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Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
For me, dressing like I do and like the others do when practising is a gesture showing my connection to a certain group. So whether we chose to stick with etiquette or not is all the same I believe.
Itīs a matter of choosing whether to stay inside or outside a certain context.
Maybe.
On a personal level, I believe putting your heart in whatever you do is important, even when it comes to dressing up. Sort of like the inside being projected on the outside I guess..
Anyway I never liked to show up at a wedding reception all dressed up in beachwear and like so I donīt like to show up for practise in my pajamas.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
The dress (and etiquette) of Aikido is just part of the ritual. According to the adage, dreams are how our unconscious mind speaks to the conscious; ritual is how the conscious mind speaks back. As humans, we create ritual around everything we do that matters to us. As Zen master John Daido Loori used to say, there's ritual to everything, even a baseball game.
The key aspect of ritual is you don't have to believe it, or mean it, or think it--you just have to do it. The meaning comes from the doing. Every Christmas you can fuss over putting up the snow village--it's a hassle and it never comes out quite right. Then one year you declare you're not going to do it--and your children all tell you it won't be Christmas without the snow village. The meaning was in the doing, not in your attitude towards it.
So in Aikido. It doesn't really matter what you think about the pleats on your hakama or your bow to the shomen--they're part of the ritual you have made of your Aikido (if you use them). They are their own meaning.
But that's *your* Aikido. Or mine, anyway. Saying they define Aikido is like saying if you don't speak with an Arkansas accent, you're not speaking English.
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This post brought to you by a Dark & Stormy or two drunk while sitting in the sun on San Francisco's Embarcadero. The poster reserves the right to disavow the contents upon sober reflection.
Evolution doesn't prove God doesn't exist, any more than hammers prove carpenters don't exist.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
To the question is this aikido? I would not answer that a demonstration of technique is aikido. In the same way I don't think aikido exists outside training.
I remember seeing at an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France, a picture from Ancient Egypt that was definitely ikkyo. How many ways are there to do an arm lock on a down coming sword? Not that many.
So aikido shares its technique with many other arts through time and space.
To come back to the initial subject, I believe that aikido without the Japanese layers would be most of the time a reflection of one's self in the mirror. We need to go out of our way to really study otherwise we end up searching for comfort and habits.
So what would be classical French fencing without "panache" and leather and all the bowing? Self satisfied technique.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Well, in my opinion, if you strip aikido from it's etiquette, protocol and dressing it wouldn't be aikido anymore, it wouldn't even qualify for a true budo.
Aikido is not a matter of personal definition but a complete martial art. There are people who are making convenient choices based on their personal opinions, so we have schools that practice no weapons because it seems useless, schools that don't adopt the proper etiquette, because they see no point in it but then these choices are showing badly on their technique.
You can make, serve and drink tea without performing the tea ceremony, it would taste the same. But you cannot call it "tea ceremony" anymore it would be mere "tea drinking". In the same manner you can practice kote gaeshi effectively without the etiquette or hakama. It can be a good disarming technique and combat method. But it wouldn't be a martial art anymore.
Studying the culture of any country by reading books is a very different thing from practicing a martial art as a way of life. Stripping it from any of it's core elements out of convenience would only leave your practice poorer...
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Quote:
Yannis Mousoulis wrote:
Well, in my opinion, if you strip aikido from it's etiquette, protocol and dressing it wouldn't be aikido anymore, it wouldn't even qualify for a true budo.
Aikido is not a matter of personal definition but a complete martial art. There are people who are making convenient choices based on their personal opinions, so we have schools that practice no weapons because it seems useless, schools that don't adopt the proper etiquette, because they see no point in it but then these choices are showing badly on their technique.
You can make, serve and drink tea without performing the tea ceremony, it would taste the same. But you cannot call it "tea ceremony" anymore it would be mere "tea drinking". In the same manner you can practice kote gaeshi effectively without the etiquette or hakama. It can be a good disarming technique and combat method. But it wouldn't be a martial art anymore.
Studying the culture of any country by reading books is a very different thing from practicing a martial art as a way of life. Stripping it from any of it's core elements out of convenience would only leave your practice poorer...
Morihei Ueshiba, of course, changed all kinds of things - including etiquette, protocol and dressing, and it still seems to have remained budo. For that matter, if you can't change things without Aikido dissapearing then it has already dissapeared, because nobody, not even the Iwama folks, trains just the same way that Morihei Ueshiba did.
All budo, for that matter has changed, and continues to change, over time. People don't wear quite what they used to wear, they don't behave quite the way that they used to behave. Things move on.
Practicing a martial art as a way of life has very little, IMO, to do with funny clothes that people didn't even wear 100 years ago anyway.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Chris, not that I have any entitlement nor means to do so - but I'd like to award IPPON to this post.
Quote:
Christopher Li wrote:
Morihei Ueshiba, of course, changed all kinds of things - including etiquette, protocol and dressing, and it still seems to have remained budo. For that matter, if you can't change things without Aikido dissapearing then it has already dissapeared, because nobody, not even the Iwama folks, trains just the same way that Morihei Ueshiba did.
All budo, for that matter has changed, and continues to change, over time. People don't wear quite what they used to wear, they don't behave quite the way that they used to behave. Things move on.
Practicing a martial art as a way of life has very little, IMO, to do with funny clothes that people didn't even wear 100 years ago anyway.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
This gets back to the question of what ritual is. People get attached to particular ritual because of the meaning they've assigned to it, which comes from the context they learned it in. All those elements of proper attitude, intentional practice, shugyo and misogi--which are, of course, valuable in themselves--become associated with the ritual in which they are embedded. It's perfectly reasonable to ask, if you throw out the ritual, how do you ensure you maintain the qualities the ritual points you towards. And I think it's fair to say that if you *don't* maintain those qualities, you have a nice sport but not a martial art.
Evolution doesn't prove God doesn't exist, any more than hammers prove carpenters don't exist.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Is it still the military (as in martial) if you take away the weapons, saluting, rank, training system, uniforms, structure, discipline, rituals, rites, and honor? Now can you do aikido if you strip these things away,sure, but doing a martial art and practising a martial art are two different things.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Is a banana split still a banana split if you don't put on peanuts? Then how many peanuts, exactly, should be on one banana split in order for it to still be banana split?
Ooooh, or even more controversial, what if you use pistachios instead? Is it still a banana split?
Oh, and do we have to use Cavendish bananas, or are some of the less common varieties okay too. You know that 99.9% of all banana splits are made with Cavendish bananas. But what about the seeming apropos named "ice cream" bananas? They of course smaller so it changes the look and feel of the banana split. And it is still a banana... But it looks different. And the banana itself tastes different, has a different consistency... And virtually no one uses them.
Re: Is it still Aikido if you take away the Japanese clothes, etiquette and other things?
Quote:
Alex Fitzgerald wrote:
Is it still the military (as in martial) if you take away the weapons, saluting, rank, training system, uniforms, structure, discipline, rituals, rites, and honor? Now can you do aikido if you strip these things away,sure, but doing a martial art and practising a martial art are two different things.