In his book ‘Aikido: Victory through Peace’, Tadashi Abe presented a kajo n°5, in which he links gokyo with irimi nage. I followed him in this approach twelve years ago, when I wrote the series of 23 kajo, because of the complementarity that exists between these two techniques in more ways than one.
But I have just explained, in ‘Kajo (correction) # 2’, how the technique we improperly call gokyo is actually an ikkyo. This alone would demonstrate that there can be no kajo #5.
However, I need to go further and justify my second assertion:
2 - Irimi nage is not a fundamental technique.
I'm going to relate an anecdote that Pierre Chassang told me. One day he was catching a plane with Master Tamura. They were both looking for their seats in the middle aisle of the aircraft, when Tamura suddenly turned to Pierre and said: ‘If irimi nage is called like that, it's because it's the form that best illustrates the principle of irimi’. Pierre replied, ‘Why didn't you tell me this before?' This may seem obvious, but I don't think many practitioners would be able to say what was in Master Tamura's mind at that moment.
Like everything that exists in nature, Aikido techniques need energy to appear, to be manifested.
In Aikido, the energy needed for movement is provided by the rotation of the body's vertical axis (in either direction). This is the motor. The image of a spinning top is probably the best.
As a result of this rotation, the two halves of the human body located on either side of the axis of symmetry - which is physically represented by the spinal column - are mobilised in a complementary way: when one turns in one direction, the other turns in the opposite direction, always.
Aikido's name for these two complementary aspects of the same energy is irimi-tenkan.
When one hip is irimi, the other is tenkan and vice versa. The hip that moves forward is linked to the oriental concept of yang, the hip that withdraws is linked to the oriental concept of yin.
But just as yin and yang, irimi and tenkan exist through the division of a primordial energy into two opposing and complementary forces, an energy that was unified before this division occurred, before duality appeared.
Lao Tzu calls this initial energy Tao. O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba calls it Irimi, as far as Aikido is concerned.
The irimi-tenkan couple is born of Irimi just as the yin-yang couple is born of Tao, and just as in the Kojiki (which was O Sensei's bedside book) the Izanagi-Izanami couple is born of the primordial deity Ame-no Minakanushi. The archetype is immutable: the One becomes Two by division, but it does not disappear in this division because its eternal essence is not diminished in the process. This is why we can write One = Two = Three. Three being the first stage of the One when it leaves the state of non-manifestation where it was in the potency of existence, and when it now advances towards form.
We do not know where the cosmic One was before its manifestation, but we have the advantage of knowing where the Aikido One (Irimi) is when it is not yet manifested. And it is O Sensei himself who tells us this in the first sentence of his book, the literal English translation of which I give here, Christopher Li having provided us with the invaluable gift of this work:
（一）構
氣勢ニヲ充實シ足ヲ六方ニ開キ半身入身合氣ノ姿勢ヲ以テ敵ニ對ス（第一圖）
(1) Kamae
Fill yourself with Ki power, open your feet in six directions and face the enemy in the hanmi- irimi posture of Aiki (see Figure 1).
O Sensei could have simply written in his sentence ‘the hanmi posture’, and all practitioners would have understood what he was referring to, but he wrote ‘the hanmi-irimi posture’ (半身入身). It is not without reason that he has done this, for he is thus indicating that hanmi is not only a position of the body, it is also the place where Irimi is in the potential of existence, it is the place where energy is when it is not yet manifested. He even emphasises this point by specifying in his sentence: ‘fill yourself with Ki power (energy)’.
Finally, in this short sentence, which concentrates in a remarkable way the whole foundation of Aikido, he adds ‘open your feet (足) in six directions (六方 roppo)’. In order for energy to manifest, it must be oriented. The hanmi position allows this to be done in six different directions, which is why roppo is the other name used for hanmi.
I won't go back over John Stevens' translation; it's a calamity, robbing the reader of any chance of understanding the fundamental message contained in O Sensei's phrase. And when you think that the French translation of Budo is based on the English version... you realise that there are books that do a lot of harm.
So in Aikido we know where the One (Irimi) is, and it's in hanmi. But that's not all, we also know the means by which the One is divided: irimi becomes irimi-tenkan through the action of tai no henka. Tai no henka is the path that energy (One) takes through one or other of the six directions (roppo) to reach irimi-tenkan (Two), through which the technique is then manifested.
We therefore have the following diagram:
hanmi-irimi ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ tai no henka ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ ˃ irimi-tenkan
This is the preparatory scheme for action.
Well, O Sensei gives us this diagram without any veil, at the very beginning of his book, in the chapter Preparing (準備) for action (動作). All you need to do is read the titles of the four paragraphs:
From hanmi-irimi (One) to irimi-tenkan (Two), via tai no henka: the world of principle, the foundations of action to come. It is only after this (chapter 3) that the techniques, the world of form, begin. Could O'Sensei have been any clearer?
Irimi is illustrated here by a projection that we later got into the habit of calling irimi nage - because it is indeed the form that best illustrates the principle of irimi, as Master Tamura had clearly seen - but irimi is not a technique, irimi is the source of energy, it is energy at the moment it appears in Aikido. The eight fundamental techniques use the principle of irimi, but never in such a perfect way as to unite tori's axis with that of his opponent. Irimi is the only movement that allows the vertical axis of tori to merge with the vertical axis of uke; it is the highest materialisation of the principle, the symbol of irimi.
This is why I wrote that irimi nage is not a fundamental technique, because irimi is much more than that, irimi is before any technique, irimi nage is the origin of all fundamental techniques insofar as they derive from the same principle.
We have seen that gokyo does not exist as go-kyo, and we have just seen that irimi nage cannot be considered as a technique but rather as the first effect of the principle, just before the technique. This confirms that there is no fifth kajo, and that it is logical that O Sensei only taught four in his book.
These three articles correcting the 23 kajo would not be complete without drawing the conclusions they imply for the general vision of Aikido. This is what I intend to do in the next article, and I will thus answer the questions that have been asked in the media about the consequences of these corrections.
Oileán Chléire, 31 December 2024
