out. As part of his ni-dan test, this person had to spar with a much-lower-ranking Okinawan student who just happened to be a gymnast and a boxer. The testing board awarded the American his ni-dan after the Okinawan student beat the crap out of him. All of us in the dojo felt sorry for him, but we agreed that he "earned" it.
Strangely enough, I met him back in the US several years later, and he was just as arrogant as ever.
Humiliation and brutality are notoriously unreliable teaching tools, especially in an arena as full of insecurities as a dojo.