Despite my position within the IAF, the International Aikido Federation, I watched from afar the technical demonstrations that graced the organisation's 2024 ‘Summit’, held in Tokyo at the beginning of October.
I'm an Aikido technician.
I got my desire to do Aikido from Nobuyoshi TAMURA - who marked my youth until 1986 - but I didn't get my technique from him.
I got the technique from Morihiro SAITO - who trained me in Iwama from 1986 to 2000 - but I didn't get the knowledge of the principle of Aikido from him.
I got my understanding of the principle of Aikido from Pierre CHASSANG - who was a very close friend of mine from 1986 to 2013.
These three personalities left a strong mark on the history of international Aikido in the second half of the twentieth century, and I can't complain, I believe, about the training I received from them from the very beginning.
Pierre died the last of the three in 2013, and what I have learnt since then in Aikido was not given to me, I found it. I didn't invent it, I discovered it thanks to the elements passed on to me by these masters over the previous decades.
This brief reminder was necessary to introduce my statement, which goes against the grain of the modern conception of Aikido, so that I can be reproached for everything except my lack of legitimacy to speak.
What I have seen of the Aikido demonstrations at the IAF Summit 2024 confirms that the principle of our art has not yet been understood by the highest ranks who contributed to the spectacle of this international Aikido mega-show.
In truth, an Aikido spectacle is precisely the last thing I want to watch. It's true that Aikido is spectacular when it's authentic, but it should never be a spectacle. All I saw on the platform set up by the IAF was a staging of Aikido, compositions, arrangements of attacks and techniques that were totally disrespectful of reality, a spectacle in other words. And it doesn't matter if this spectacle is pleasant to watch for the untrained eye.
Aesthetics is not the right criterion for an Aikido demonstration, the only criterion should be reality.
Let me explain.
Taking reality into account with Aikido means being attentive to the constraints imposed by the permanent presence of a danger coming simultaneously from all four directions; movement must take this requirement into account. However, the practitioners I saw were not moving in accordance with this principle, and martial reality was therefore neglected.
Aikido requires a unique movement, whether there is one, two, three or four opponents. You have to move with one opponent as you would move with four, and move with four as you would move with one. This recommendation by O Sensei is tantamount to saying that you should always move in the same way. What we see in these demonstrations, on the contrary, are people whose displacements vary according to the attacks and movements, who apply heterogeneous technical recipes instead of responding in a unique way to different situations.
Aikido is about the eternal return of the same thing : movement doesn't vary according to circumstances, it obeys a single law, a geometric law that governs the action and therefore determines the dynamic. As long as this law is not understood, you can do kote gaeshi and irimi nage ten thousand times, but that doesn't make it Aikido. Because Aikido is not found in gestures, or rather it is only expressed in the body's gestures to the extent that they show respect for the law. When techniques and falls are the consequence of this law, they have the beauty of authenticity, of conformity to reality, of approval of reality. When, on the contrary, they disregard the constraints of reality, they are feigned and artificial, they disavow reality, they express nothing but a dream.
And I'm sorry to say that, although one generation has pushed the other, nothing has changed since the article I wrote in January 1996 in the magazine Karate Bushido: ‘Open letter to the Aikikai’. In the midst of a hieratic and somewhat affected areopagus, gathered I imagine to judge the proper conduct of the IAF's demonstrations, we can indeed see Doshu Moriteru Ueshiba and his son the young master, O Sensei's great-grandson, sitting together, but unfortunately this is no guarantee of anything, any more than number is a guarantee of truth:
