The exhibition ‘Spring Calligraphies’ is coming to Rome in October!
Scheduled in Dojo Bodai (Rome) on Friday 12 and Saturday 13 October 2018 is the event One Book – One Exhibition.
Following on from previous previews in Paris and Milan, the event once again offers the Roman public the opportunity to see the book Calligrafie di Primavera [Spring Calligraphies] and the rich photographic exhibition dedicated to Itsuo Tsuda‘s calligraphy that inspired the book published by Yume Editions in 2018.
On 18 and 19 May 2018, we presented the book entitled Itsuo Tsuda, Calligrafie di primavera [Itsuo Tsuda, Spring Calligraphies] in our dojo in Milan. We exhibited more than 80 high-quality photographic reproductions of Master Itsuo Tsuda’s calligraphy (chosen from the 116 featured in the book) as well as three original calligraphy pieces.
An article, photos and two videos to relive the event!
| The event at Dojo Scuola della Respirazione | Presentation of the book at RAI radio |
Continuation of the interview with Régis Soavi, who tells us about his discovery of Itsuo Tsuda‘s calligraphies.
Putting up a piece of calligraphy rather than a photo of a master has another advantage, which I understood later: it avoids a certain “cult of personality”. Instead of putting up a photo of Master Ueshiba, I could have put up one of my master, Itsuo Tsuda… but then that would imply something about “a Gr-ow-ate Maaaaaster” who IS, and that also goes in the direction of religions where there are saints, paintings of saints, statues of saints… We have this in Buddhism, and in Christianity too, of course…
But this way, we no longer have the same resonance, because these are photos of people, of “characters”.
Spring Calligraphies is the first monograph devoted to the calligraphic work of philosopher and writer Itsuo Tsuda, bringing together 113 calligraphies and the research we have been able to conduct to date.
To mark its publication, an exhibition based on the photos in the book will be held at Tenshin Dojo in Paris on November 18 and 19, 2017. An opening reception will be held on November 18 at 6:30 p.m. Anyone interested in discovering the work of Itsuo Tsuda is cordially invited to attend.
The dojo is open and admission is free. Welcome !
In the meantime, we wanted to share with you a few lines about the origins and behind-the-scenes story of this adventure, which began more than thirty-three years ago.Read more
by Manon Soavi
Who breathes from their heels nowadays? People breathe from their chest, their shoulders or their throat. The world is full of these invalids who ignore themselves.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. I, 2013, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 15
This is how Tsuda sensei begins his first book, published in 1973, setting the tone by quoting the philosopher who most accompanied him throughout his life.
Tsuda sensei was a relentless researcher and a man of great culture. Throughout his life, he worked tirelessly to enable human beings to free themselves from what burdens and hinders them. Starting from his personal quest for freedom of thought, it was ultimately a philosophical understanding of human beings that emerged through his practices: Aikido, Seitai, Nō… And Tsuda sensei spread this philosophy of human beings, this path, primarily through his books2nine books (plus one posthumous) published in French between 1973 and 1984 – still available[ – then in English from 2013 to 2025]and his teaching in dojos over a period of ten years. But there was a more secret medium that he took up in the last years of his life: calligraphy.
by Régis Soavi
In the practice of aikido, I have always loved the ken. The sword, like kyūdō in the way Herrigel talks about it in his book on the art of archery, is an extension of the human body, a path to the realisation of our being. In our School, the first act at the beginning of the session is a salute with the bokken in front of the calligraphy. Every morning, after putting on my kimono and meditating for a few minutes in a corner of the dojo, I begin the respiratory practice with this salute towards the calligraphy. It is essential to harmonise with my surroundings, with the universe.
The simple fact of breathing deeply while raising the bokken in front of the tokonoma, with a calligraphy, an ikebana, changes the nature of the session.
For me, it is a matter of realising Ame no Ukihashi1see the Kojiki (古事記), a collection of myths about the origins of the islands that make up Japan and of the Kami, the celestial floating bridge, which links the human and their surroundings, the conscious and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible.
Throughout the respiratory practice, the first part of the session, my bokken is by my side, the same bokken I have had for forty years. It is like a friend, an old acquaintance. A gift from a simple and generous woman who used to run the shop when I was a young aikido teacher at Master Plée’s dojo in the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.
Tsuda Itsuo never taught ken. Of course he did use it for the salute in front of the tokonoma at the beginning of the session, and then when we ran in a circle around him on the tatamis before lining up to watch the demonstration. Otherwise he used it mainly to demonstrate the pushing of the bokken with two partners, as he had seen Ueshiba Morihei O-sensei do.
In fact, I make no distinction between bare-handed aikido or aikido with bokken or jō aikido. The most important thing to me is the fusion with the partner’s breathing. This other person so different and yet so close, and also, at times, so dangerous.
My main roots in weapons come from what I learnt from Tatsuzawa sensei. He is the one who influenced me the most. In the 1970s I started practising Hakkō-ryū Jūjutsu with Master Maroteaux. Then I studied weapons at the Noro Institute where specific courses were held, and during workshops with Tamura sensei and Sugano sensei – this work was part of aikido. What Tatsuzawa sensei showed me was a koryū (ancient school), which is something else. In Paris for his studies, this young Japanese man (we were both in our twenties) turned up unexpectedly one evening in the dojo where I was teaching aikido. So we started an exchange: he practised aikido with me and showed me techniques from his family’s school, which we worked on for a certain number of hours a week, maybe four or five, for about two years.
We practised a lot of Iaijutsu and also Bōjutsu2the bō is a long stick, 180 cm long, wielded with both hands The techniques he showed me impressed me by their extreme precision. He was the young master of his family’s school, Jigo-ryū. At that time, I did not even know the name of the school. Today, he is an important sensei, the 19th master of Bushūden Kiraku-ryū, a school that is over four centuries old.
There is a reality in weapons that can be lacking in the practice of aikido as it is sometimes taught today and then risks becoming a kind of dance.
With Tatsuzawa sensei, there was a breathing. It was not the same breathing I found with Tsuda sensei, but there was something and I liked what he taught. It was something so fine, so precise, so beautiful that I wanted to share it with my students. And for years, when I gave workshops, I would say: ‘What I’ve just shown is a technique from the School of Tatsuzawa sensei’. Gradually these two skies, the teaching of Tatsuzawa sensei and the work on breathing with Tsuda sensei, led me to give this name to what I was discovering myself, Ame no Ukihashi Ken, the sword that links heaven and earth, the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary.
Tatsuzawa sensei and I did not see each other for thirty years, and it was during a trip to Japan that we met again! For the last ten years, my students have been studying the art of Bushūden Kiraku-ryū with him and one of his students, Sai sensei. It is a way for us to better understand the origins of the techniques we use, and it is a historical research that allows us to discover the path walked by Ueshiba O-sensei.
For Tatsuzawa sensei training had to be real; during our training sessions in the seventies, he used an iaitō and he hit like hell! ‘Men, men, kote, tsuki, men, tsuki’. Of course, at some point I got tired and caught the sword in my shoulder – I still remember it. Because it was a metal sword, it went a few centimetres into my shoulder, three, maybe four. It woke me up. I was never asleep on dodges again. Never again. It was a wake-up call, because obviously he was not there to hurt me. His state of mind was to wake me up, to push me in a direction, so that I would not be some kind of clumsy sleeping lump. Well, it served me right. In that sense, the sword can wake you up. A good kick in the ass is sometimes better than a thousand caresses. I am still very grateful to my master for bringing reality into my body.
Today, when aikido seems to have become a pastime for some, I gently but firmly bring them back to reality.
I have too often seen people parodying the drawing of the katana with a bokken where they simply opened their hand to draw the sword (those who practise Iai will understand).
We must not confuse the Noble Art of the Sword with the way we use it in aikido.
I have always advised my daughter, who has practised aikido since she was a child and loves the sword, to go and see a real sword school. As well as aikido, she too has chosen to study Bushūden Kiraku-ryū with Tatsuzawa sensei and Iaijutsu with Matsuura sensei, who teach her what I could never have taught her.
Aikiken is not Kendō or Iaidō. Poetry is not the novel, and vice versa, each art has its specificities, but when we use a bokken we must not forget that it is a katana which also has a tsuba and a scabbard, even if they are invisible. We must use it with the same respect, the same rigour and the same attention.
Every bokken is unique, despite its often rather industrial production. It is up to us to make it a respectable, unique object, through our attention, the way we handle it and the way we move it. For example, when working with a bokken, if we visualise drawing the sword, we must also visualise sheathing it. Little by little, as it is getting charged, you may get the impression that it is getting heavier. Moreover, the students who have the opportunity to touch my bokken, to hold it, or sometimes to work with it, always find it very special, both easier to handle and at the same time more demanding, they say. It is not quite the same, it is not an ordinary bokken. That is why I advise my students to have their own bokken, their own jō. Weapons get charged. If you have a bokken or a jō that you have chosen well, that you have charged with ki, and that you have used for years, it will have a different nature, it will resemble you in some way. You will already be able to know exactly how big it is, the size of the jō, the size of the bokken, to the nearest millimetre. This will prevent accidents.
It will have a different consistency when we act in this way, it will be a reflection of who we are. The circulation of ki changes the bokken and we can begin to understand why the sword was the soul of the samurai.
We remember the legendary swords that reflected the soul of the samurai to such an extent that they could only be touched by their owner. I had the opportunity to discover this at a time when, to continue practising and support myself, I was working in the field of antiques. I specialised in the resale of Japanese swords: katana, wakizashi and tantō. Being around them – for I could never have afforded to buy them – allowed me not only to admire them, but also to discover something inexpressible.
Some of them had such a charge of ki, that was extremely impressive! Just by drawing the blade ten or fifteen centimetres, you could feel if the sword had an aggressive or generous soul, or whether it exuded great nobility, and so on. At first this seemed absurd to me, but the dealers I worked with confirmed the reality of these sensations and later discussions with Tsuda sensei gave them the reality they needed.
A weapon without breath, without fusion, what is it? Nothing, a piece of wood, a piece of metal.
Zhuangzi does speak to us of fusion, of the extension of the being with the tool, the weapon, when he speaks of the butcher:
‘When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. […] whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.’ 3Zhuangzi, translated Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013, Columbia University Press, pp. 71–72
If there is no fusion with the partner, you cannot work with a weapon, otherwise it is nothing but brutality, fighting. Precisely because we use it by merging our breath with our partner, you can discover what great masters have discovered before us. All their efforts to show us the way, the path to follow, will be lost if we ourselves do not make the effort to work as they suggested. With a weapon in our hands, we can discover our sphere and make it visible. And thanks to that, we can extend our breathing to something greater, which will not be limited to our little personal sphere, but will go further. If we use weapons in this way, I think it makes sense, but if we use them to try to cut off other people’s heads, to hurt them, or to show that you are stronger, we have to look elsewhere, not in our school.
Weapons are extensions of our arms, which are extensions of our centre. There are lines of ki that run from our centre, from the hara. They act through the hands. If we put a weapon at the end, a bokken, a wakizashi, a stick, these lines of ki can converge. They have an extension. It may be easier when you work with your bare hands, but it starts to get more difficult with a weapon. However, it also becomes very interesting: you are no longer limited, you become “unlimited”. That is what is important, it is a logical progression in my teaching. At the beginning you work a little bit small, in a way limited, then you try to extend, to go beyond while starting from your centre. Sometimes there are interruptions, the ki does not go to the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, the fingers. Sometimes the bokken becomes like the stick of a puppet hitting the policeman, and then it makes no sense. That is why I show these lines, which everyone can see. This is something known in acupuncture. You can also see it in shiatsu and in many other arts. And there we go further. If we could materialise them as lines of light, it would be amazing to see. It is what binds us to others. It is what allows us to understand others. These are lines bound to the body, not just the material body, but the body as a whole, both physical and kokoro. It is the subtle, the immaterial that is bound, there is no difference.
In our School we practise the art of Seitai-Dō, the way of Seitai. This art, which includes Katsugen undō (Regenerative Movement in Tsuda Itsuo’s terminology), allows us to rediscover an unusual quality of response, both involuntary and intuitive.
It awakens the “animal” instinct in the good sense of the word, rather like when we were children, playful or even sometimes turbulent but without any real aggressivity, taking life as a game with all the seriousness that it implies.
It was thanks to this art that I discovered the breathing intermission, that space of time between inhaling and exhaling, and between exhaling and inhaling. That infinitesimal, almost imperceptible moment during which the body cannot react. It is in one of these moments that the seitai technique is applied. At first it is difficult to feel it, and even more difficult to act exactly in that moment, very precisely. Gradually, however, you get a very clear sense of this space – you get the impression that it is expanding, and in fact you get the impression that time is passing in a different way, as it sometimes does when you fall or during an accident. You may ask what this has to do with the use of weapons in aikido. Well, our research follows precisely this direction, and the following anecdote told by Tsuda sensei reveals us just how much:
Noguchi Haruchika sensei, the creator of Seitai, wanted to practise Kendo when he was young and enrolled in a dojo to learn this art. After the usual preparations, he was confronted by a kendoka. As soon as the other raised his shinai above his head, Noguchi sensei touched his throat, even though he did not know any of the techniques. The teacher sent him a more advanced practitioner, with the same result: he was given a sixth dan: no better. The master asked him if he had ever practised Kendo: ‘Not at all’, he replied, ‘I stab at the breathing intermission, that’s all’. ‘You’ve already reached too high a level, sensei’ he said. So Noguchi sensei could never learn Kendo.4[this story seems to be told in Tsuda Itsuo, The Path of Less, Chap. XII (end), 2014, Yume Editions (Paris)]
Whether you practise aikido with empty hands, Aikiken, Jō, Bō, Koryū or any other art, like Tsuda Itsuo himself who recited Nō, the essential thing is not in the technique, but in the art itself and its teaching, which must allow the realisation of the individual. Tsuda sensei told us, citing the various arts he had practised:
Master Ueshiba, Master Noguchi and Master Hosada5nō theatre: Kanze Kasetsu School dug ‘wells of exceptional depth […]. They have reached the streams of water, the source of life. […] However, these wells are not interconnected, although the water found in them is the same.’ 6Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, 2023, Yume Editions, p. 12 (1st ed. in French: 1973, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 10)
Would you like to hear about the next article?
Article by Régis Soavi published in April 2016 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 12.
by Régis Soavi
‘If I have to give my Aikido a goal, it will be to learn to sit, stand up, move forward and backward.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Path of Less, Chap. XVIII, 2014, Yume Editions, p. 174 (1st ed. in French: 1975, Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 166 Tsuda I.
To move correctly, you need to be stable, and stability issues cannot be resolved through learning. Stability must come from balance, which itself comes from the involuntary system. Human beings have the unique ability to stand upright with only the tiny surface area of their two feet as support. If it were just a matter of standing still, that would be fine, but we move around, and what is more, we are able to talk, think, move our arms in all directions, as well as our head and fingers, all while remaining perfectly stable. Involuntary muscle coordination takes care of everything. If we lose our balance without being able to hold on to anything, our body tries by all means to regain the lost balance, and often succeeds by shifting weight from one leg to the other, finding extremely precise points of support that we would have had difficulty finding using only our voluntary system. Tsuda Itsuo recounts a personal anecdote about his learning of Aikido that I find edifying in his book The Science of the Particular:Read more
by Régis Soavi
Talking to my students about the masters I have known is obviously part of my teaching. Some were so important that I cannot simply dismiss them and claim that I made it on my own. The masters I have known left their mark on me, shaping me and, above all, opening my mind to fields I knew nothing about, or which I sometimes suspected existed but could not reach.
I have always felt it was important not to turn these masters into supermen, geniuses or gods. I have always considered these masters to be much better than that. Idols create an illusion, lulling us to sleep and impoverishing idolaters, preventing them from progressing and spreading their wings. In this regard, Tsuda sensei, now a master of the past, wrote in his eighth book, The Way of the Gods:
It is not for me to worship, deify or idolise Mr Ueshiba. Like everyone else, he had strengths and weaknesses. He had extraordinary abilities but he had weaknesses, especially vis-à-vis his students. He was fooled by them because of considerations that were a little too human.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. XVIII, 2021, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 144 (1st ed. in French: 1982, Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 156–7)Read more
by Régis Soavi
Escape route: a clever and indirect way of getting out of a difficult situation.
These are the definitions given by the [French] Larousse dictionary. Synonyms for escape route include: sidestep, exit, evasion, and even way out. Is this not the meaning we should give to ukemis, which, in fact, in Aikido, are simply intelligent responses to throws?
As we saw in a previous issue about ukemis, falling in our art is never considered a defeat but rather a way of surpassing oneself. It is also, sometimes, simply a means of escaping from a situation that in reality could be dangerous, even fatal if accompanied by certain atemis, or if there is a risk of hitting a vital spot at the end of the movement. Similarly, although throwing may seem like a constraint during a session, it always leaves a way out for Uke, a means for them to regain their integrity, which is what Ukemi is for. During the years of training, one of the essential requirements for everyone is to perfect their falls, as they will be used to improve their responses to Tori’s throwing techniques.
Training should not be confused with fighting; without controlled falls, it is dangerous to throw someone unless you are willing to risk an accident and its possible consequences, which is not at all the purpose of practising on the tatami mats. Whether the throws are short, as in Koshi-nage, or longer, as in Kokyū-nage, they always leave Uke the possibility of escaping the technique unharmed. Only throws with strict control, for example to the ground, leave no ambiguity as to the fact that there is no escape, but if we only work in this way, we might as well practice Jūjutsu, for which this is the rule, and which is perfectly suited to combat. In my opinion, Aikido is not about seeking efficiency but rather about deepening one’s physical, psycho-sensory, and human skills in order to rediscover the fullness of the body and its entire capabilities.
When someone has the bad habit of “sticking” to others, of being so close during a conversation that you feel oppressed, you have only one desire: to distance them by any means necessary. Only our social side, or even propriety, sometimes prevents us from doing so. If we do not push them away, we try to distance ourselves from them, we create space. In the same way, projecting is distancing the other person, it is allowing ourselves to reclaim the space that has been invaded, or even stolen or destroyed during an incursion into our living sphere – all the more so during a confrontation. It is a matter of rediscovering Ma-ai, that perception of space-time whose understanding and, above all, physical sensation is the basis of our teaching and which is so essential to the exercise of our freedom of movement, our freedom to be. It is recovering your breath, perhaps breathing more calmly, possibly regaining a reorganised mind, a lucidity that may have been disturbed by an attack that triggered a response technique that has become instinctive and intuitive as a result of training. It also means, of course, the possibility of making the attacker aware of the futility and danger of continuing in the same direction.
Aikido leads us to have a different relationship with combat, which is more about clarity of mind in the situation than a violent and immediate reflex response to an attack. It is this attitude that can be described as wisdom, acquired through years of working on the body, which is the result.
The aggressor is seen in a way as someone who has lost control of themselves, often simply for social or educational reasons. A down-and-out, a misfit, an ill person in the psychological sense of the term as it were, who unfortunately can be harmful to society and those around them, who at best only disturbs the harmony of relationships between people, and at worst causes immeasurable damage to others. It is not a question of punishing the “ill” person, nor of excusing the illness on the grounds of societal contamination, but of finding a way out of the situation without becoming contaminated oneself. Aikido is a training for everyone, and its role is broader than many people generally think. It often brings relief, even peace, to our own psychological difficulties or habits. Through rigorous and enjoyable learning, it allows us to rediscover our inner strength and the right path, so that we can face these kinds of problems.
During training, if the throw comes at the end of the technique, it is never an end in itself. It could sometimes be considered a signature move, and a release for both Tori and Uke.
A good throw requires excellent technique, but above all, good coordination of breathing between partners. It is important never to force a practitioner to fall at all costs. Even at the last moment, we must be able to sense whether our partner is capable of performing a correct fall or not, otherwise an accident will occur and we will be responsible for it. It all depends on the partner’s level and their state “here and now”; if the slightest tension or fear manifests itself at the very last moment, it is imperative to sense it, feel it, and allow our Uke to relax so that they can fall safely. Sometimes it is better to abandon the idea of throwing and instead offer an effective yet gentle grounding technique, even if the ego of some will always remain unsatisfied at not having been able to show off as brilliantly as they would have liked. But it is by doing so that we will have enabled beginners to continue without fear. It is thanks to the confidence they will have gained with their partners that they will be encouraged to persevere. They will have realised that they are valued for their true worth, that their difficulties and their level are respected, and that their fear is not a handicap to practice. On the contrary, it allows them to overcome what they believed to be their incapacities and limitations. They are pleased to see that they are not guinea pigs at the service of the more advanced, but that with a little effort, they will be able to catch up with them or even surpass them if they so desire.
The most experienced members must be there to show the newer ones that falling is enjoyable when the projection is performed by someone who is technically capable of doing so in a way that combines gentleness and harmony, and therefore safety. Tsuda sensei recounts how O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei acted during the sessions he led:
‘If, when he was over eighty, Master Ueshiba, who was small of stature, would throw a band of robust young assailants as easily as if they were packets of cigarettes, this extraordinary force was in no way physical strength but respiration. Stroking his white beard he would lean over them anxiously and ask if he had not hurt them. The attackers did not realize what had happened to them. Suddenly they were lifted up as if on a cushion of air, and they saw the ground above them and the sky below before they landed. People trusted him absolutely knowing that he would never harm anybody.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. I, 2013, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 21 (1st ed. in French: 1977, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 18)
O-sensei’s behaviour towards his students should serve as an example to everyone, regardless of their level, because it leads us not towards renunciation or self-effacement, but towards wisdom, as expressed by Lao Tzu:
‘the sage is square but not cutting […], // Sharp but not injurious, // Straight but not overreaching, // Bright […] but not dazzling.’2Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chap. 58, trans. Ellen Marie Chen
Today’s Aikido seems to oscillate between two main trends, one leaning towards competition and a sporting vision, the other seeking ways to strengthen itself, drawing on ancient combat techniques such as Jūjutsu for an effectiveness that is no longer recognised.
Today’s Aikido seems to oscillate between two main trends, one leaning towards competition and a sporting vision, the other seeking ways to strengthen itself, drawing on ancient combat techniques such as Jūjutsu for an effectiveness that is no longer recognised.
Why turn Aikido dojos into places for training in street fighting, where effectiveness becomes the ultimate benchmark? The dojo is another world that must be entered as if it were a completely different dimension, because that is what it is, even if few students are aware of it. If throws have become nothing more than constraints, where is the harmony emphasised by the founder and his closest students, and which we still claim to uphold today? I have too often seen practitioners asserting their ego by crushing Uke at the end of a technique, even though their partner had offered almost no resistance up to that point. Or others, putting up ultimate resistance when the technique is already finished from a tactical point of view, in terms of the positioning and posture of both partners, forcing Tori to apply a severe and unnecessary throw, which therefore becomes very risky for Uke if they are not at a sufficient level.
What about demonstrations prepared under the auspices of self-proclaimed masters, which the internet bombards us with, complete with contortions and somersaults, all accompanied by viewers’ comments?
Whereas the project supported by the practice of Aikido is of a completely different nature, living under the daily constraints imposed by the behaviours generated by the type of society we live in, and practising martial arts to learn to “endure them without complaint,” or learning how to coerce others in order to recover the few crumbs of power left to us – is this not completely absurd?
As he often does in his books, Tsuda sensei recounts his experience and practice with O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei. Here is another excerpt:
Another time when he was standing, he beckoned me to come. I went and stood in front of him but he continued talking to everyone. This went on for quite some time, and I was wondering if I should stay or withdraw, when suddenly I was swept away by a cushion of air and found myself on the ground in a tremendous fall. All I was aware of was his powerful kiai and his right hand, after tracing a circle, heading for my face. I had not been touched. We could offer any psychological or parapsychological explanation for this, but all would be false. Before I had time to react with any reflex whatsoever, I had already been thrown. The famous air cushion is the only explanation.’3Tsuda Itsuo, The Path of Less, Chap. XV, 2014, Yume Editions, p. 148–9 (1st ed. in French: 1975, Le Courrier du Livre, p. 140)
Personally, I stop right away when I feel that an opponent is too stiff to be able to fall properly. I know how to repair broken wrists, and even broken ribs. I know how to repair because I have respect for the living organism. I avoid breakage. Those who prefer breakage will easily find teachers.’4ibid., Chap. XVI, p.156 (1st ed. in French: p. 148)
Is the power of breathing comparable to the force of coercion? Which direction should we take? It is up to each individual to decide which direction to follow; no one should force us, regardless of the good reasons given.
Would you like to hear about the next article?
Article by Régis Soavi published in July 2021 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n°6.
by Régis Soavi
For the first time in its history, Tenshin, our dojo in Paris, is closed for an indefinite period, as are all the dojos in our school (Milan, Rome, Turin, Ancona, Toulouse, Amsterdam, etc.). This is all the more exceptional given that the dojo has never closed since it opened in 1985. There are sessions every morning, all year round, regardless of vacations or public holidays.
The Itsuo Tsuda School is a special school because we practice Aikido, of course, but also Katsugen Undo (Regenerative Movement), which can be practised alone at home. And for a small number of students interested in the ancient koryū that are at the origin of our art, there are also sessions dedicated to the weapons of the Bushūden Kiraku Ryū school. This school, which includes many kata, has in its teaching curriculum the practice of bare-handed jūjutsu, Naginata, Kusarigama, Bō, Tessen, etc. There is also work on other techniques that come from the two-sword schools, Niten Ichi Ryū.
Despite the closure of dojos, as far as I know, almost no one has stopped practising. Some people practice weapon kata at home, but above all, we are fortunate to have a first part in the Aikido sessions (a kind of Aiki-Taisō) that my master, Tsuda sensei, had practised with O-sensei, and which he already called “solitary practice.” This first part lasts about twenty minutes and can be done in a small space (equivalent to a single tatami mat). What differentiates it from gymnastics is that it focuses on breathing and the circulation of ki in the body. In some ways, it resembles the exercises that some Tai Chi practitioners do, with its own specific characteristics, of course. This solitary practice can therefore be done every day. I know that practitioners also take advantage of this break to read or reread the books of Tsuda Itsuo (nine books published by Le Courrier du Livre – Paris) but also, as I have often recommended, the great authors and philosophers such as Chuang Tzu, Li Tzu, Sun Tzu, or even The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.
While no practice is obviously a ready-made solution to the situation we are experiencing, it is clear to me that having a daily practice helps us to stay on track internally. Tatsuzawa Kunihiko sensei, 19th master of Bushūden Kiraku Ryū, a school with over four hundred years of history, talks about Kakugo 覚悟, which is usually translated as determination or clarity in the face of a situation. His personal interpretation struck me as relevant in the light of the crisis we are currently experiencing. When asked, ‘Why do people still practice such an ancient art?’ he replied, ‘It is to achieve stability of the heart (Kokoro). This is what Kakugo originally meant. Kakugo is difficult to translate into English. It means conceiving of oneself without dreams or fear. Becoming, having the mentality of Nec spe nec metu in Latin. Without hope of reward and without fear of punishment.’1Tatsuzawa Kunihiko, « Le sens de la beauté » [‘A Sense of Beauty’], interview by Yann Allegret, Karaté Bushido N° 371 (October 2008) Practice, even when solitary, helps us to regain our breath and inner calm.
Similarly, philosopher Hans Jonas – whom I have sometimes quoted in my lectures – seems to me to be particularly relevant in these uncertain times. On the occasion of the Rio de Janeiro environmental summit in 1992, the newspaper Der Spiegel published an interview entitled Closer to a fatal outcome. When asked by the journalist about the plundering of the planet and whether he thought it was possible to change our way of life, he replied, unfortunately already visionary: ‘Paradoxically, in my view, hope lies in education through catastrophes.’2Hans Jonas, Une éthique pour la nature [An Ethics for Nature], pub. Flammarion (Paris), 2017, p. 39 Nevertheless, there remains this imperative that concerns us all, which he expresses as follows:
‘Act in such a way that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on Earth.’3Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979
Ten months have passed, ten months of restrictions, ten months of a nameless night, with no end in sight. The rise of an insidious form of authoritarianism on health grounds that is currently taking place is leading us all to a form of self-censorship, so as not to hinder the resistance that has been put in place almost everywhere in this “new world” that is far from being a “new world.”
The stability of the “Kokoro” is maintained by our practices; without them, tensions would threaten to overwhelm us and we could succumb to the surrounding atmosphere.
All our dojos have been able to stay open and pay their rent despite being closed for months, thanks to the unique association model they have adopted since their creation, some as far back as the 1980s. The dojos belong to all their members, who are like “room-mates,” so it is of their own free will that they come together to keep these places of practice alive. The members pool what is necessary, without depending on any subsidies, municipal facilities, or even customers. Thus, this mode of operation, which usually seems quite fragile, is in fact proving to be quite resilient in the period we are going through.
The first part of our Aikido sessions, “individual breathing practice,” continued everywhere, depending on the weeks when it was legally permitted, sometimes in parks, as in Milan, to recreate the missing connection, or else at home or at the homes of friends who were already practitioners.
Everyone was able to continue practising Katsugen undo (Regenerative Movement) at home, alone or with their family, as they do whenever they are unable, for one reason or another, to come to the dojo. This practice, which allows the body’s innate movement to express itself, contributes to the overall balance of the individual. By keeping the involuntary system active, it promotes early reactions, accelerates and amplifies the regulatory aspect of the body’s functioning.
Contacts and exchanges between members, both nationally and internationally, have enabled the circulation of information and references, texts and books, emphasising and thus activating once again the cultural role of dojos. No one could have predicted what we are currently experiencing, but perhaps this excerpt from a poem by Estelle will calm everyone’s strength and guide them towards Non-doing, Wu-wei:
In a world undergoing destruction,
Building places where another space-time reigns,
Where another relationship with life is created,
Where beings can flourish. […]
The only way not to sink is to keep swimming.
Demori4Demori means “I remain” in Cathar (Occitan). Estelle Soavi, « Bâtir » [‘To Build’], Utomag N°4 (June 2020) [online: http://estellesoavi.fr/utomag/ ]
Would you like to hear about the next article?
Article by Régis Soavi (on the topic “Coronavirus, thoughts on the situation”) written in March 2020 for the review Aikido Journal n° 74
by Régis Soavi
If the teaching we have received and integrated has changed our lives, if it has allowed us to deepen the values we hold dear and discover others that, although previously unknown, have proved essential to our quality of life, it is important to “pass on this treasure” because it is our responsibility not to let a heritage of humanity that is there to serve the living fall into oblivion.
Teaching Aikido is not a profession in the usual sense of the word; fortunately for our art, it is something else entirely. It is a task that we are called upon to accomplish, a bit like a freely accepted mission that has been given to us in order to allow others to discover this path, this way, this Tao that we continue to follow. “[W]hen we work in the human professions, we work in de-mastery, that is, in something over whose outcome we have no control, since it is the person themselves who shapes what they are becoming.”1Jacques Marpeau, Un mot, un enjeu : « Profession » et « métier », [One Word, One Issue: ‘profession’ and ‘trade’], 3 March 2023 (pub. online), emphasis by R. Soavi It is the transmission of a legacy that has been passed down to us little by little over many years and continues to resonate in our daily lives. Whatever rigid rules are imposed by the state and implemented by the various federations, there is still a small margin that allows the teaching of our art to remain above all a gift of self, and a way to deepen our own journey. It is mainly about communicating the incommunicable, and despite this, succeeding in conveying the message that was passed on to us by Tsuda sensei. Changing the world, at least locally, “regionally,” was, in my opinion, an important part of Itsuo Tsuda’s philosophical and physical work. He particularly emphasised what he called “solitary practice,” which he conducted every morning.
Within the Aikido session, this is a very ritualised, profound first part, based solely on “Breathing” (the circulation of Ki and its visualisation), and it was his way, besides writing his books, of directly intervening in his surroundings, in the world.
In our school, it is specified in the first articles of the statutes that we ‘practice without purpose.’ Tsuda sensei insisted that these few words be prominently featured, because therein lies the essence of our practice. They are rarely understood at the very beginning, and even later, unfortunately, because they are often considered practically inconceivable in the West – except for people who are seriously involved in the practice and who, as a result, deepen their knowledge of Japan or the East in general. A wide variety of opinions are expressed during initial encounters or when discussing it with friends and acquaintances. They range from the mildest, such as ‘that is crazy,’ to ‘that is ridiculous, that is nonsense.’
What is more, and often unsettling and difficult to admit, there are no “classes” as in gyms or yoga clubs, just daily sessions usually led by the most experienced practitioners. There is no progression either, but rather a real deepening, also an opening towards a strengthened sensitivity and a world of sensations which, as soon as one is capable of it, allows anyone who has the courage and desire to discover what it means to lead a session: all that is needed is continuity, respect for others, and, of course, the agreement of the group. Even in the practice of Aikido, it is not a question of teaching sophisticated techniques or correcting at all costs, but rather of creating an atmosphere conducive to the development of each individual. It is about allowing people to reach deep within themselves, at the level of the “Hara,” the “Breath,” to become aware of the circulation of Ki. This is all the more evident in the practice of Katsugen Undo, where, from a technical point of view, all you need to know is how to count to twenty at a given rhythm to enable the coordination of the group of practitioners.
The same applies to Aikido: it is the concrete, physical, non-intellectualized perception of yin and yang and posture that are the determining factors in conveying a message that is both visual and sensory. Conducting sessions has “no value in itself”; it is enough that they are appreciated by everyone. Nevertheless, it sometimes allows us to better understand where we are in our practice, to see if we are able to convey what we have discovered and which may be useful to others. It is important to communicate at different levels; sometimes we understand better when the demonstration is done by a senpai who is closer to what we are capable of doing, seeing, and feeling. On the other hand, if we understand this well, even if it does not flatter our ego, leading sessions allows us to break free from the social castration that limits our abilities and freezes us in whatever role we find ourselves in, to find ourselves without running the risk of a destructive overvaluation of the ego.
Given that our School is a School without grades, without levels, ‘without fixed benchmarks’ as Tsuda sensei told us, every step forward, every deepening of our practice is important, and even the smallest discoveries must be given their due value. Wearing the hakama is significant in more ways than one and has a meaning that must be discovered if we want to understand what it can bring us. There is incidentally an essential text available for those who wish to read it. The black belt is not a rank but an opportunity to be seized (there is a text that lists the words spoken on this occasion). Each practitioner follows a path that is personal and purely individual. No one should be jealous or even envious of another’s journey, at the risk of losing the meaning of what is being taught.
It is not a matter of “fate” but rather a destiny that has been created independently of desire or will, by someone who, through correct and regular practice over many years, has become capable of giving back what he or she has received. The term Sensei, as everyone knows, is not a rank or even a recognition and has no particular value. It could be interpreted as “walking ahead,” being older (regardless of the number of years) and having real experience and abilities in one’s art, understanding and feeling “the Other” and knowing how to communicate with simplicity. As in everything, there is “chocolate and chocolate,” and so in all arts there is “sensei and sensei.” I think that no one can claim or, above all, impose such a title. It can be attributed to someone for a variety of reasons. In any case, it can only serve those who use it, because considering someone as one’s sensei is the student’s position, and it is this position that allows them to understand other things from their sensei.
When I was a child in my judo school, as in all martial arts, there were coloured belts. We were children, then teenagers, and this was supposed to motivate us, to “allow healthy competition alongside the school system,” in order to get a bigger piece of the pie, even if it meant crushing others to get it. The world encourages a certain lifestyle and educates us in that direction, there are winners and losers, that is the form of egalitarianism that is offered to us, a far cry from equity, is it not!
At the time, I had no other choice. If I wanted to practice a martial art, I had to play the game, pass the exams, and win fights to earn ranks. First white belt, then yellow, then orange, then green, and finally blue. From there, I had to prepare for brown belt with a view to the ultimate achievement, the black belt.
The 1960s brought about a reversal in perspective. As a result of the post-war period, a social, societal, and cultural upheaval began. Everything was called into question. I was seventeen and took a break from my training to devote myself to other discoveries. The world, or rather “my vision” of the world, had changed. As society disintegrated, something impossible became possible. Nothing would ever be the same again. I WOULD NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN.
After this break, I took up martial arts again, specifically “judo jujitsu,” but I no longer found the same spirit there. My spirit too was different.
The old world is dead, another world is blossoming within me. I want to use the remains of the old world to turn them against itself in order to create a new situation. Aikido is one of the non-lethal weapons available to me to continue in the direction I have taken. I am twenty years old and I am starting Aikido, a new and revolutionary path for me.
A new journey begins, with a white belt, of course. Very quickly, I serve as Uke during demonstrations (I know how to fall very well and I have good balance). Maroteaux sensei gives me the 1st kyu, which means I can wear the hakama and be sempai.
Next came the black belt, which I obtained in the three streams originating from the Aikikai – first from Nocquet sensei, then from Tamura sensei, and then by Noro sensei – but above all, it was my encounter with the man who would become my master, Itsuo Tsuda, that guided me.
With my master, I continued to wear the white belt every morning and during training sessions, while I wore the black belt and led sessions as an instructor throughout the three “official” schools approved by the federations. Finally, after seven years of inner conflict, I could no longer bear this imbalance, so I let go and decided to only lead sessions as Tsuda sensei had taught us. This decision puts me in a somewhat unusual situation in the various dojos I work with, but it is the price I must pay to regain stability in my practice and further deepen my search for the truth about the circulation of Ki. This is the moment I choose to start wearing the black belt during Master Tsuda’s sessions.
A few years later, I am fifty years old and have deepened my practice. I have gained experience that allows me to guide practitioners in our school. I am responsible for seminars in many dojos where I am invited, even in other federations. I seek to demonstrate our way of practising, to convey the flow of Ki, and the general spirit of our school. It is at this point that I decide to wear a grey hakama, which for me is a sign of seniority and a statement of position. My master has been gone for over thirty years, and I feel it is my duty to ensure the continuity of a teaching that must not disappear, as I consider it a path and a hope for humanity. Many elements have matured in my personal practice over the years, from my breathing and concentration to the way I circulate Ki in the simplest of moments. During kokyū-Hō, for example, by simply placing my hand on people’s backs to make them feel the flow of Ki, instead of giving them technical instructions on the position of their body or hands.
One morning during the first part of the session, which Tsuda sensei called solitary practice, my “breathing” suddenly intensified. It is an event that is impossible to describe except in terms that could be described as mystical, when in fact it was much more rudimentary and spontaneous. This is a new breakthrough for me, giving me a feeling of natural freedom, but it is also a new step on a path that is familiar, modest, and difficult, as well as unknown. For several months, I had felt that my practice was deepening, but something was missing, a kind of confirmation that would make it tangible, more physical in some way. Today I am in my seventy-fifth year and, as with other transitions I have experienced, a new opportunity to evolve is presenting itself to me. It seems important to me now to confirm it, to give concrete form to the work I have done over the last fifty years. A simple act must reflect this: since “that morning,” I have simply put on a white belt again.
The act of visualising depends essentially on the posture that allows the circulation of Ki, or “vital energy.”
If the body posture directs energy toward the brain, imagination comes into play and takes over. Imagination can be positive or negative, is difficult to control, and can easily run wild, so it is not very useful in immediate action. If the imagination is positive, it can be used in everyday life because it can be creative, for example in writing, drawing, or art in general, but it is a hindrance when it comes to taking action and giving a direct physical response. When it is negative, it very often blocks action and makes it impossible to react unless it is overcome by a rapid and supreme effort of will to avoid being drawn into an unproductive spiral.
When energy is produced and gathered in the lower body, “the hara,” then visualisation becomes possible. You have to start training it with exercises that can be done daily during Aikido. The most important thing is the resonance it must have for each individual. It must correspond to their personality, their era, or something that touches them. Visualisation must be simple and immediately usable; it must “speak” to us.
Tsuda sensei warns us:
Visualisation plays an all-important role in Aikido. It is a mental act at first, but it produces physical effects. One of the aspects of ki is to visualise. What do you visualise in Aikido? Circles, triangles and squares.’2Itsuo Tsuda, The Path of Less, Chap. XV, Yume Editions (2014), pp. 150–151
This overly simplistic, overly familiar translation is too strong in my opinion. It distorts the meaning and causes us to reject the deeper meanings of the proverb, which we risk taking literally. We might say to ourselves: ‘I too looked at the finger, and yet I am not a fool, I have degrees and even a doctorate…!’ or ‘It is obvious he is pointing at the moon, I saw it right away.’
Sengai was a Zen monk of the Rinzai School (Lin-tsi School in China), a school that uses koans in its teaching. His drawing of this proverb, while perhaps not a koan, gives us food for thought. Is it not the innocent, or perhaps the child who looks at the finger because he is in the action, in the moment, in the present instant? And what about the little character playing at his feet and jumping for joy, and the enormous bag that Hotei is carrying behind him?’ We can also see the sensei, the wise man who shows the way, the direction, but for now the student only sees the finger, that is to say, the practice, even if he suspects that he should see something that is still invisible to him. Or is it a warning to those who, in order to show off, point their finger, seeming to indicate that they have understood, when in fact they are only showing their ego in order to have admiring followers who obey their every command so that they can take advantage of them?
So many possibilities and reflections are open to each of us.
Little by little, something becomes clearer, more refined; we emerge from mental stupor and awaken.
Everyone, whether they practise it or not, has the right to ask this question. Today, there are many different approaches to our art, and a large number of schools claim to be more authentic than all the others or to have a longer history, while others evoke a need for renewal, perhaps the appeal of modernity! The range of forms and techniques taught is enormous, sometimes varying considerably, from the gentlest to the most violent, from the most flexible, even acrobatic, to the most rigid, even lethal. Who can calmly judge their appropriateness or value in our world? Our school, whether for Aikido or Katsugen Undo, is based on the practice of Non-Doing (Wu-wei), which has its roots in Chinese philosophies such as Chan and Taoism, as well as Japanese philosophies such as Shinto. Like so many other schools, it finds its place in the great pacifist and universalist movements that emerged after the Second World War.
This article by Régis Soavi was written for Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido before the magazine ceased publication in 2025; the topic was “Professionalisation.”
by Régis Soavi
‘Ki belongs to the realm of feeling, not to that of knowledge.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. II, 2013, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 27 (1re ed. in French, 1973). Tsuda Itsuo
As soon as you mention ki, you are dismissed as a mystic, a kind of crackpot: ‘It’s not scientific; no instrument or machine is capable of proving or demonstrating that ki exists.’ I completely agree. Indeed, if we consider ki to be a super-powerful energy, a kind of magic capable of throwing people across the room or killing them with just a shout, as was believed with kiai, we risk expecting miracles and quickly becoming disappointed.
What is this “Eastern” philosophy that we supposedly do not have access to? Is there a specific domain reserved for a select few adepts, a handful of hand-picked disciples, or is this knowledge available to everyone, and what is more, without complicating our lives? I mean by leading a normal life, without being part of an elite group with access to secret knowledge, without having special, hidden practices that are doled out sparingly, but more simply by having a job, children, etc. When you practice Aikido, you are obviously engaged in both philosophical and practical research, but it is an “exoteric” rather than “esoteric” research.
Tsuda Itsuo wrote nine books, thus creating a bridge between East and West to enable us to better understand the teachings of Japanese and Chinese masters, to make them more concrete, simpler, and accessible to all. You do not have to be Eastern to understand and feel what it is all about. But it is true that in the world we live in, we are going to have to make a little effort. We need to break out of our habitual behaviours and references. We need to develop a different kind of attention, a different kind of concentration. It is not a question of starting from scratch, but of orienting ourselves differently, of directing our attention (our ki) in a different way.
First, we must abandon the very Cartesian idea that ki is one single entity, when in fact it is multiple. We must also accept that our bodies are capable of sensing things that are difficult to explain rationally, but which are part of our daily lives, such as sympathy, antipathy, and empathy. Cognitive science attempts to dissect all this using mirror neurons and other processes, but this does not explain everything, and sometimes even complicates matters.
In any case, there is an answer to every situation, but we cannot analyse everything we do at every moment in terms of the past, present, future, politics, or the weather. Answers arise independently of reflection; they arise spontaneously from our involuntary responses. Whether these answers are good or bad, analysis will tell us after the fact.
The West was familiar with ki in the past; it was called pneuma, spiritus, prana, or simply vital breath. Today, this seems rather outdated. Japan has retained a very simple use of this word, which can be found in a multitude of expressions, which I will quote below, taking a passage from a book by my master.
But in Aikido, what is ki?
If any school can and should talk about ki, it is the Itsuo Tsuda School, not because we claim exclusivity, but simply because my master based all his teaching on ki, which he translated as breathing. That is why he spoke of a ‘School of Respiration’2ibid., Chap I, p. 17: ‘By the word respiration, I do not mean the simple bio-chemical process of oxygen merging with haemoglobin. Respiration is all at once vitality, action, love, a sense of communion, intuition, premonition, and movement.’3ibid., p. 16
Aikido is not a art of fighting, nor even a form of self-defence. What I discovered with my master was the importance of coordinating my breathing with my partner as a means of achieving a fusion of sensitivity in any situation. Tsuda Itsuo explained to us through his writings what his master Ueshiba Morihei had taught him. To convey this to us in a more concrete way, during what he called “the first part” – solitary practice, which we would now call Taisō – he would say KA when inhaling and MI when exhaling. Sometimes he would explain to us: ‘KA is the root of the Japanese word for fire, kasai, and MI is the root of the word for water, mizu.’4[see e. g. Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, chap. XVIII, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 152–3 (1st ed. in French, 1976, p. 157–8)]. The alternation of inhalation and exhalation, their union, creates kami, which can be translated as the divine. ‘But be careful,’ he would tell us, ‘we are not talking about the God of Christianity or of any other religion – if you are lacking reference points, we could say that it is God the universe, God nature, or simply life.’
In the dojo, there was a drawing in Indian ink by Master Ueshiba containing fourteen very simple shapes and which we called Futomani because O-sensei had said that it had been dictated to him by Ame-no-Minaka-nushi: the Celestial Center. Tsuda Itsuo explains this in his book The Dialogue of Silence5Tsuda Itsuo, The Dialogue of Silence, chap. XII, 2018, Yume Editions, p. 106–7 (1st ed. in French, 1979, p. 157–8). Thanks to this, I gained a better understanding of the directions ki took when it had a form.
The founder spoke of Haku no budo and Kon no budo: kon being the essential soul that must not be stifled, but, he said, we must not neglect the haku soul, which ensures the unity of the physical being.6[see e. g. The Dialogue of Silence (op. cit.), chap. XII, p. 100–2; or The Way of the Gods (2021, same author & publisher), Chap XIII, p. 103–4]
Once again, we are talking about unity.
If our practice is called Ai-ki-do – “the way of unifying ki” – it is because the word ki has meaning.
Practical experience will allow us to understand this better than long speeches. And yet we must try to explain, try to convey this important message, because without it our art risks becoming a fight where “may the strongest, the most skilled, or the most cunning win,” or an esoteric, mystical, elitist, even sectarian dance.
And yet we know ki well; we can sense it from a distance. For example, when we walk down a small street at night and suddenly feel a presence, a gaze on our back, and yet there is no one there! Then suddenly we notice a cat watching us from a nearby rooftop. Just a cat, or a curtain that flutters surreptitiously. The gaze carries a very strong ki that everyone can feel, even from behind.
One of the practices of Seitai-dō called Yuki consists of placing your hands on your partner’s back and circulating ki. This is not about laying hands on someone who is, on the face of it, not sick to heal them, but about accepting to visualise the circulation of ki, this time as a fluid, like flowing water. At first, neither person feels anything, or very little. But then, little by little, they discover the world of sensation. You could say that it is a dimension in its own right, in all its simplicity. It is simple, it is free, it is not linked to any religion, it can be done at any age, and when you begin to feel this flow of ki, the practice of Aikido becomes so much easier. The kokyū hō exercise, for example, cannot be done without kokyū, and therefore without ki, unless it becomes an exercise in muscular strength, a way of defeating an opponent.
I would never have been able to discover the Aikido that my master taught if I had not willingly and stubbornly sought it out. In sensitive research, through all aspects of daily life, to understand, feel, and expand that understanding without ever giving up.
Ki is also atmosphere, so in order to practice, you need a place that allows ki to flow between people. In my opinion, this place, the dojo, should, whenever possible, be “dedicated” to a particular practice or school. Tsuda Itsuo believed that entering the dojo was a sacred act, which is why we bowed when stepping onto the tatami mats. It is not a sad place where people ‘should wear a scowling constipated expression. On the contrary, we must maintain a spirit of peace, communion and joy.’7Tsuda Itsuo, Heart of Pure Sky (posth.), ’Booklet n°3 – Respiratory Practice in Aikido’, 2025, Yume Editions, p. 102 (1st ed. in French, 2014)
The atmosphere of the dojo is nothing like that of a club or a multi-sports hall that is rented for a few hours a week and used, for reasons of profitability, by different groups that have nothing to do with each other. The kind of place, the kind of gym where you go, train, then take a shower and say goodbye; at best, you might have a beer at the local bar to chat a little with each other. When you know about ki, when you start to feel it, and especially when you want to discover what lies behind this word, a place like the dojo is really something else entirely. Imagine a quiet place in a small Parisian passageway at the end of the 20th arrondissement. You cross a small garden and on the first floor of a very simple building is “The Dojo.”8[more of which in Yann Allégret, On the wach for the right moment, pub. online (Feb. 2014)]
You can come every day if you want, because there is a session every morning at quarter to seven: you are at home. You have your kimono on a hanger in the changing rooms, the session lasts about an hour, then you have breakfast with your partners in the adjoining area, or you rush off to work. On Saturdays and Sundays, you can sleep in, with sessions at eight o’clock.
Explaining ki is difficult, which is why only experience allows us to discover it. And for that, we must create the conditions that allow for this discovery. The dojo is one of the elements that greatly facilitates the search in this direction. It reconnects circuits, but also unties the bonds that constrain us and obfuscate our vision of the world.
Little by little, the work will be done, the knots will be untied, and if we accept that they are untied, we can say that the ki begins to flow more freely again. At that moment, it flows as vital energy; it is possible to feel it, visualise it, and in a way, make it conscious. Unnecessary tensions that cannot be released cause our bodies to stiffen. To make this as clear as possible, we could say that it is a bit like a garden hose that is blocked. It risks bursting upstream. The stiffening of the body forces it to react for its own survival. This triggers unconscious reactions that act on the involuntary nervous system. To avoid these blockages, micro-leaks of this vital energy occur, and sometimes even larger leaks, for example in the arms, at the koshi, and mainly at the joints. The immediate consequence is that people are no longer able to practice with fluidity, and it is strength that compensates for the lack. Parts of the body stiffen and begin to react like bandages or casts to prevent these losses of vital force. This is why it is so important to work on feeling the ki, on making it circulate. At first, visualisation allows us to do this, but as we deepen our breathing (the sensation, sensitivity to ki), if we remain focused on flexible practice, if we empty our minds, we can discover, see, and feel the direction of ki, its circulation. This knowledge allows us to use it, and the practice of Aikido becomes easy. We can begin to practice non-resistance: non-doing.
Women generally have greater sensitivity to ki, or more accurately, they retain it more if they do not distort themselves too much in order to defend themselves in this male-dominated world where everything is governed by the criteria and needs of masculinity, the image of women that is conveyed, and the economy. Their sensitivity stems from the need to keep their bodies flexible so that they can give birth naturally and care for newborns. This flexibility cannot be acquired in gyms, weight rooms, or fitness centres; rather, it is a tenderness, a gentleness that can be firm and unwavering when necessary. Newborns need our full attention, but they cannot say ‘I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, or I’m tired,’ or ‘Mom, you’re too nervous, calm down, and tell Dad to speak more softly, it scares me.’
Thanks to their natural sensitivity, they sense the child’s needs, they intuitively know what to do, and ki flows between mother and child. When the father, who is always very rational, does not understand, the mother senses and therefore knows. Even if she is not a mother, even if she is a young woman with no experience, it is the body that reacts, it is the body that has this natural sensitivity to ki, and that is why, I think, there are so many women in our School. It is because ki is at the centre of our practice that nothing can be done without it. We focus our sensitivity in this direction and thus we can see the world and people not only on the level of appearances but much further, in their depth, what is behind the form, what structures it, or what drives it.
Most Japanese themselves are incapable of explaining what ki is, yet they know instinctively when to use the word and when not.’9The Non-Doing (op. cit.), Chap. II, p. 25–7
Tsuda Itsuo started practising Aikido at the age of forty-five. He was not athletic, but his mere presence transformed the entire atmosphere of the dojo. I would like to tell you a story about one of the exercises I did in the 1970s, when my master was already over sixty years old. When I passed through the gate to the courtyard at the back of which the dojo was located, I would stop for a moment, close my eyes, and try to sense whether “he” was there. At first, it did not work very well; it was just random guesses, strokes of luck. Little by little, I understood: I should not try to know. So I began to “empty” myself, to stop thinking, and it came. Every morning, I knew whether he had arrived or not. I could feel his presence as soon as I approached the dojo.
From that moment on, something changed in me. I had finally understood a small part of his teaching, and above all, I had verified that ki was not part of the irrational, that it was concrete, and that its perception was accessible to everyone since it had been accessible to me.
Would you like to hear about the next article?
Article by Régis Soavi (on ki 気) published in January 2017 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 15.
We are pleased to present a restored version of the video of Master Tsuda reciting Nō.
During the 1981 summer workshop in Coulonges-sur-l’Autize, Master Itsuo Tsuda recites an excerpt from a Nō play. Before beginning, Master Tsuda introduces the story.
Here is the transcript of the presentation:
She dances and comes to the center of the stage, and suddenly she jumps and the bell falls.’
Would you like to hear about the next article?
It all started on an ordinary afternoon in my neighbourhood of Blanc-Mesnil in the “93” département1[number of French département Seine-Saint-Denis, colloquially referred to as “nine three” to emphasize the social difficulties in its working-class suburbs]. It was an altercation like many others, but that day, I found myself pinned down by a boy who was banging my head against the pavement and saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you.’ I do not even remember how it ended. But the following week, I was registered in a Jūdō Jū-jutsu Self-Defense class in the neighbouring town of Le Bourget.
I was twelve years old, and in my head there was this recurring thought: ‘Never again, never again.’
Two years later, at the middle school’s end-of-year party, the judo club was scheduled to give a demonstration. Everything was going very well when suddenly, a teenager wearing a black leather jacket jumped out of the front row and shouted at our group: ‘Your stuff is fake, you’re losers…’ Before anyone could react, he jumped onto the stage, pulled out a flick knife, and in a magnificent tsuki attempted to “stab” me. I dodged and executed a technique (I think it was a kind of oo-soto-gari). The audience was shocked and shouted! Then my attacker and I bowed to each other. The result: a lecture from the school principal, who made my friend Jean-Michel (the attacker) and me swear never to do anything like that again, because he had almost had a heart attack.
In addition to karate lessons for him and jūdō lessons for me, we trained as often as possible and for hours on end in my “personal dojo”.
Since we had moved into a detached house, located as we entered a small inner city where my mother had found a job as a concierge, I had converted the basement into a dojo, using pallets covered with recycled foam as tatami mats, and it was there that we had prepared our coup, he the karateka and I the jūdōka.
At the time, in the early sixties, we knew nothing about weapons such as katana, bokken, jō, or others. Apart from fencing, which was a sport, and Robin Hood’s stick, thanks to Errol Flynn, the only weapon we knew in everyday life was the knife.
When practising Aikido, there is always the possibility of imagining oneself as someone else. Cinema and special effects lend themselves well to inspiring dreams in teenagers and young adults of the new generations. In our industrialised countries, death has become virtual and often asepticised; spectacular fashion has distanced it. The screens everyone has today have enabled this psychological and physical distancing.
The work that can be done with a bokken, a jō, or even an iai is hugely important from a physical and psychological point of view. But I have never seen my students react in the same way as they do with a tantō.
As long as it is a wooden tantō, it is fine, but as soon as we offer a metal tantō, even if the blade is not sharp, there is a recognisable gleam in the practitioners’ eyes. With all kinds of nuances, from dread to panic to astonishment, in any case, fear – because we must call it by its name – is there. Whatever the denials, whatever the justifications.
We are often so far removed from this kind of reality.
The calligraphy for our 2016 summer workshop was Look under your feet, written by my master Tsuda Itsuo. This phrase, which was displayed at the entrance to Zen monasteries, clearly resonates like a Koan. It is one of the many pieces of calligraphy he left behind and that intrigue us. A subliminal message? A message for posterity.
During our workshop, Look under your feet meant: “See and feel reality. Come out of your dream, your illusion, and become a true human being.”
The tantō is part of a principle of reality. Beyond the dexterity that training can bring, what is decisive and must be considered is precisely fear: fear of injury, which is already a lesser evil, and fear of death.
First, the people who will take turns being uke need to learn how to use the tantō: although the striking and cutting techniques are fairly simple, even rudimentary, they require what I would describe as rigorous training. The way to hold the weapon in the palm of the hand and the supports to be discovered for a good grip must be taught carefully and must be easy to understand, because if the tantō is held incorrectly, it can be more dangerous for uke themselves than for tori. In our school, very few people have ever held a weapon of this type in their hands when they arrive.
The simple fact of the blade’s direction, how it is held in the hand, the cutting angles. All of this determines a good attack.
Very often, people are reluctant to use metal tantō, which is too close to reality. They already visualise themselves as barbarians, their hands dripping with their partner’s blood!
No matter how much I explain and take the necessary precautions, these visions prevent them from making a real attack and block them. They stand there, waiting for I do not know what, or they attack weakly and, although the attacks are conventional, they warn, “call”, the moment of their attack. But if everything, absolutely everything, is planned, there is nothing left that is alive. If we protect and overprotect, life disappears. Breathing becomes shorter, gasping, inconsistent.
Instinct cannot be developed. All that remains is repetitive and tedious training.
And here I must say: this is not just about martial arts, because all attacks are planned, which is normal and necessary in order to acquire the correct posture. It is even important to work slowly for a certain amount of time in order to get a good feel for the movements, as when practising a Jū-jutsu kata, for example. But from a certain level onwards, the timing and intensity must remain random and you have to give your all. Free movement – a kind of randori at the end of each session – is precisely the moment when you can work on your reactions, while respecting everyone’s level.
What sets the great masters of the past apart is not their exceptional technique but their presence, the quality of their presence. What still makes the difference today is the quality of being, not the quantity of technique.
When practising with a sword or a stick, one can take refuge in the art, the style, the beauty of the movement, the rules, the etiquette. With the tantō, it is more difficult because it is closer to our reality. Knives and daggers are, unfortunately, weapons that are still used too often today. Aggression is frightening, and transforming ourselves into aggressors for a few minutes is intimidating. This constraint is extremely unpleasant and sometimes even impossible for some people to overcome. My job is to help them break out of this immobility, this blockage in their bodies, to go to the end of this fear, to reveal it, to show that it is what prevents us from living fully. The tantō reveals what is going on inside us. And here, two main paths are possible: the path of reinforcement or the path of less.
In the first case: the fight against fear and its corollary – the fight against oneself, which is an illusion, because in the end, who is the loser? It is a path of desensitisation, of stiffening the body, of hardening the muscles, and its consequence: the risk of atrophy of our humanity.
Or it is about overcoming fear by accepting it for what it is, and by promoting the flow of ki that made it incapacitating. Fear, which is initially a natural sensation, stems from our instinct. It is merely the blockage of our vital energy when it cannot find an outlet. It transforms into stimulation, attention, realisation, and even creation when it finds the right path.
That is why our School offers Regenerative Movement (one of the practices of Seitai taught by Noguchi Haruchika sensei) as a way to normalise the terrain by activating the extrapyramidal motor system. This normalisation of the body involves developing our involuntary system, which, instead of functioning reflexively as a result of hours and hours of training, regains its original abilities, liveliness, and intuition. Little by little, we will discover that many of our fears, our inability to live fully, to react flexibly and quickly in the face of difficulties, and even more so in the face of physical or verbal aggression, as well as our slowness, are due to our body’s lack of reaction. To the blockages of our energy in a body that is too heavy or to a “mentalisation” that is too rapid and ineffective. When the imagination is focused on the negative and develops excessively, it is often the source of many difficulties in daily life and can be dramatically debilitating in exceptional circumstances.
Tsuda Itsuo gives a striking example from the life of the samurai Kōzumi Isenokami, as recounted in Kurosawa Akira’s famous film Seven Samurai:
When I think of this personality of external flexibility and internal firmness, compared to how we are, we civilised people of today, with our external stiffness and internal fragility, I think I must be dreaming.’2Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. IX, 2021, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 70–71 (1st ed. in French, 1982)
If I insist on the path of Seitai, which is unfortunately so little known in Europe, or sometimes so misrepresented, it is because it seems to me to be truly the path of guidance that a great many martial arts practitioners are seeking.
It is an individual path that can be followed without ever practising anything else, because it is a path in its own right. But when practising Aikido, I think it would be healthy to practice Regenerating Movement regardless of the level one has reached and even, or especially, from the very beginning. For example, it could prevent many inconveniences and minor accidents, and prepare you for the time when, as you are no longer young, you will need to rely on resources other than strength, speed of execution, or reputation, etc. to continue practising.
The Regenerative Movement is precisely what Germain Chamot refers to as ‘a regular personal health practice’ in his latest article3Germain Chamot, « Aïkijo : une histoire de contexte » [‘Aikijō: a matter of context’] (last paragraph, about Shiatsu), Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 13, p. 12–14. It is a path that requires neither funding nor physical fitness, but simply continuity and an open mind. I can only agree with his reflections on the difficulties in our society of offering a regular, long-term practice, as well as on the cost of weekly sessions with a Shiatsuki, etc. As the therapist treats the patient on an individual basis, they also have an obligation to achieve results, and the fact that they are consulted on an ad hoc basis for problems they are supposed to resolve as quickly as possible makes this difficult.
Seitai is not a therapy but a philosophical orientation, recognized by the Japanese Ministry of Education4[cf. Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. XI, 2023, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 120–121: ‘It was at the beginning of the 1950s, if I am not mistaken, that the department of physical education in the Japanese Ministry of Education chose the Regenerating Movement, after having studied many different worldwide known methods of relaxation, and of its own volition gave its support to the Seitai Society.’].
Noguchi sensei wanted to develop the practice of Regenerative Movement (Katsugen undo in Japanese). His aim was to “seitai-ise” (normalise) 100 million Japanese people, which is why he supported Tsuda Itsuo sensei in his desire to create Regenerative Movement groups (Katsugen kai), first in Japan and then in Europe. It was this, along with Tsuda Itsuo Sensei’s immense work, organising numerous workshops and conferences in France, Switzerland, Spain, etc., that made Regenerative Movement known and enabled the development of this invaluable approach to health.
His work continues today.
Article by Régis Soavi published in October 2016 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 14.
Part 2 of an article written in 1993 by Noguchi Hiroyuki1son of Seitai founder Noguchi Haruchika. Translated from the Japanese by the Itsuo Tsuda School. Sequel (and end) of Part 1.
If we seek to understand the logic of the principles of Dōhō, katas will arise naturally. Dōhō and kata form a pair, and we cannot talk about one without talking about the other. Originally, Dōhō is the basic principle of kata performance. Each kata consists of three states2These three states are experienced with each performance of the kata as well as in a person’s development over a lifetime. They are concentric circles that deepen the movement. They can be compared to shu-ha-ri 守破離, which describes the stages of learning: ‘follow/obey’, ‘understand/explore’ and ‘integrate/transcend’. Or even jo-ha-kyū 序破急, slow, acceleration, fast, which is an organic rhythm present throughout Japanese culture. Playwright Zeami wrote about it: ‘Every phenomenon in the universe develops through a certain progression. Even the cry of a bird and the sound of an insect follow this progression.’ In nō theatre, each play, each act, each scene and each individual speech will have its own internal jo-ha-kyū. : welcoming3The use of the word ‘welcoming’ suggests the use of the non-dualistic principle of Non-doing, where there is no opposition between me – the acting subject – and the environment. It is not I who ‘initiate’ the action; my action consists of welcoming “the right action”, being physically and mentally ready to “welcome” the kata./beginning, transforming, and integrating/closing. Here, however, we will explore what runs through the three states of kata.
The current era is an era without kata. The physical exercise that has been promoted instead is so-called ‘relaxation’ and ‘letting go’. With an emphasis on the fact that katas were oppressing freedom and individuality and were a form of coercive repression. Thus, katas have been unjustly perverted.
Yet, the principles of Dōhō cannot be “rigidity and discomfort”. On the contrary katas are used to move naturally and effortlessly. For example, despite Nō costumes weighing a total of thirty kilos, the dancers can still move freely and with ease. If the kata is broken, i. e. no longer performed correctly, this will no longer be possible.
Among the principles of Dōhō shared by the ancients are the expressions: kire (cut), tame (charge/prepare), shime (close/tighten), shibori (wring out), ochi (fall), otoshi (descend), etc. None of these expressions describe appearances from an external point of view. On the contrary, they all refuse to do so. It is impossible and meaningless to describe the external form of the body. When we say that ‘the koshi is engaged’, ‘the hara is determined’ or ‘the chest is lowered’, these are descriptions of internal perceptions of fullness when one achieves a superior movement. It can therefore only be valid and useful if your search within your internal perception.
Internal perception of the body is an integral part of Dōhō. There can be no Dōhō method without this internal perception. The reason for the current decline in the practice of Dōhō is the lack of daily attention to this internal perception of one’s own body. If this internal perception is lacking, it is not surprising that katas seem to be nothing more than a simple, empty and useless form.
The key to understanding Dōhō lies in the vision of the body from a time when anatomy did not exist. What I call ‘internal perception of the body’ is the image of the body obtained through inner sensation, forgetting anatomical divisions and feeling deeply inside one’s own body. The vision thus obtained is very different from a simple mental and objective image of the body; it could rather be described as a ‘gaseous body image’.
Now, sit down, close your eyes slightly and try to perceive the area of your own hara. An image of the belly will then appear. Some areas are indistinct and blurred, while those that are clear may resemble, for example, a squash or a half-moon. Next, we move from the internal perception of the surface of the belly to the deeper layers. The deepest layer is the inside of the back. People whose internal perception reaches the inside of their back will be able to feel their hara in three dimensions.
The hara felt with internal perception is three-dimensional and multi-layered. Furthermore, try exerting force in the abdomen while contemplating and observing this internal hara. This force cannot reach the deepest layer. For it is when the force fills the hara from the deepest layer to the surface layer, passing through several layers, that we use the expression hara ga kimaru 腹が決まる, a determined belly.
To do this, the origin of the force must be sought in the deepest layer. First, it concentrates at a point in the deepest layer, from where it generates a slight movement that can hardly be described as force. This movement spreads immediately to the upper layers and gradually increases. As soon as it reaches the surface, a feeling of power or antagonism appears. This is what the ancients meant by ‘moving the axis’ or ‘moving the centre’. If the deepest force reaches the surface, the hara naturally positions itself.
In addition, try doing the same with the koshi. You will find that the koshi shares space with the internal hara. In the internal perception of the body, koshi and hara are one and the same. The names koshi or hara are simply names based on the anatomical representation of the body.
However, the Dōhō norm of “determined hara” was developed with the internal perception of the person. This hara is that of the internal perception of the body. People today, who do not know how how to do this introspection of the body, try to apply the ancients’ wisdom of the Dōhō by taking as a basis the vision of an “objective” body, i. e. one that is theoretical and not felt through internal perception. But no matter how you try to move your “objective” belly, how you agitate yourself, how you concentrate your ki, you will only affect the superficial layer of your hara, it will not touch the deeper layers.
Consequently, it is impossible for them to achieve the blossoming of internal perception. In these conditions, it is hardly surprising that people today feel that mastery of katas is imposed on them. However, once you know the breadth and depth of the hara with internal perception, you will understand why the ancients attached so much importance to it. The calm and tranquil movements of gestures made in this way are well worth savouring.
I am convinced that one of the reasons why the Dōhō principles of body movement were deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and even had a strong influence on its spiritual practices, is that they came with the pursuit of a “perceived body”.
The satisfaction that comes from mastering the “perceived body” and doing what the “perceived body” is naturally ready for was the substance of ‘memorizing through the body’ and ‘feeling through the body’.
For example, when we see the moon in autumn, we do not see it with our eyes. It is through contemplation of the “perceived body”, clarified by sight, that we remember the beauty of the autumn moon. The Japanese lived with this “gaseous body”. It was a body with a vague space between flesh and spirit. And the ancients knew the techniques for realizing this “perceived body”.
Let us return to the question of katas.
The “Dōhō kata” is used to master movement. The more the “objective” body is motionless, the more clearly the “perceived body” appears, and the more vigorously this change takes place. Consequently, it can be said that kata induces the action of the “perceived body”.
Nō dance is restrained, as if rejecting movement. Similarly, the performer’s expression is hidden by masks. Japanese culture was originally based on the perception of the difference between interiority and exteriority of feelings, and on the perception of the difference between interiority and exteriority of appearances. It was considered vulgar to grit one’s teeth, make an effort or reveal one’s emotions.
It is a culture that tries to evoke a sense of luxury in a simple camellia bud in the tokonoma and a sense of absolute silence in the sharp sound of the koto4koto 琴: string musical instrument. This is where stands the particularity of this culture, which stems from the relationship between kata and internal perception of the body. The outward appearance of dance seems restrained, but in fact the world of inner perception is full of rich movement.
If you stop the outside, the inside moves; if you stop the inside, the outside moves.
Kata sums up this inversion of the order between outside and inside. There are three principles in the “Dōhō kata”.
The first principle is jungyaku kikkō. It means that forces balance each other. It applies not only to the relationship between inside and outside but also to the details of the kata, i. e. to the orientation of each body part. For example, the shizumi form5a baseball body position taken by the infielder (cf. part 1), considered to be the correct forward inclination of the body, is based on the standing position where the pubic bone moves backwards and the knees bend forward. They move simultaneously in opposite directions.
The second principles are tenkei dōshitsu and dōkei tenshitsu.
Tenkei dōshitsu means that no matter how the kata is modified, if the koshi of the “perceived body” is in place, it will never be destroyed, in other words, the essence of the kata remains unchanged.
Dōkei tenshitsu means that while the outer form of the kata remains the same the “perceived body” has been moved from within. For example, when tension is generated by clenching the fist and flexing the arm to release this tension, the angle of flexion of the arm must be relaxed, or the grip must be released. Dōkei tenshitsu is the process of relaxing thanks to the “perceived body” without changing the angle of the arm or the force of the grip.
The fact that the expression of the Nō mask changes freely is not only due to the performer’s Dōhō technique, but also to the fact that the performer has acquired the dōkei tenshitsu technique of moving the “perceived body”.
The third principles are dōchō and tenkan.
This is awareness of other people, through harmonization and movement. Try to shake hands with anyone. You will notice that the elbow angles of their right hands are synchronized without realizing it. If you adjust the angle of your elbow with more precision, you will no longer know whether you are moving the partner or the partner is moving you. You then have the feeling that you are both being moved by the other, and the two movements become one and the same.
This is the principle followed in the early stages of the Seitai method of internal perception, which I am continuing. Although techniques with the “perceived body” rather than the “objective body” are the norm in Seitai today, this basic principle is still relevant.
I believe that Japanese culture is founded on the pillars of Dōhō – the method of movement –, naikan6naikan 内観: lit. inner view. – internal perception – and kan-nō – sensitivity. If the other side is polite, we treat them with courtesy, whether they are enemies or friends. This form of harmonization is called “welcoming”.
The art of welcoming guests in Chanoyu 茶道 was originally a search for sensitivity. Why does the meeting during the tea service, ichigo ichie7lit. one life one encounter, or each experience is unique (cf. part 1), not take the form of direct contact, face-to-face with the main guest? Ask anyone today and you won’t get an answer. The answer is simple: the Japanese did not believe in interviews. They assumed that it was not the eyes that were central to the fusion of sensibility with another person. The Japanese is rather averse to making eye contact.
Our culture consisted in seeking an encounter with the other person from koshi to koshi8Tsuda Itsuo used to say ‘from intuition to intuition’ (see The Non-Doing, Chap. I, Yume Editions (2023), p. 17: ‘Noh theatre is not a means of expression. It strikes straight from intuition to intuition’). In this way, the Japanese rejoiced, respected and desired exchange in the mutual internal sensation of each other’s bodies.
Noguchi Hiroyuki (1993)
Translation: Itsuo Tsuda School (2025)
an article written in 1993 by Noguchi Hiroyuki1son of Seitai founder Noguchi Haruchika. Translated from the Japanese by the Itsuo Tsuda School.
In the past, a unique approach to body awareness and movement underpinned traditional Japanese culture. This tradition was linked to a way of moving that transcended the boundaries of disciplines, styles and schools, and was the norm for physical exercise.2Marcel Mauss pointed out that the body is an expression of ourselves, but above all of a cultural conception, of social organisation and the systems of representation of the world. Education plays a key role in the transmission of bodily techniques that shape our habitus – our way of being, general appearance, demeanour, state of mind. M. Mauss, « Les Techniques du corps » [‘Techniques of the Body’], Journal de Psychologie, vol. xxxii, no. 3–4, 15 March–15 April 1936..
Although there used to be no organised system, our predecessors benefited from this way of moving quite naturally and deepened their own movements. I call this traditional approach to the body Dōhō3dōhō 動法 : lit. method of movement. It is a way of experiencing the body that is disappearing, while it is an intangible heritage developed by our ancestors. I seek to rediscover this way of moving and its principles of internal body awareness from the perspective of the Seitai4Seitai was developed by Noguchi Haruchika (1911-1976). This ‘method’ includes the practice of Katsugen undo (Regenerative Movement) spread in Europe by Itsuo Tsuda in the 1970s. Seitai is based on the postulate that the body has a natural ability to rebalance itself in order to ensure its proper functioning. The practice aims to restore this sensitivity and the body’s self-regulating abilities. method.
Japanese culture is a flower that has blossomed on the rich soil of dōhō. But if the soil deteriorates, the flowers will have no choice but to wither. Chadō – the art of tea –, nō theatre and hana – the art of flowers –, are extraordinary art forms created by great masters. However, the beauty of a tea ceremony does not lie in its form, but in the ground that underlies it, that is, in the subtle movements between the host and the guest.
Whatever the form, even if technically excellent, if there is no active movement of the body underlying it, it has no life.
The refinement of ichigo ichie5ichigo ichie 一期一会: lit. one life, one encounter, or each experience is unique can only be felt in the present moment, by being kan-nō dōkō6kan-nō dōkō 感応道交 (Buddhist expression): mutual communication between the feelings of Buddha and human beings. In a broader sense, it refers to understanding between people who are close but have a difference in position, such as between a master and a disciple., that is, in a mutual communication that can only occur when the way of moving the body involves a strong concentration of ki from both host and guest, who exchange and merge together.
The way a tea master moves is not always specific to tea ceremony. There is no doubt that the art of tea masters is imbued in each of their movements, their way of walking hokō, sitting posture zahō, approaching nijiri7躙り: the crawling position, approaching slowly, and walking on knees shikkō are common to Shintoism, nō theatre and martial arts.
Similarly, although the gesture of holding a bowl with one hand is different from the gesture of clapping hands and joining them in prayer, in Dōhō, the effect on the body is similar.
In the muddy rice fields, peasants developed a way of moving in which they stretched their toes outwards to be flexible and stable at the koshi8koshi 腰: area of the hips, pelvis and lower spine. The Yagyū school of swordsmanship developed the same way of moving and sitting in seiza in order for one to be able to sense a presence behind them. One could even say that the way of handling chopsticks for kaiseki9kaiseki 懐石: the simple meal that the host of the tea ceremony (chanoyu) serves to his guests before the ceremony is the same as the movements of Japanese swordsmanship.
In nō recitation, the sensation of sound vibration in the hara10hara 腹: area below the navel, centre of the body in Japanese and Chinese traditions (tanden 丹田) is found in Shintoism and in the Shugen11Shugendō 修験道: an ancient Japanese spiritual tradition in which the relationship between humans and nature is paramount. It involves asceticism, mountain life and teachings from animism, Shintoism and Taoism. method of kiai. In any case, a certain arching of the koshi is absolutely needed. It can also be found in the nō dance, probably because nō actors originally used to sing while dancing.
This is how our ancestors created their own unique forms of agriculture, rituals, combat, ornamentation and elegance, in accordance with the principles of Dōhō, which are common to the Japanese people. Similarly, the foreign cultures imported into Japan were integrated thanks to Dōhō.
A good example is the forward bend of the koshi, which was not as emphasised on the continent, but which has become an integral part of Japanese Zazen.
With this arching of the koshi, during the practice of Zazen, when the hands are joined, the fingers are brought together while leaving a space between the thumbs as thin as a sheet of paper. This promotes a subtle movement, Dōhō.
Arching the koshi is a movement that the Japanese particularly appreciated and that is found in the trace of the calligrapher or the seiza, the sitting posture, as well as among ordinary people sitting around a traditional Japanese table.
If we look closely, we can see different types of arching of the koshi.
In the case of Nō, one sits with the sensation of pulling the sacral vertebrae upwards, while in the case of Zen, the sensation is that the sacral vertebrae push towards the hara, causing it to descend. It is a little as though the hara were being pulled downwards.
Modern sport is no exception in Japan, even in baseball. Here too, we find different ways of arching the koshi.
There is sonkyo – the catcher’s crouching position –, shizumi – the infielder’s position – and the batter’s position. The batter appears to be holding a Japanese sword symbolising the arch of the koshi.
These three positions correspond to the three specific ways of arching the koshi: the priest’s position, the nō style position, and the Zen style position.
Dōhō is like a “blood bond” for the Japanese, a “DNA” that, though partially disintegrated, has been passed down to the present day. This is proof that we are a people who, if we unleash our full potential, will naturally be in harmony with the principles of Dōhō.
A pulley called nanban was introduced to Japan, and the image of a worker using this pulley is said to have given rise to the word nanba, which could be one of the original characteristics of the Japanese way of moving.
Nanba walking is when, while the right leg is forward, the right shoulder and the upper body are also forward.
In ancient martial arts, the standing posture so12so ソ: the basic standing position in the school Kashima Shin Ryū (鹿島神流) and the sideways posture shumoku are recognised as typical of nanba.
From Awa Odori13odori踊り: folk dance Festival to nō dances, and even more so in the positions of peasants planting rice, all these movements come from nanba.
During the morning assembly at primary school, our generation had to do a walking exercise called Kōshin14kōshin 行進: walking in step. The modernisation policy of the Meiji era (after 1868) consisted of replacing traditional Japanese forms in all aspects. This also affected physical education through the introduction of Western gymnastics.. At the time, we were not yet accustomed to marching in step in the Western style, swinging our arms alternately in front and behind, so many students found themselves clumsy after two or three steps and were immediately labelled as having poor motor skills. It is strange, because the Japanese were mistreated simply because they moved in the traditional style.
Try it with today’s schoolchildren and you will see that nanba walking has completely disappeared. If we think about it, Japanese physical education in schools since the Meiji Restoration has attempted to eradicate the tradition of Dōhō represented by nanba walking. Today, a hundred years later, this national policy has triumphed, but it has also led to the disappearance of traditional techniques.
Once again, if the soil of Dōhō is lost, the flower can only perish, no matter how much protection it receives. However, even today, when many Japanese people have naturally adopted the Western way of walking, if you gather ten Japanese people and ask them to walk with long, energetic strides and large arm movements, as if they were trampling the earth, at least seven of them will do the nanba.
Nevertheless, they must be taught to walk with their feet flat rather than dropping their weight alternately on one foot then on the other. Today, people walk on their toes. If you do this, it will never be nanba walking. It can be said that nanba is clearly linked to the sensation of the arch of the foot and is closely related to the traditional gait of sliding feet (摺り足 suri-ashi).
To understand the characteristics of a country’s culture, it is useful to examine the relationship between objects and people. The production of objects is closely linked to the appearance of a culture. Traditional Japanese craftsman Akioka Yoshio identified that one of the qualities of Japanese culture is that objects have flexible and versatile uses. Chopsticks, for example, are a versatile tool, unlike Western forks and knives, which are single-purpose. The same chopsticks are used to pick up beans, grab The same chopsticks are used to pick up beans, grab tofu, eat rice porridge and cut potatoes. However, using a single object in such a versatile way means that the use of the Dōhō method is as subtle as possible.
Kenjutsuka Kono Yoshinori uses the example of the nihontō (Japanese sword) to illustrate the numerous uses of a single instrument. The nihontō is both a sabre and a sword, unlike the continental differentiation, where the sabre is a single-purpose instrument for cutting. However, this has led to functional ambiguity in that the nihontō is inferior to the sword for cutting and not as good as a sword for stabbing. Kono sensei states: ‘That is why we do not cut with the sword, but with the koshi. Kenjutsu (the art of the Japanese sword) is above all a taijutsu; an art of the body.’
Not only Japanese swords, but also the tools produced by Japanese masters, are unfinished objects. However, this does not mean, of course, that the skills of the craftsmen are immature. On the contrary, they remain unfinished in order to harmonise the function of the tool and the motor skills of its user. It is like the empty spaces in a Chinese ink painting. For Japanese craftsmen, a tool is only complete when it is connected to a person.
Furthermore, Japanese utensils are already designed to promote the user’s Dōhō. For example, the handle of a Japanese teapot must be too short to be grasped. Of course, this is not because our ancestors had small hands. First of all, the handle of a teapot is not meant to be grasped. It should be held between the thumb and index finger in a hook shape. This kata requires a strong and deep auricular presence in order to support the weight of the hot water in the teapot.
The use of the auricular is the basis of the skill of Dōhō. The auricular is the finger most closely connected to the koshi via the wrist. Therefore, if you hold the kyūsu (Japanese teapot) in this way, the weight of the hot water is naturally supported by the koshi. Thus, the shape of the kyūsu is designed to promote holding by the koshi.
This example clearly shows that Dōhō was present in every detail of daily life. There was a time when the katas formed by Dōhō actually functioned in everyday life. That time is not so distant.
The character 躾 (shitsuke: discipline) is not a Chinese character. It is a Japanese character written as 身ヲ美シウスル (lit. body that beautifies). This is where the vision of education held by the ancients lies. In simple terms, Japanese education was an education of the body. The emphasis was on “learning through the body” rather than memorisation with the head, and on respecting “the sensation of the body” rather than intellectual understanding.
Learning was not training the mind, but practising the body. Therefore, the first principle of education was discipline of the body, which meant the transmission of the principles and katas of Dōhō. Children learned to hold the bowl and chopsticks at the appropriate time. The bowl is held with the thumb of the left hand curved backwards. This was not only to avoid touching the rim for hygiene reasons. In fact, if you hold the bowl with the thumb joint arched, you can sit with the koshi also arched towards the belly. Whereas if you bend the joint, you immediately lose the hara, and the koshi slumps. ‘Losing the koshi’ means showing cowardice. On the contrary, if you have a stable koshi and hara, you will have confidence in yourself and you will be determined. The ancients saw a person’s character in their koshi and hara.
There are sensations and realisations that can never manifest themselves if the groundwork is not laid, that is, if the body is not “in order”. The ancients were well aware of this, which is why they developed these superior methods, Dōhō, to go further and discover a kokoro15kokoro 心: refers to the mind, heart or inner nature (wisdom, aspiration, attention, sincerity, sensitivity) that had not yet been discovered.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the basis of the culture of shin-shin-ichi-nyo 心身一如, unity of body and mind. The arts of Dōhō were never the exclusive property of craftsmen, dancers or martial artists. The Japanese used kata to “be” in joy, anger, sorrow, reflection, appreciation and determination.
In addition, the Japanese distrusted the spirit stemming from a kata emptied of its meaning, but appreciated the spirit of a broken kata giving birth to a new form in a delicate balance. The aesthetic notions of iki16iki 粋: chic, fresh, direct, original. Can refer to attitude, behaviour, appearance, aesthetics. and sha-re17sha-re 洒落: fashionable, funny, witty, pleasant are good examples of this.
In the past, the spirit was very close to the body. The spirit is made up of words/sounds. The word is the voice. The voice emanates from the body. As we have already mentioned, vocalisation was done using the Dōhō method. Words were originally ideograms and calligraphy. Writing was done using the Dōhō method. This is how the intelligence of the ancients shone through the Dōhō method.
Hiroyuki Noguchi
Part 2 ‘The principles of Dôhô and katas’ can be read here.
by Régis Soavi
My master Tsuda Itsuo, quoting Ueshiba O-sensei, wrote in his second book: ‘Aikido is an art whereby people unite and become separate again (musunde hanatsu)’ 1.
This was a very present aspect of his teaching, but he never used the terms awase and musubi. He spoke to us in French, he spoke about something greater than ourselves. He invited us to empty our minds in order to perceive something. Sometimes he would say: ‘God (in the sense of kami) is talking all the time, but we humans can’t tune in, so we don’t hear anything. Or we only hear sounds like a scrambled radio. But God speaks clearly’. So for him, it was up to us to put ourselves in a state where we could “receive”. The Itsuo Tsuda School’s aikido is based on what he called the fusion of sensitivity, so on fusing with the partner: faced with an attack, there is a response, but for our response to be adequate, we have to fuse with the partner. During the sessions I talk, for example, about merging and harmonising with the partner, feeling their centre – then we are bound by something, nothing is foreign to us any more. Today I am starting to go a bit further in the practice of aikido and I feel much more what Tsuda sensei meant about the link that unites us with the Universe. You really feel yourself like a link between this Universe and your partner, and you realise it circulates, that everything returns to the Universe.
The Respiratory Practice2 we do at the beginning of the session puts us in a “state of mind” that allows us to receive, to create this link between the Universe and ourselves. We do not really know what the Universe is. It is not the stars, it is not a black hole, etc. It is something else. For the Respiratory Practice we stay as close as possible to the teachings of Ueshiba O-sensei; Tsuda sensei was very precise about this.
For example, we do the vibration of the soul, Tama-no-hireburi, three times, each time with a different rhythm (slow, medium, fast) and only while breathing in. The first time we evoke Ame-no-minaka-nushi, the Centre of the Universe. I sometimes say this is an “invocation-evocation”. Ueshiba O-sensei used to say that it should be evoked three times during the vibration of the soul: the person leading the session says it out loud and then you evoke twice more internally. I heard this from Tsuda sensei, but nowhere else.
So when we evoke Ame-no-minaka-nushi, as Ueshiba O-sensei used to say, we place ourselves at the Centre of the Universe. Centre of the Universe does not mean “Centre of the World”, nor “me and others”, nor something religious. It is somehow elusive, but at the same time extremely concrete. In any case, it does not encumber us, it is the Centre of the Universe and we can be there.
Then the second time we evoke Kuni-toko-tachi, the Eternal Earth, for me it is human, it is matter. The first is immaterial, the second becomes concrete, it is matter.
Then the third Kami evoked-invoked is Amaterasu, the sun goddess, life, what animates us. I sometimes tell the story of the cave where Amaterasu took refuge and of the rock door3. Ueshiba O-sensei often told it and Tsuda sensei also quoted it. It is life which had shut itself away in a dark cave and which has re-emerged. It is important to open the rock door inside us. We have closed ourselves off, we have become rigid, we cannot hear anything, and then one day we open up a little bit.
Aikido gives us a breath of air, something that allows us to breathe a little better. Then, with this breath, we can open up more and perhaps hear better what the Kami have to say to us, what the Universe has to say to us. I am not religious at all, but every morning I recite the Norito, as Tsuda sensei did, as Ueshiba O-sensei did. Every morning, at the beginning of each session, at quarter to seven, I recite the Norito, then I do the vibration of the soul, and I have been doing this for over forty years. And little by little I discover something, I go a little further, I am more permeable.
Straight from the first part of the session, which is an individual practice, it is important to get into a certain state of mind. The harmonisation work continues in the second part, where we practise with a partner. To facilitate this, in our school we work with the same partner throughout the session. Of course, we could change for each technique, but if you want to harmonise, it is difficult to do so in just five or ten minutes with each person. For those who have been doing it for twenty or thirty years, this is fine… But if you are just starting out, say for the first ten years, it is also reassuring to stay with the same partner, so that you have time to harmonise and become imbued with the other person. Thus you can feel them, the first few contacts can sometimes be a bit difficult. But with the same technique, a second, then a third, you can go a little further, get closer to your centre, breathe the “fragance” of your partner better. Tsuda sensei used to talk about discovering the inner landscape of somebody, but it is more difficult to discover the inner landscape of seven or eight people in the same session. Sometimes, particularly at the end of a session, I ask people to change partners, especially during Free Movement. But of course we change every session – they are not partners for life!
Uke has a role to play, without being violent, they must be sincere in their attack because without this energy, Tori will be in the “Doing” and not in the “Non-Doing”. In aikido, I often see very gentle Ukes and Tori happily slaughtering their Uke. This is not my principle at all. When I talk about attack, I mean when Uke does a Shomen, a Yokomen, a Tsuki or a seizure, it is important that an energy comes out of it, he or she “does”. Tori, on the other hand, diverts it, lets the energy that expresses itself in the gripping of the wrist or the striking pass, he moves to the side and transforms it, then it is “Non-Doing”. Tori does not respond to the attack, they let that energy, that ki, flow, they go beyond the attack. Of course, Tori does not foolishly wait to be hit! Non-Doing does not mean doing nothing.
I also assume that when someone attacks another person, it is because they do not feel good about themselves… When you feel good about yourself, when you are alive, you have no desire to go and attack others. It would not even occur to you. It is because you do not feel good about yourself that this happens. We live in a violent world, and we have been brought up to react in line with this violence – we have to defend ourselves against this, against that… It has made us sick. By practising aikido, when you are Tori, you are “healing” this violence. This violence, which is in the other person, which is expressed by the role and firmness of Uke, one guides it to transform it into something positive and liberating.
Almost thirty years ago, I decided to use the term Ame-no-uki-hashi ken to refer to the work with weapons that we do in workshops and sometimes in regular practice. The ken, the sword, is a representation of the celestial floating bridge: Ame-no-uki-hashi. We speak of a celestial floating bridge when we see the katana with the cutting edge facing upwards, and we also speak of a celestial floating boat when the cutting edge is facing the other way, downwards. It is quite curious because it is both the bridge and the boat… It is what unites heaven and earth, the conscious and the unconscious, the Universe and us. When we work with weapons, they are an extension of ourselves, beyond our skin, something that allows us to go a little further, to discover our sphere too.
Ame-no-uki-hashi: being on the celestial floating bridge, this was an image used by Ueshiba O-sensei and passed on to us by Tsuda sensei. To be on the blade of the sword is to be in a state of attention that could even be described as “divine”, where a different perception can occur. I do not want to get into a discussion about whether or not weapons should be used in aikido, it does not matter. I work with weapons because it forces us to be in a state of extreme concentration while maintaining relaxation. They also help me to make the ki lines visible in a more obvious way, both those of my partner and those that come from myself. For example, when I place two bokken on my centre in a demonstration, I show that the strength comes from the hara and not just from the muscles.
Traditionally with Tsuda sensei, the session always began with the Respiratory Practice, then we did the exercise he called Solfège4, then we worked on techniques and at the end there was always Kokyū Hō in suwari wasa.
For Tsuda sensei, Kokyū Hō was an opportunity to do just one thing: breathe. He gave us, among other things, the visualisation of opening the arms 
as the lotus flower opens. There is no more technique, just a person grabbing you, and then you breathe through them, circulating the ki through your arms, through your partner. Whatever the partner’s resistance, we open up to it and achieve the fusion of sensitivity between ours and theirs.
For me, every Kokyū Hō is different, with every person. There is no particular technique, but there are lines that spread out from the hara, it is like a kind of sun that shines and you can follow each ray of sunlight to find that hara, something ignites and the person falls to the left, to the right and you do the immobilisation. For me, this is a special moment of deep breathing. When I talk about deep breathing, I am obviously talking about ki, meaning that when you breathe deeply the ki starts to circulate in a different way.
Awase beyond the tatami: taking care of the baby, the height of martial arts
‘Knowing how to treat babies well is for me the height of martial arts’ 5. When Tsuda sensei wrote this sentence, he was relating aikido to the way of looking after a baby in Noguchi Haruchika sensei’s Seitai. He also said that taking care of a baby is like having a sword over your head; as soon as you make a mistake, “snip” the sword falls.
If we draw a parallel with aikido, the baby is both much more demanding than the master and at the same time much more gentle; in Seitai, taking care of the baby means having constant attention, it means abandoning yourself. The greatest masters talk about the importance of abandoning yourself, it is central to martial arts. Awase, this fusion we talk about, is also accepting to abandon yourself. With a baby, it is all a question of sensation, we are in a constant fusion of sensitivity, like when a mother knows if her baby is crying because it has to pee or if it is hungry or tired. In the same way, but in reverse, for the samurai facing their adversary, the art was to discover in the other the moment when their breathing would become irregular, the moment when they would be able to strike. It means calling on all our abilities.
Taking care of a baby is discovering a world of sensitivity, for example through the art of giving a hot bath in Seitai. Knowing how to put a baby into the water when it breathes out and how to take it out of the water when it breathes in, when you are able to look after a baby in this way you are also in martial arts. Touching a baby, changing a baby in the rhythm of its breathing, putting a baby to sleep and laying it down without waking it up… Of course, it is much more flamboyant to pull out your katana and pretend to cut off a head! But for me, it is so much more difficult and important to put to bed a baby who has fallen asleep in your arms, to be able to take your hands out from under the baby without waking it up, that is art! With an aikido partner, you can “cheat”, you can use a little shoulder pressure, you can push… but with a baby, you cannot cheat. There is fusion or there is not. I learnt a lot from my babies, I think I learnt as much from them as I did from Tsuda sensei, although in a different way.
It is generally believed that one must begin by learning the techniques and that after many years of work one can grasp awase and musubi. In our school, the Respiratory Practice and the fusion of sensitivity are at the beginning and inseparable from the rest. All our research is done through breath, “ki”. This direction allows us to deepen the research in simplicity rather than acquisition, and in this sense we meet Ueshiba O-sensei’s definition: ‘Aikido is Misogi’.
Article by Régis Soavi published in October 2014 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 6.
by Régis Soavi
“Non-fighting” is not the same as refusing to fight, in the same way that “non-doing” is never the same as “doing-nothing”. Understanding life in its most unusual, most upsetting, most incongruous and sometimes apparently most incomprehensible manifestations is perhaps the real fight to be carried.
This article is difficult for me, because I was originally a fighter who, thanks to the practice of Aikido and Katsugen undo, now aspires only to “non-fighting”. Revolted since my early teens by the conditions and solutions proposed by society, my path could have been very different had I not crossed that of my master: Tsuda Itsuo. It took me seven years to have defused within me what would only have brought me to my doom. After that, a few decades were enough to respond to my inner demand and strengthen the direction I had begun to take. I then found a personal antithetical response through the work of emancipation and release of the people who come to practise in our School. Allowing everyone to rediscover their inner strength, as opposed to reinforcing all their acquired tendencies, which are merely the result of an underlying education orchestrated by a world that makes us believe in our weakness, that accustoms us to fear and thereby pushes us into submission.
If our art were some mere “self-defence”, I would not have practised it for so long, I would not have got up at the crack of dawn every morning, for nearly fifty years, to go to the dojo. I have not sacrificed anything for this, but I have not let anything divert me from this direction. Aikido is a ‘total social fact’ in the sense that Marcel Mauss understood it. It has led me to deepen my own understanding in many ways. It has driven me to fight against the injustice suffered by individuals of all genders, through the normalisation of bodies that have become rigid and blocked, and through a return to the truth of inner strength which is only waiting to emerge once more. Stepping outside the box to show its falseness. Proposing self-management of groups in dojos, the independence of individuals, the power of the encounter between beings rather than incomprehension or manipulation: these are both the conditions and the answers to be provided.
Any fight can be legitimised on the basis of a theory or ideology, but its effects and consequences must be measured in each situation. The end does not justify the means. Too many fights have been lost by those who had won them, this even if they did so rightly, because the means were unjustifiable in the face of life. The violence done to human beings in an unjust society provokes a fight, and the response is very often a rightful conflict, a struggle against adversity. However, the struggle is not meant to be a violent fight, but a fight without a struggle is doomed to failure. The revolt against injustice of all kinds, whether individual or collective, must pass through our sensitivity and empathy, and be nourished by them. If it leads us to fight, how can we refuse it? It is rather to the form that we are due to pay attention. Thus shall we be able to practise “non-fighting” and act in Non-Doing.
On an individual level, we need to put an end to the reasoning that legitimises everything by relying excessively and exclusively on Darwin’s all-too-famous ‘struggle for life’. In the 19th century already, when scientific knowledge of how the body works was still in its infancy, libertarian theorist Prince Kropotkin, without denying the theory of evolution in its entirety, pointed out that the best-adapted species are not necessarily the most aggressive, but can be the most social and the most supportive. This theory, incidentally, will get a confirmation in this beginning of the 21st century in researcher Marc-André Selosse’s writings about biodiversity, microbiota and symbiosis. Darwinism has been the justification used since the 19th century to stifle social revolt, legitimise the exploitation of human beings, establish patriarchy on pseudo-scientific grounds and ultimately destroy the planet in the name of immediate profit. Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Wall, who has studied the feeling of empathy in animals, concludes that social Darwinism ‘is an abusive interpretation: yes, competition is important in nature but, as we have seen, that’s not all.’ ‘We are also programmed to be empathetic, to resonate with the emotions of others.’1 For me, promoting life at both individual and collective levels and using an art like Aikido to spread the possible enrichment of humanity along the path towards which our masters guided us is more than just a task – it is rather a conviction.
Before addressing the issue of legitimate defence, it is important to reflect on our humanity, our ancestral animality, our primitive reactions which are often antithetical, and above all on our instinct for life which overrides our reflex for death. Sometimes, very simply, the instinct to survive is enough to wake us up from the numbness caused by our fear of what surrounds us. To carry out this reflection, we cannot be satisfied with an overview of general thinking, nor can we look around us for either answers or examples. If our reflection, our thought is meant to be intelligent, it must delve into the very depths of our being in order to find answers that will always be relative, never definitive, and in motion so to say, because the elements at our disposal are both numerous and contradictory, theoretical, legislative and even religious. They have their purpose in different societies, different times, and we cannot disregard them with a stroke of the pen or adopt one on superficial grounds. That is what makes the art of Aikido so precious: an art which leads us both physically and spiritually.
The nature within us needs answers, and these answers must be right and clear. They must be unambiguous and no more problematic than the question itself, nor engender further misunderstandings in an outburst of resentment. The situation that leads to the fight already favours, if we understand it, our giving it a right answer. It is our attitude in life that is our starting point, and this is why practising Aikido is so important. It is not just about training to fight, but rather about finding the sensation of the living down in all aspects of everyday life. Life is not a long, tranquil river, nor is the world an amusement park. Injustice and violence are present, and no one can ignore them. Even if the result of conditioning or fear of the future, closing our eyes to what surrounds us would only be childish self-centredness or cynical egotism. I cannot see fighting only as an individual or collective solution, but much more as a sane demand for health, for intelligence of the world and as a search for unification, pacification, return to unity.
Relaxation is not an option, nor is it a tactic or a subterfuge for victory, but more simply the result of a state of being. It cannot be acquired but can rather be discovered by following a path of simplicity and sincerity. It is a way of life when body and spirit are “finally” in harmony. It is this return to the deepest nature of ourselves that must occur when we have rid ourselves of what encumbers us, of what shackles us, of what obstructs the clear vision we could have if we were freer. Aikido is the royal path to achieving this, Tsuda sensei called it ‘The path of less’,2 as opposed to the path of acquisition, which creates tension and conflict. It is a new basis that takes us back to our early childhood while not being childish,3 with, on the other hand, the strength of age, experience and perhaps a little of that wisdom brought by our art.
A poem like the one I found in Utomag magazine is sometimes better than a long argument:
“Fighting”
Being always ready
Observing in a diffuse way
Not acting unnecessarily
Acting at the right moment
In a relaxed body ready to pounce
This is very clear with cats:
Constant vigilance is not permanent tension
On the contrary, they are capable of great relaxation
Their bodies are supple, ready to tense up for action,
and then, to relax again
Their aggressiveness, deployed when necessary, is matched only by their voluptuousness, used without moderation
Should we condemn them for one or the other?
Should they give up one or the other?
No
Because they act in total harmony with their function as animals: to be
There is nothing constructed or thought out about this
They are, they live, they protect their integrity, their territory.
They won’t be aggressive for the sake of being aggressive, just as they won’t not be aggressive on principle
Fighting is a means of self-preservation, not an end in itself.
If it is, it may be that the instinct for self-preservation has been touched.
Sometimes, preserving oneself means not fighting
But not fighting must never mean renouncing oneself, one’s ability to preserve oneself.
Article by Régis Soavi published in January 2025 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 20.
by Régis Soavi
While the West has almost entirely converted to the shower, despite the importance the bath has had over the centuries, the East and in particular Japan seems to be taking the same direction. In spite of a renewed interest due to a fashion that has touched the young Japanese, it turns out that the elderly are, almost solely, the only people who retain an attachment to what could be called “an ancestral way of life”. In Seitai, what makes the bath special is that Noguchi Haruchika sensei had made it one of the elements of the terrain normalisation and it was part of the training for the uchi deshi.
It is Tsuda Itsuo sensei who, thanks to his books and especially in his fourth volume entitled One, introduced the Seitai hot bath practice in Europe as soon as the early seventies. A seitai technician, who had studied and worked with Noguchi Haruchika sensei during more than twenty years, he started as soon as he arrived from Japan to make known what he translated by the Regenerating Movement: Katsugen Undo.
It was already a bit of a revolution to make a little group of French and Swiss people experience this “exercise of the involuntary system”, to have them admit that it was possible to practice – as he recommended – ‘with no knowledge, no technic, no aim’, but Tsuda sensei did not stop there. He started a long work of education, but also of clarification, which encouraged students to think and experiment by themselves instead of following beaten tracks, ideas or protocols. At the beginning, to concretise this immense work, he published booklets of a few photocopied pages which we used to call “Mr Tsuda‘s notebooks”. It is these notebooks, which we would discover more or less every month, which later became the chapters of his books.
It is on the occasion of a Regenerating Movement workshop, during one of his conferences he would call ‘little causeries,’ that he started to talk about the hot bath. We had no idea of what he taught us, many of us visualized something that was closer to a sauna or hammam. As usual with what he would make us discover, it took him years to get his message through. To admit that a bath did not merely consist in washing oneself to be clean but could have other qualities, as well as other consequences, did not appear to us, young French people, as something obvious.
‘Seitai, the normal terrain, means that we constantly maintain the feeling of well-being we have after a hot bath’ 1 Tsuda sensei used to tell us. To apprehend Seitai, I therefore had to discover this sensation, keystone of the understanding, and this would at least pass through the discovery of the hot bath!
In Europe, there are no or very few Sento2, Ofuro3, and even less Onsen4, and discovering the Japanese hot bath was already not a simple thing, but understanding what makes the Seitai bath something special, that turned out to be a challenge. In order to have the chance to be introduced with simplicity to the art of the hot bath, one needs to know someone who has already had the opportunity not only to discover it, for instance during a stay in Japan, but also and especially to have made it a daily practice.
What difference is there between a “normal” bath and the hot bath, in particular in Seitai? In the West the purpose of the bath is often washing, or, at best, relaxation, rarely is it precise regarding temperature, but in general it is rather mild and one can lounge in it and stay in the water for a rather long time. In this kind of bath, the water cools down rather quickly of course, but this is not a problem because at the moment when we find it too lukewarm we get out of the bath and that’s it. One of the basic elements to understand the Seitai vision of the bath is obviously the hot bath as it is practised in Japan, and for a Japanese it is way much simpler from the beginning. But this is not enough because the Seitai bath has many specificities which distinguish it from the traditional Japanese bath. Noguchi sensei himself often regretted the lack of understanding his students would show when he gave conferences about the Seitai bath in which he explained its purposes and beneficial effects.
An abyss of details, particularities, divide these two ways of taking the bath. The preparation of the Seitai hot bath requires an attention, which we – many of us – have lost the habit of exerting, and which, for what concerns us, does not usually apply to the bath anyway. The concentration required for its preparation can from the start discourage many people who are no longer accustomed to making use of this capacity outside their work, or who only resort to it during their youth when they are studying. Many students show a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning, but they rapidly get tired of the repetitive aspect and often quickly find another topic of interest that better satisfies their superficial and light side, acquired in a world that often favours this aspect only.
It is almost impossible in France to have a ready for use bathtub, always full with lukewarm water, that we would only need to warm up, as it exists in Japan. The first move therefore consists in filling it with hot water, and according to the room temperature, the tension, the tiredness we feel, the atmosphere of the house, the quantity will differ to allow us, after adding a little cold water, to obtain the desired temperature. We do not a priori and peremptorily adjust the thermostat according to an idea or a protocol. The bath temperature is never an objective value. Although it is measurable, it still remains entirely subjective and depends on each person’s feeling, on their own perception when they enter the bath. It is a knowledge that expresses itself in the form of sensations, that builds up, and develops gradually as one discovers what the hot bath is. The first times, if only as a security measure not to risk burning oneself, it is necessary to dip a hand into the water to feel if the temperature suits us, but it is extremely difficult to know, even approximately, if it is right or not, the main thing, which is experience, is lacking. If one is not accompanied in this discovery it turns out rather difficult and often, the first times, the bath is somehow a failure, even though it was pleasurable, it relaxed us, refreshed us, and even invigorated us.
It is the first information we look for as a neophyte and I was no exception. In addition Tsuda sensei carefully avoided making it easy for us, he would simply write:
‘The sensation of heat differs according to the individual,’ 5
‘The hot bath causes the blood channelled to the brain to flow to other parts of the body, but the effects can be risky for Europeans, who are not used to it.’ 6
‘The bath thermometer, even if it is true and accurate, has the following defects: the temperature rises quickly but falls slowly; it only shows the temperature of one area of the bath. There is nothing better than a good sensitive hand.’ 7
‘What a lot of harm I would cause if, for example, I declared it essential to take the bath at such-and-such a temperature! We are flooded by rubbish science that removes any chance we have of exercising our ability to focus our attention and to feel.’ 8
My personal bath temperature is generally around 43°C to 44°C though it can, sometimes, still vary by 1 to 2 degrees higher or lower depending on the day. This, I could observe over the years when I was still a neophyte, because I would control each bath with one of the thermometers I had tested. I kept the one that seemed the most accurate and the closest to my sensation. I continued to verify the accuracy of my sensation with respect to the bath heat during almost twenty years, among other things by measuring the bath temperature when I considered that it was ready, that there was nothing to add, neither hot nor cold water. Even today each time I need to do a “technical bath” for someone of my family, I am particularly careful both to the temperature and to the way to enter or get out, as well as to the duration. For this, only one instrument, the concentration nourished by the sensation which is itself fostered by experience.
It is in the last two chapters of his ninth book Facing Science that Tsuda Itsuo sensei reports in a few lines one of the conversations I had with him about the Seitai hot bath before publishing two of my letters on the topic. The title of these chapters ‘Experience is the mother of intuition’ had at that time touched me very much and I am still moved and grateful for the trust he expressed towards me given the few words he wrote as a header and at the end of the text9.
Entering “this world of the hot bath” has not been simple and it would be too long to explain here all the processes, the experimentations, as well as the verifications I made during this period of time, on the way to enter, the moment to get out, as well as to find the right temperature, the one that fitted my body temperature at a given moment, and what the consequences were on my organism, my sensibility.
The starting point of my research on this path consisted in finding the way to stimulate my organism, so as to allow it to normalize. The hot bath belongs to the techniques used in Seitai to make the body’s terrain become more sensitive. I therefore started as an autodidact, and mainly on myself, by following the few observations and recommendations from Tsuda sensei. I needed a bit more than three years taking the bath every day, this means it was necessary to prepare about a thousand two hundred baths, not counting those I prepared for my partner, before reaching something convincing, something that allowed me to verify by myself that what I discovered was reliable, and that I could rely on my sensations, on my intuition. Sensei’s reactions and reflexions, which he made about the anecdotes I would tell him on this matter, in the morning or when I was driving him home after the aikido session, were particularly valuable to me. In this way I could check that it was valid and my master, Tsuda Itsuo confirmed to me his attachment to the development of this research by publishing these few lines on my experience in 1983.
I had practised the Regenerating Movement and Aikido with Tsuda sensei for almost ten years, and my sensitivity had developed a lot, when Manon my first daughter was born. Thanks to my experience with the bath, I was ready to accompany her for her first bath after birth. Tsuda sensei writes about this:
‘The first bath after birth should be regulated according to the temperature of the mother’s womb, to which the newborn had been accustomed, so we begin at 37 degrees and go up to 38 degrees. The temperature can be increased by another half degree. We need to be careful not to clean the vernix all at once, that is, the layer of fat that covers the baby, for it continues to protect him after birth. It is better for it to disappear by itself after a week of soap-free baths, without too much washing.’ 10
I accompanied her as I later did for my other children, until their adolescence, an age when, having acquired the capacity through daily experience, they started to prepare their bath by themselves and for themselves. It is essential in Seitai, when one wants to use the hot bath, to do it in the respect of the biological speed of the individual, and especially of course for a child. Tsuda sensei explained to us that Noguchi Haruchika sensei, to solve the problems when his children were too nervous, anxious, had a cold or had to go through an infant disease, used the variation and modulation of the bath temperature, its duration, as well as the way to enter into the water. This is of utmost importance in the case of babies, hence Tsuda sensei explained:
‘What matters is not so much the bath temperature as how to dip the body in the bath. The decisive moment is when the baby is put in the hot water, because one is making use of the reaction of the musculature, produced by the body temperature change in moving from the open air to the bath water. The body contracts temporarily on contact with hot water and gradually expands. We must choose the precise moment, when induced relaxation is not yet complete so that contraction resumes, to take the baby out of the bath.’ 11
The vocation of Seitai is to allow individuals to live fully without having to worry about their health, to go through diseases, life accidents, to react in an adequate manner to all that directly or indirectly touches us. Restoring the body’s good condition, recovering a good sensitivity, all this starts early, very early. Acting so that children, as soon as they are born, can maintain the balance in the functioning of their body is not an easy task, the Seitai hot bath if correctly used can be of great help for parents who already know it for themselves and have understood how to use it.
Therefore, the hot bath is a kind of gymnastics that affects the entire being, rather than a cleansing of the body.’ 12
Without a personal research in this domain it is impossible to understand what I am talking about, the concrete sensation of the bath itself, as well as the after-bath sensation, will always be missing. This knowledge cannot be only theoretical, else one could say this would correspond to knowing all about swimming without ever dipping a foot into the water, and intending to teach other people to swim.
In Seitai, to each situation corresponds a precise bath, if we are very tired, if we have eaten or drunk too much, if we are chilled or have caught a cold. There is no user guide, it all depends on the age, health state, the period we are going through and a thousand other details, all of which have their importance. In Seitai, there is no science of the general but only a science of the particular, Sensei would tell us.
Once again there is no manual that would allow to take the bath with 100 % guaranteed results, with complete safety and impeccable reliability. It all depends on they way to prepare it and on the state of mind. If one is presumptuous, or absent-minded, better not to try, else it is at your own risk! It is almost impossible and even dangerous to give advice to someone who is not used to the bath. It is most often the less competent persons who try to teach the hot bath “vademecum”. Presenting themselves as knowledgeable they discuss their ideas on the topic article after article, or on the social networks, give recipes supposed to solve all health issues, all difficulties. They even indicate all the so-called precautions that have to be taken with “The Hot Bath”, unfortunately forgetting most of the time some notions of utmost importance. The consequences can be serious, and accidents, even not severe, can sometimes turn out worrying for people who have no habit of the hot bath. Yet, it is most of the time a matter of having a bit of common sense and not playing the jack-of-all-trades or the careless pretentious.
There are a lot of technical baths in Seitai: the leg-bath, the bath in case of food poisoning, the bath to eliminate an excess of alcoholic drink, the bath in case of brain fatigue, the bath to balance the baby’s nutrition, etc.
Here is an example of technical bath which Tsuda Sensei revealed to us with the purpose to allow us an approach of this know-how:
‘Foot-baths, whose principle I have explained, are starting to become widely used among practitioners. It is a matter of soaking your feet to above ankle depth in a bath that is 2 degrees warmer than a usual bath, which makes it unbearably hot for a normal body. After two minutes, we take our feet out and dry them. They have become red. When a person has a cold, one foot remains pale. We re-soak it in the bath, adding hot water before, until it also turns red.’ 13
When you read it for the first time you may think that the aim of the technique is to cure the cold whereas once more, according to the Seitai approach, it is a matter of stimulating the body to go through the cold, speeding up the bodily reactions so that you get out of the cold stronger and in better health when it is finished. This technique seems very simple, but if you reread the short text with care before starting you will realize that, though it is precise, there are a lot of unknown details which are far from trivial and require some thought before you make the attempt. Nevertheless you will realize later, after having made a lot of experiences, that it is not so complicated when sensitivity is our guide.
The vision Seitai has of hygiene is indeed different but more modern from a certain point of view, in spite of its anteriority, than the one disseminated in most media. A conception of cleanliness which meets not only ecology but also the leading studies on symbiosis, like those collected by M.-A. Selosse, which have led him to the notion of “clean filth”. Here are two extracts:
‘The reconciliation with the microbial world flies in the face of our codes of cleanliness.’ And offends ‘education and good manners. But here cleanliness (a social code) no longer overlaps hygiene (the medical practice which optimizes health). Yesterday, one thought wrongly that there was no hygiene without sterilization, which led to a counter-productive vision of cleanliness regarding diseases related to modernity like diabetes, overweight, allergies.’ 14
‘The hygienist theory then encounters the notion of “clean filth”: a certain degree of contamination is necessary for a good development and a good functioning of the immune system.’ 15
The hot bath in the first place affects the skin. It is important to realize that the skin is the largest organ of the human body, it accounts for 16% of its total weight, it is not just ‘a kind of leathery bag that contains the body’ 16, a mere shell with a complex makeup, it interacts with the environment and has vital functions.
The epidermis includes immune cells and that’s where you find the cutaneous microbiota, filled with billions of micro-organisms. The hot water stimulates the immune system of the skin without attacking it with etching or bactericidal reagents like those in shower gels or other detersive soaps. The heat stimulates sweating so much so that we even sweat in water, which facilitates the activity of the autonomic nervous system and the elimination of toxins and other impurities through the sweat ducts. Facilitating discharge through sweating also eliminates bacterial macerations and therefore unpleasant body odours.
Modern living conditions – work, transport, excessive mediatisation, thus stress of all kinds – cause tensions in individuals which are prone to make everybody sick. The suggested answer is often medicalisation. Against sleeplessness sleeping pills are proposed, against nervousness tranquilisers, to deal with apathy stimulant drugs, with depression euphoriants, etc. The hot bath as Seitai understands it is not a cure-all, it is an opportunity to regulate the body, a tool to retrieve one’s balance, one’s autonomy, thanks to the relaxation and at the same time the stimulation of the whole body. The well-being that one then feels comes from the relaxation brought by the energy circulating afresh, and from the clarity of mind one feels because the “head” is cleared of the concerns which accumulate in everyday life. One then discovers what it means “the sensation of after the hot bath” of which Noguchi Haruchika sensei and Tsuda sensei would talk, this sensation being one of the keys, one of the impalpable but major instruments for who wants to have an approach not only intellectual but more concrete and practical of Seitai.
The hot bath is always a huge pleasure, everyone in the family expects it, when the time comes, no one would want to skip it, much to the contrary, the opportunity is so great and yet so simple, to relax, to recover after the fatigue and the tensions which are hard to escape from during the day. The children are never reluctant at taking it, all the more so if they know it since birth, but whatever one may think, it is more than a daily habit, for them too it is part of a rebalancing moment which they intuitively feel.
The bath often becomes an axis in the family life, a moment unlike any other thanks to which everybody gets together for this activity regardless of age or occupations. It is for example around bath time that rituals are renewed, as well as a certain type of communication between parents and children; it’s a moment when they can get together outside social contingencies imposed by society and its codes.
The bath is generally prepared in the evening, without haste, and everybody after washing comes to dive into the hot water. The ones to go first will be those who take it the hottest, for it is easier to cool the water than to warm it in the present conditions of Western urban life. Yet each person has her own suitable bath temperature, which is different from that of the others, even if the difference is very small, a few tenth of a degree sometimes, but the satisfaction of this need of the body that we feel requires an adjustment which is very precise, though subjective. Since the temperature of the water tends to decrease, one often has to warm the bath in order to get the satisfaction.
Sometimes also at the end of one’s bath, one gets out and adds some burning hot water which is mixed in the bathtub to prepare a “reactivation:” as the body has cooled down, when you get into the water again, the difference of temperature between the air and the water which the skin feels is all the greater, one stays just a few minutes and one comes out of the water again.
This method is well known in Seitai because it stimulates the organism much more and it can be used to help the body go through an illness or a little accident of daily life. Still, it is better not to do too many reactivations and not too hot ones, because if one thinks that in this way the reactions will be stronger and therefore more efficient, this is a mistake. Too much power often impairs the strength of the reaction that we had hoped for and it sometimes turns it into an opposite reaction. Everyone already knows his own habits, his own tendencies regarding the heat of the bath, but one is sometimes surprised by the bath one has prepared for oneself. That is why it can happen that even afterwards one should think to oneself: ‘ah, but today I really felt like a much hotter bath’ or ‘it’s strange but I need a relaxing bath these days, I take it really mild.’
The art of the bath was part of the study of Seitai for Noguchi sensei’s uchi deshi. The student had to prepare his master’s bath so that it was ready when he would come back after his trips, lectures or encounters outside home. This does not seem so difficult if one does not know the conditions the student had to face.
First he did not know when Noguchi sensei would come back from the visits he made in town because his hours were never the same, he did not know either if his day had been difficult or rather pleasant and so if he was tired, tense or relaxed. He had to anticipate the moment when he would be back to have time to prepare the bath, which in particular required at the time to fuel a wood stove especially designed to warm the water and bring it to the right temperature. He had to guess in what mood he would be, with no information at all, to know what the temperature of the water was without a thermometer. How could he manage?
Or give up everything “because it was too hard”?
All these reactions would be perfectly understandable, especially if you know what Noguchi sensei’s final recommendation was: the most difficult, the worst from a certain point of view, the student did not have the right to touch the bath water, even with the tip of a finger. That was so whatever the difficulties, the conditions, the need to check etc.
What was left for him to do? One single solution to continue on this path: use and develop his intuition.
‘The art of the hot bath in Seitai’, an article by Régis Soavi published in October 2021 in Yashima #13.
Would you like to hear about the next article? Subscribe to the newsletter:
by Manon Soavi & Romaric Rifleu
In the first part of this article on Niten ichi ryū, we traced bujutsuka and martial arts researcher Hirakami Nobuyuki’s investigation into Musashi’s art. His work on the almost extinct lineages of Niten Ichi ryū led him to discover the Iori lineage, which had preserved some characteristics typical of the koryūs of the Edo period. This discovery, which shook him up, led him to a better understanding of the kyokugi (lit. prowess, performance, art, ability), the potential of Musashi’s art. The very “Edo-Style” peculiarities of Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū make sense in a given martial system, in line with its era. We will now discuss some examples of these peculiarities.
In a koryū, unlike in modern budōs, uchitachi – the one who attacks (uke we would say in Aikido) – has a teaching role. It is essential that they give the right intensity and control the speed and rhythm of the kata. They must adapt their attack to the abilities of shitachi (tori in Aikido), who is in the process of learning. Gradually, uchitachi will modulate their attack to help the beginner to progress, to challenge her/him or to help the beginner work on a particular aspect. This role is therefore played by the teacher or an experienced student.
This is why, whenever Hirakami came to Akimitsu sensei’s dojo to practise Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū, the latter, despite being 92 years old, always put on a keikogi and practised directly with him. This way of doing things is the essence of the transmission from master to student in the koryūs (this has also been maintained in the Niten Ichi ryū lineages that were modernised after the war).
Just as characteristically, Hirakami discovered that in Ioriden each kata has two faces, an omote face and an ura face. Again, the meaning is different from Aikido, where this distinction roughly refers to going in front of or behind uke. In the Edo style of traditional koryūs, the omote katas refer to a basic version of the kata that it is essential for beginners to master. It is also this version that will be used in public demonstrations. In a context where it was vital for each school to keep its secrets, the omote kata was very useful. Sometimes, final cuts were added in order to blur the audience’s memory. Since it is easier for the brain to remember the beginning and end of a sequence, this made it possible to hide the decisive technique in the middle. At the same time, omote katas give the students the key principles, they do not actually hide them – they are, as Ellis Amdur would say, ‘hidden in plain sight’ 1.
The ura face in Japan means what is inside, behind, but also what is not directly visible. It touches on all aspects of Japanese culture: architecture, art, combat, human relationships, etc. For katas, the ura form can be a more pragmatic version or one with variations that are sometimes minor, sometimes quite significant. While the omote kata sets out the principles, the ura kata gives the keys to “open the door”. In fact, this is very much part of the ancient Japanese cosmovision since there is no black without white, no negative without positive, no yin without yang. It is a dynamic tension between two poles that nourish each other.
Again, the riai of the katas – their principles – are best understood when there are both omote and ura versions. In Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū, there are five two-sword omote katas and their five ura counterparts – so are there for the one-sword katas.
Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū places great importance on breathing. This is worked on through the five breathing exercises performed with the two swords and through rei – the salute. Each kata begins and ends with a particular way of doing the salute, working on the opening of the body at shoulder height and the suppleness of the wrists. While it is clear that the art of swordsmanship is often about breaking the rhythm, seizing the breath to get out of sync with it, to be able to do this you have to start by harmonising yourself. And to get in synchrony with the other, breathing is the key.
Maintaining calm breathing in order to maintain a certain inner calm, even in the face of a blade, was of course a crucial point. Breathing is the royal road to refocusing and staying clear-headed, not to mention all the benefits that a number of physical practices also make use of. So it makes sense in this martial tradition to have explicit exercises and postures that allow you to work on breathing and coordination.
Lastly, the names of the Ioriden katas were also more classical, more in the style of ancient koryūs. Hirakami explains that, in the Santo-ha lineage, the names of the two-sword katas are simply the names of the starting guards (Chūdan 中段, Jōdan 上段, Gedan 下段…) whereas in the Iori lineage the names are more typical of koryūs in the sense that they are evocative. They evoke an action, an impression, the names speak through images – as in Zenga where the calligraphy evokes a poem, a kōan, a story that carries a teaching. The names of the katas in the Ioriden branch, for example, are In-bakusatsu (yin deadly coil) or Tenchi-gamae (heaven and earth guard). These are evocations, they are not literal. The same phenomenon can be seen in the names of the techniques of modern budōs such as Aikido, Judo or Karate compared to the names of the jūjutsu katas of the koryūs. We find more poetic names such as ‘taming the wild horse’, ‘blowing the ash’ or ‘stopping the ogre’ (examples taken from the Bushūden Kiraku ryū).
Tokitsu Kenji also wondered about names and how they changed from one school to another:
To conclude this “investigation”, let us remember that the vitality of an art lies in this tension between evolution and tradition. For Hirakami sensei, it was thanks to his research into these ancient forms that the riai of this martial tradition became apparent and finally the depth of the kyokugi of Musashi ryū became more obvious to him.
Ultimately, koryūs take us on a journey that interweaves the life of a people and their culture, the jolts of history and the efforts to both preserve a martial tradition and keep it alive in a world very different from the one in which it was born. Evolution is inevitable, and at the same time a thorough understanding of the past is necessary. It is, of course, a question without a definitive answer, almost a kōan that each generation has to face.
It is therefore up to each follower to play their part in the chain of transmission, to rekindle the fire back from the embers and not just to honour the ashes. Today, it is up to us to continue this transmission, listening to the traditions while taking inspiration from this beautiful phrase by Jean Jaurès, which inspired our title, taken from a speech in 1910:
‘the true way to honour [the past] or to respect it is not to turn towards the extinct centuries to contemplate a long chain of ghosts: the true way to respect the past is to continue, towards the future, the work of the living forces that, in the past, laboured.’ 3
A text by Manon Soavi & Romaric Rifleu published in April 2024 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 17.
by Manon Soavi & Romaric Rifleu
Throughout their history, all martial traditions have been caught in the tension between evolving to adapt to the world and preserving their past skills. It is actually thanks to the alternation between these two poles that a tradition can continue; followers themselves are divided between those who modernise and those who delve into the origins. We need to get rid of any idea of hierarchy between them in order to appreciate the necessary work that each follower brings to this dynamic.
An example of this can be found in Western music with the research carried out in the 1990s by certain musicians on the manufacturing of instruments during the Baroque period. Their research led to a qualitative rediscovery of a repertoire that had been neglected because it was difficult to perform correctly on 20th-century instruments. Other musicians, on the other hand, such as Beethoven and Liszt, pushed the limits of the instruments of their time and led piano makers to modify their instruments, thus giving birth to the piano of today.
Miyamoto Musashi was one of those who, in order to create his two-sword school, modernised a martial tradition by ‘a reorganization of existing knowledge of technique’ 1 coming from his familial jitte2 school and own fighting experience. For us, this development is a thing of the past. A past that, on the one hand, we must keep alive through practice and, on the other hand, is nourished by the qualitative rediscoveries of certain researchers. The aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of the riai of a given martial tradition – that is, of the coherence of its principles. With the developments and contributions of each generation, one sometimes tends to lose sight of the riai. This is precisely why there are times when some adepts turn to the past to rediscover the roots of a school’s principles. This is the kind of work we want to discuss in this article on Musashi’s two-sword school.
Of course, the legacy of Miyamoto Musashi – like, incidentally, the legacy of Aikido itself – is historically controversial, with each branch claiming to be more authentic, more important, more realistic, and so on. In the same way that each of Ueshiba O Sensei’s disciples received his teaching at a different point in the master’s evolution and passed it on in their own way, so Musashi’s disciples received and passed on things that were similar but over the years became different. Once again, instead of looking for a hierarchy between these schools, these branches, instead of looking for a single truth, we can choose to nourish ourselves with the completeness that these differences bring in order to make Musashi’s art something alive.
When we were lucky enough to start studying Musashi ryū with Tatsuzawa sensei more than fifteen years ago, we knew almost nothing about the world of ancient Japanese schools. We had already been practising Aikido for about ten years, but we did not know what we were getting into, because these schools are not just a repertoire of ancient techniques and archaic weapons, they refer to a universe, a culture, a “cosmovision” you might say.
Tatsuzawa Sensei is Professor Emeritus of International Space Law and Vice Rector of Kyoto Ritsumeikan University. Descendant from a samurai family, he studied his family school, Jigo ryū, from an early age, before becoming a 10th master of Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū and the 19th master of Bushūden Kiraku ryū. The latter is a 500-year-old koryū that includes jūjutsu, iai, nagamaki, bō, tessen, kusarigama, kusari-fundo, yari and chigiriki. A martial tradition rich in around 180 katas, which represent a genuine dive into feudal Japan.
As a 10th generation master of Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū, Tatsuzawa sensei teaches several branches of what is known as Musashi ryū: Sakonden Niten Ichi ryū, Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū and Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū. These three branches correspond to three periods in Musashi’s life: Sakonden in his youth, Ioriden in his middle age and Santo-ha at the end of his life. In the Musashi ryū, this ensemble forms a curriculum based on the traditional system of transmission by levels – Shoden, Chūden, Okuden. Each level allows you to deepen your understanding of Musashi ryū by discovering a branch and its specificities (without confusing them).
Tatsuzawa sensei explained that his own master, Hirakami Nobuyuki sensei, had carried out extensive research since the 1970s to find the forgotten traces left by various students of Musashi, which had finally enabled him to gain a better understanding of the power of Musashi’s kyokugi (lit. prowess, performance, art, ability).
Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1642) is an almost legendary figure in Japanese popular culture. He lived at a turning point in the history of his country, at the beginning of the Edo period. Japan was emerging from feudal warfare and beginning to stabilise around a strong power, but also a very rigid social structure. Tokitsu Kenji, in the research book he dedicated to him, says: ‘Because of the extension of his art into so many domains and the way in which he explored the limits of the knowledge of his time, Miyamoto Musashi reminds us of Leonardo da Vinci’3. Indeed, Musashi was also a painter, a sculptor, a calligrapher, and left a written work that occupies an important place in the history of the Japanese sword. He wrote several treatises on strategy, the most famous of which is Gorin no sho [The book of five rings], a compendium of the art of the sword and a treatise on strategy.
Living at the beginning of the Edo period, before the Tokugawa family’s policy of closing and stabilising Japan, Musashi also seems to have been a pivotal figure, the bearer of very ancient martial traditions and at the same time aware of his posterity and of a very different future, where some guidance would be needed. ‘[The strategy of combat] as well as reflection on it constitutes the basic background of Musashi’s life and conferred on it several dimensions. It was his constant reaching toward creating an expression of his art in writing that gives a unique quality to Musashi’s work.’ 4
Hirakami5 Nobuyuki has been researching the martial arts and the history of science and technology in the Edo period6 since the 1970s, and is passionate about the various schools of Miyamoto Musashi’s successors. He recalls his early days when he was already practising kendo: ‘The first person to teach me Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū was Komatsu Nobuo Sensei in Kobe, who lived near my parents’ house. I rode my bike there and we’d train at his house and in the park next door’.
Hirakami sensei was already a practitioner of two other koryū (old schools), Jigen ryū and Shibukawa ryū, so he was very intrigued by the fact that there were so few katas in the transmission he received from Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū. Although it is true that Musashi was critical of schools that accumulated many different techniques, five katas still seemed very few to him. He felt that he lacked the elements to understand this martial tradition in more detail, which led him to look further afield.
The Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū branch is transmitted by the students of Musashi’s last years and is the most widespread today. Hirakami had the opportunity to meet a shihan of this school, Inamura Kiyoshi, who had studied with Aoki Kikuo Hisakatsu before the war. He had therefore benefited from the transmission of Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū forms that were prior to post-war modernisations and dated back to the end of the Meiji era. Again, there were only five two-sword katas, but Hirakami learned from him that the tradition of the twelve one-sword katas had been added after Musashi whereas the katas with only one kodachi (short sword) had been added by Aoki Sensei after the Second World War.
This encounter gave Hirakami a better understanding of the ancient forms of the Musashi tradition. The forms of the Meiji era were different from those developed after the war. By comparing both, he was able to see the additions and modifications made in the post-war techniques of the Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū. The discovery that there were other, older forms was a first step in his research that encouraged him to continue.
In the course of his research into the art of Musashi swordsmanship, one lineage in particular caught his attention. It was in a Kendo Nihon magazine special issue on Musashi that Hirakami discovered the existence of a living successor to the Miyamoto Iori lineage in Tokyo. A line passed on by Aoki Jôzaemon7, who had studied with a middle-aged Musashi. From then on, Hirakami went from surprise to surprise:
These katas, handed down from generation to generation, had a unique style and atmosphere that could not be found in Santo-ha Niten Ichi ryū. I was fascinated and wanted to learn this unique form at any cost. Akimitsu Sensei told me that he would be happy to accept my request for initiation and that I could come at any time.’ 9
Note by the way that the use of fukuroshinai did not originate in Musashi’s time, but was a later development10. Here again we find the tension between preservation and innovation. Practising with fukuroshinai, although a modern contribution, allows us to get closer to the real fighting distances, something the bokken does not really allow; it also allows us to strike genuinely, without fear of injuring or killing our partner. What we have here is a pedagogical choice made by the masters of this lineage.
Continuing his research into the lines of transmission, Hirakami was fortunate enough to find a copy of a historical document on Musashi’s swordsmanship, dating from his youth. It was a book called Niten ryū Kenjutsu Tetsugisho: inside it was clearly written ‘Niten Ichi ryū’ and it also contained a copy of Gorin no sho. What was original was that the book contained a description of nine two-sword katas with very detailed commentary. Hirakami then realised that it was a document containing specific technical forms passed down through the lineage of Fujimoto Sakon from the Owari region.
The content was fairly easy to understand, although very different from that of the Niten Ichi ryū transmitted in modern times – yet with possible overlaps with current katas transmitted in other lineages. The restoration of these katas took Hirakami several years and, after several unsuccessful attempts, nine katas were restored: five omote katas and four ura katas.
What Hirakami sensei observed as a result of his research was that these Iori and Sakon lineages had characteristics that he recognised as typical of the koryū of the Edo period, characteristics that have more or less been lost in modern budō such as Judo, Karate-do and Aikido. These characteristics were not kept in the creation of modern budō because they did not correspond to the Western “cosmovision” imported after the Meiji Restoration and reinforced even further after the war. Budōs were then built mainly on the model of Western sports. They were rationalised in terms of names, katas and dan systems. In the same way that modern Western architecture imposed itself on the building of hospitals, schools, airports, etc., this way of “managing” in a systematic way imposed itself on traditional martial arts.
In order to survive in a new world, on the ruins of ancient Japan, the transmission of the Musashi schools modernised by distancing itself from certain traditions, although none of these branches became a sport for all that. Nevertheless, they have also moved away from the “cosmovision” of the time which supported their transmission and allowed a better understanding of the set of principles that irrigated a particular martial tradition.
This is why it was so important for Hirakami to have access to the Meiji style of the Santo-ha lineage, the first step in understanding the kyokugi, the potential of this art. Going back even further allowed him to discover that the lineage had retained some very Edo-style peculiarities, peculiarities that make sense in a martial system linked to its era. In the second part of this article we will look at some of these specific features of Ioriden Niten Ichi ryū.
Sequel to follow shortly…
A text by Manon Soavi & Romaric Rifleu published in January 2024 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 16.
by Manon Soavi
Imagine for a few seconds a world in which articles were written about “male Aikido”! With a single article talking about Tohei sensei, Shioda sensei, Noro sense and Tamura sensei. Articles that would find it relevant to put these people together for the sake of having in common… a Y chromosome. It is strange, even ridiculous, isn’t it? How can you put together men with rich, different personal histories, each of whom had a special relationship with O-sensei, each of whom followed a different personal path in Aikido? Each of them has his own personality, his own story and his own specific teaching. Each of them deserves, at least, a separate article.
Yet this is what happens to women. One finds it appropriate to talk about “female” Aikido… Of course this is not something specific to Aikido, it is a society phenomenon. Did you know that the United States were world champions in soccer? Oh yes, “women’s” football, so that does not count. But why? Because there is Football and then there is “women’s football”.
It is also the phenomenon that allows each Smurf to have a distinctive feature, however small, whereas Smurfette’s distinctive feature is that she is a girl, that is all. She has no character, other than the characteristics of a silly, flirtatious girl. Of course, this is just a comic strip, but if you think about it for a few minutes, you can find hundreds of examples of the same phenomenon. Men are people, characters with distinctive features and stories. Women are, mostly, just “women”. Like the female aikidokas who are lumped together in the “women’s aikido” basket, and thus being denied their specificities, their differences and their histories. Fortunately, some people are trying to retrace their steps, although the information is “coincidentally” much less available, if not completely non-existent!
‘The Matilda effect is the recurrent and systemic denial, spoliation, or minimisation of women’s contributions to scientific research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues.’ 1 This is a phenomenon observed by historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter, who calls this theory the ‘Matilda effect’ in reference to nineteenth-century American feminist activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. She had observed that men took credit for the intellectual thoughts of women close to them, with women’s contributions often relegated to footnote acknowledgments.
This was the case, for example, with Rosalind Franklin, whose work, decisive for the discovery of the structure of DNA, was published under the names of her colleagues. The same is true of Jocelyn Bell’s discoveries in astronomy, for which her director won a Nobel Prize in 1974. Him, not her.
Fujitani Miyako’s story is somewhat similar to that of Mileva Einstein, physicist, fellow student and first wife of Albert Einstein. Mileva and Albert Einstein met on university benches and the theory of relativity was to be their joint research. However, she became pregnant while they were still unmarried, which speeded up their marriage but slowed down Mileva’s studies considerably. In the end, the couple’s three children, the last of whom was disabled for life, were entirely in the care of Mileva after Albert Einstein left to pursue his career in the United States. Of course, the point here is not to question Albert Einstein’s genius, but to question the possibilities of Mileva to continue her career with three dependent children, one of whom was disabled. Albert Einstein was able to pursue his career only because she stayed. At the end of the day, when you think about it, there is nothing romantic or touching about the saying “behind every great man stands a woman” once rephrased more exactly into “behind every great man there stands a woman who sacrificed herself because she had no other choice”. Careers, honours, awards, positions, peer recognition, are all based on the more or less “accepted” crushing of women. When we think that we measure a woman’s competence by her career and the recognition of her peers, we forget that the game is rigged, because for every aikido master who has made a career, there is at least one woman behind him who has taken care of their children, often of the dojo, the registrations, the book-keeping and the social relations. Not to mention taking care of the husband himself, giving him the attention he needs. With these foundations provided by the master’s wife, extraordinary martial skill can flourish and shine. Mind you, I am not questioning the competence of these masters, I am contextualising the female presence that allowed them to flourish. A presence they often took for granted, a state of affairs. Because it is systemic. On the contrary, very often no one helped women to practise their arts. Nobody looks after their children, prepares their meals or does the dojo’s book-keeping for them. Not to mention those who try to stand in their way. So when we compare their careers, supposedly on an objective basis, with those of certain men, it is obvious that, structurally, they have not been able to achieve the same level of fame. However this is not a matter of skills, this is a matter of society.
Born in Japan in the 1950s, Fujitani sensei is now one of the few female seventh dan in Aikido, who has been teaching in her own dojo in Osaka for forty years. A student of Tohei Koichi, she took her first and second dan in front of Ueshiba O-sensei. However, unlike the story of some of Ueshiba O-sensei’s students, her career as an aikidoka does not tell the story of how she set out to confront the world and make a career for herself, but it tells the story that is so often the fate of women: to stay behind and endure. In this sense, it is a symbolic journey.
Fujitani Miyako was confronted with male violence from an early age. Her father abused and beat his three children. He died when she was six, having “only” had time to abuse her and dislocate her shoulder. She continued to experience this violence at high school, where she was assaulted by boys on a daily basis. At the time, she was practising classical dance and Chado (the art of tea), but she decided to do something about the violence and considered taking up Judo like her brother. In the end, she chose Aikido. Her first teacher in Kobe refused to allow women in his class, but she insisted so much that he eventually accepted her. She later became a student of Tohei sensei and took her first dan in front of Ueshiba O-sensei in Osaka in 1967. She recounts that ‘[Ueshiba] always referred himself Jii (old man or grandpa). He was always with Ms. Sunadomari, […] helping him in everything. […] Ueshiba sensei would always demonstrate this trick attack with her, a kind of faint to trick the opponent.’ 2
When she started practising in Aikido, she felt inferior as a woman in the practice. With no role models, she had no other horizon but “to become as strong” as men in order to finally be considered “equally competent”. So she tried to match the muscular strength of the men around her. She spent a year building up her muscles. She says that her technique at the time seemed very powerful indeed, but that she abused her body so much that she ended up breaking the bones in her arms and fingers. She also damaged the joints in her elbows and knees. She even had to stop practising for a year to recover.
This situation where women suffer disproportionately from work-related injuries can also be found, for example, among women pianists, where ‘[s]everal studies have found that female pianists run an approximately 50% higher risk of pain and injury than male pianists; in one study, 78% of women compared to 47% of men had developed RSI.’ 1 We are facing a societal issue here again: by only valuing a certain way of doing things, moving, playing music etc., women are systematically disadvantaged and, while desirous of doing their jobs and fulfilling their passions, they damage their bodies excessively. They also pay the price of interrupting their careers or even giving up.
Fujitani Miyako was twenty-one when she met Steven Seagal in Los Angeles, where she was accompanying Tohei sensei to an Aikido seminar. She attended his first dan in the United States and met Seagal again shortly after her return to Japan. He had just won a lot of money at a karate show in Los Angeles, during which he broke his knee, but with the money he had won he bought a ticket to Japan, arriving with his ripped jeans and a silver fork as only possession.
Fujitani Miyako was then a second dan and she opened her own dojo, which she called Tenshin dojo, on land owned by her mother, using her mother’s money. She married Steven Seagal a few months after they met in 1976 and, in a reflex very typical of female conditioning, she herself made him the main teacher in her own dojo, even though she was his senpai, i. e. his hierarchical superior. This is a very strong conditioning of women, who are brought up with the idea that they must ensure the peace of the household and the well-being of their husband by promoting what he imagines to be his superiority. Above all, they must not earn more money, be more famous, or be more successful than him, at the risk of seeing their family destroyed. Every woman knows this, and stories of men leaving their partners because they are jealous of their success are not uncommon. Mona Chollet makes this perfectly clear in her chapter on “‘Making Yourself Small’ to Be Loved?”, with examples that speak for themselves, and with this critical conclusion: ‘Our culture has normalised the inferiority of women so well that many men cannot accept a partner who does not diminish or censor herself in some way.’ 4 Of course, for Fujitani, the rapid arrival of two babies makes things even worse.
While she was in her own dojo, Seagal quickly began to belittle her, relegating her to the role of ‘the Japanese girl who brings the tea while he plays the little shogun’ 5. The trap closed in on her, all the more so as newspapers and television echoed the “gaijin’s dojo”, highlighting the idea that Steven Seagal was “the first Westerner to open a dojo in Japan”, when in fact he had phagocytized Fujitani Miyako’s dojo.
Meanwhile, Steven Seagal had numerous affairs with other women, including his students, and finally told Fujitani that he was moving back to the States to pursue an acting career. She waited for him with the promise that she would be able to join him and their children. Another promise – money to look after the children – was never honoured either.
Eventually, lawyers contacted her to file for divorce and allow Seagal to remarry in the United States.
Fujitani Miyako was obviously desperate to be abandoned with her two children. To make matters worse, almost all the dojo students at the dojo were more influenced by Seagal’s charisma than interested in Aikido. The ground he had laid by systematically belittling her in front of the students had a lasting effect because, not only did they leave, but they also came back to make fun of her and her deserted dojo. She related in an interview: ‘[At that time] I wanted to crawl into a hole. I had not done anything wrong. Some students would come from other dojos very arrogantly as if they owned the place. And once I started to get a few students someone would bad-mouth me to them: “she is weak so go somewhere else.” So, I really hated that time and this dojo. Some people even rumored that Steven left me because I was bad (laugh). So, old time students truly believed that. Even when he was here Steven would bad-mouth me among the students. That’s why when he left everybody followed him. However, as I lied in bed at night, I would imagine what I have now[…]. I would use my imagination watching my children grow up and me having grandchildren and I would wonder whether the day would came when I would feel happy for having aikido. That was what helped me to reach here. I love teaching youngsters with joy and today I can truly and happily say “I am glad I have aikido”.’ 6
In the end, she hung on, persevered and also discovered the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu sword school, which became her passion and nourished her understanding of Aikido. She held steady, fulfilling both her role as a mother and her passion for Aikido. ‘Nowadays, many women work, even in jobs that were previously only held by men. It’s not unusual for a woman to work and bring up children at the same time. But it was different for me, because I had to support my family by teaching Aikido. […] [Aikido] was, initially, a martial art that was mainly practised by men and I had to miss out on training for a long time because of the children. […] I was embarrassed as an Aikido teacher by the following: one day during training I made a mistake and injured both knees’ 7
Today, in her teaching, she insists on a practice that respects the integrity of the body as a cardinal value. As a result of the accidents she had when she first started, she insists on the importance of the uke following correctly rather than resisting until the body suffers. ‘Ukemi is not a demonstration movement, the original purpose is to protect the body from injury. Doing ukemi does not mean you are a loser. If Uke understands what technique is being used, they can escape it, gain an advantage and prepare their counterattack. When executing a technique, Uke’s role is not only to execute ukemi correctly without resisting the throw, but also to observe the timing of the technique in order to develop the ability to “read” the technique. After all, it is an exercise for both the person executing the waza and the person receiving it.’ 8 That is why she stresses the need for a relaxed body: ‘In Japanese, there is the word “datsuryoku” [脱力], which could be translated as “relax the body as in sleep”. When we sleep, we normally cannot overstress our bodies.’ 9
‘In karate, for instance, you would block and counterattack but in aikido we don’t block. We don’t clash at the same level as the opponent that’s why it’s so difficult. Timing is very important which I emphasize a lot. I teach something totally different from what they do at the Tokyo branch [the Aikikai] which I am sorry to say is wrong. I teach a smoother way with the precise timing so the techniques can be executed more smoothly.’ 10
Convinced that Aikido is the right martial art for women, she works to develop it on a daily basis and through events such as the seminar she conducted in 2003 in the United States – Grace & Power: Women & the Martial Arts in Japan. The importance of having female role models on the tatami has not escaped her. Certainly ‘[t]here was a time in this dojo when there was quite a number of female students but during a period many students were using force and got injured so many women thought they couldn’t do it and there was a blank of women aikidoka for a while.’ 11
‘[I myself] taught Aikido for over 10 years in an atmosphere of discrimination against women. [Yet] by perfecting my practice over and over again, I have developed my own style of Aikido, an Aikido that can be practised by women with no physical ability.
I believe that men who practise my style have a great advantage. If you use your muscles right from the start, you get used to using strength all the time. However, you will not achieve or develop much. But if you rediscover the bases without using strength, relying only on technique, then once you reach a certain level, muscles, size, etc. are an advantage that should not be underestimated.
The founder of Aikido said:12 “Aikido based on physical strength is simple. Aikido without unnecessary strength is much more difficult.” I know that if I tried to teach Aikido based on physical strength, I wouldn’t be able to do a single technique and I wouldn’t have a single student. Perhaps it can be said that aikido techniques developed by women are the key to the last secrets of aikido – an aikido that does not rely on strength.’ 13
Would you like to hear about the next article? Subscribe to the newsletter:
[mailpoet_form id=”2″]
Article by Manon Soavi published in Self et Dragon (Spécial Aikido n° 17) in April 2024.
Notes:
by Régis Soavi
Mystification is the result obtained by someone who uses mystery to deceive others.
Mystique or mysticism has to do with mysteries, hidden or secret things. The term is mainly used in the spiritual domain, to describe inner experiences of contact or communication with a transcendent reality that cannot be discerned by the common sense.
No one can deny that O-sensei was a mystic; even so, was he a mystifier? His life, his fame during his lifetime, his now historic fights – notably against a Sumotori or against martial arts masters –, his teaching, the testimony of his students, all tend to prove the opposite. Many uchi deshi recounted how O-sensei managed to squeeze through the crowds in the middle of Japan’s overcrowded train stations, such as in Tokyo during rush hours. What was his secret, despite his advanced age? Practising an art like ours does not just give you strength and endurance, that is what you get after a few years of effort, and I would even say that it only lasts for a while, because as you get older it becomes difficult to rely on that alone. However, there is one area that I think is important to understand and to experiment with, and that is working through what is directly experienced and felt, from the very beginning.
The space, the Ma, must become something tangible, because it is a reality that is not theoretical, technical or mental. Rather it is like a protective sphere that adapts to all circumstances, far from being a cloak of invisibility or an indestructible armour, it moves with us, it is both fluid and very resistant, it contracts, expands or retracts as needed and independently of our conscious or voluntary capacity. It is not an infallible safety, but in many cases it can save our lives or at least prevent the worst. Too often, it has been turned into a mystical value, when it is only the result of a passionate and enthusiastic captivating work. It is a reality that we must never give up on, right from the start, no matter how unattainable it may seem. If there is one essential guideline that Aikido teaches us, it is not to oppose others head-on, to avoid direct confrontation whenever possible, and to use it only as a last resort.
The Tao is not just an Eastern understanding of the world, but much rather an ancestral intuitive intelligence. It is intimately known to many people, and artists, poets, painters and others have sometimes been able to communicate to us in their own way the essence of the forces that animate it. Painter Kandinsky, although a modern European artist, was able to find the words that, even though referring to a work of art, speak to us as practitioners and allow us to visualise Yin and Yang:
Therefore, it is evident that forms of harmony reflect in a corresponding vibration on the human soul.’ 1
It is through understanding Yin and Yang that we can see certain functions of the body and its movement more clearly, to put it simply, understand how it all works. Here is an approach that might help to clarify what I am talking about: the outer envelope of our body as a whole is Yang, and therefore the inside is Yin, as a whole as well. The physical aspect, the luminous side of people, their social aspect as well as the way they present themselves, communicate and relate to others, all tend to be Yang if there are no distortions. The inside, understood not only from an organic point of view but also from a psychic and energetic point of view, is Yin. There is, of course, no real separation between the two, but the complementary aspect leads to observe that it is Yin that feeds Yang, just as it is breathing in that allows breathing out and therefore action. Yin supports Yang, giving it its fullness; the strength of the body comes from the strength of Yin and is manifested through Yang.
All the strength of Yin needs an envelope, however malleable it may be from within, this envelope must also be able to harden in order to contain this force and at the same time prepare it to react, to act. If the power of the Yin is not contained, if it has no way of centering itself – because it would then be boundless and therefore without reference points – it runs the risk of dispersing without bearing any fruit. If the Yang is undernourished because of the poverty of the Yin, which is struggling to regenerate itself, or because of a separation between Yin and Yang caused by the internal hardening of the “wall” which both separates and unites them, then action becomes impossible.
As always, it is the balance between the two that makes them a single force. An imbalance in favour of one or the other creates the conditions for a general imbalance, which is the origin of numerous pathologies of varying degrees of severity, and of the inability to provide correct and rapid responses to all physical, psychological or simply energetic and therefore functional problems.
An organism that reacts with flexibility and efficiency in all circumstances, whether in the face of human or microbial aggression, is an ideal to which we can adhere, or at any rate which deserves to be pursued. Aikido in our School, through the quality of its preparation at the beginning of the session based on breathing, as well as the way in which things happen during the session, helps to awaken the body as a whole.
To start with, the simple fact of breathing more deeply, concentrating our breath in the lower abdomen, and allowing this natural ability to develop at its own pace, increases the oxygenation of the brain and therefore improves the functioning of the cells and the communication between them. From there to saying that we become more intelligent is a step I do not want to take, because intelligence depends on many factors and is difficult to measure, even with today’s scientific methods. I would prefer to classify intelligence as a quality of the human brain, the use of which is sometimes surprising. But if each of us simply notices that they move better, think better and faster, that it becomes more difficult to deceive or trick them with tempting proposals or arguments based on fallacious reasoning due to lack of reflection, that is already a big step. It can also be in part a way out, even a relative one, from the world of stupidity and falsehood that rules our planet.
When it comes to strength, we tend to talk and see things in terms of quantity, rather than quality. As a martial arts enthusiast, I remember that at the very beginning of the craze in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, we eagerly consulted articles explaining how to achieve maximum effectiveness with minimum muscular strength. How, thanks to speed, positioning, posture, technicality, and also muscular strength, which was not the most important thing, but had to be present and, above all, well directed, we could achieve results that could be astonishing. In Karate, Kung-fu, Jiu-jitsu or any other martial art, there were plenty of examples.
These magazines mentioned all sorts of oriental meditations that could give incredible abilities to those who practised them. Although very often grossly exaggerated, the core truth of techniques, postures or meditations is now being recognised, analysed and theorised by researchers in mathematics, the humanities and cognitive sciences. This recognition, even if in the interest of doing justice to these practices, remains purely intellectual. Instead of leading to concrete physical research and allowing everyone to benefit from it, it provokes weariness or a mental over-heating, which risks rendering useless the efforts made by some practitioners to follow a slightly different path with the help of able and wise teachers.
It is through experience in practice that we discover what no text could have given us. Ancient texts, and sometimes even more recent ones, have an undeniable value, and often serve as a guide or reveal our discoveries afterwards. Their ability to put into words, to explain what we have felt, to reveal an experience that “speaks” to us, can be a precious help. What would I have done had I not been guided by the books and calligraphies, kinds of koans, of my master Tsuda Itsuo?
We live in a world where the accumulation of goods, commodities, knowledge and security is the rule. Thanks to artificial intelligence (A. I.), we are presented with an “augmented human”, as in the transhumanist project. Is it because today’s human beings can no longer find their way, because values have changed? Or because, disillusioned with their immediate and global environment, they no longer have a taste for anything but the superficial and have lost both the sense of and interest in the slow and the profound? Already at the end of the last century, in the 1980s, conductor Sergiu Celibidache, during a conducting course in Paris that I was fortunate enough to attend, complained that there were no longer any great symphonic movements written in a “largo” tempo: ‘everything has become faster’, he said.
Aikido has preserved from the past the values of humanity, respect for others and sensitivity, making it a quality tool for rediscovering what makes human beings sensitive and not robots. However perfected it may be, this “augmented human” will at best be a pale imitation, a substitute for what each of us can be and above all of what we can become.
Rebellion is an act of health both for our physical body and for our mind. Its salutary importance should not be overlooked. If we practise an art like ours, it is not by chance. If the intelligence of this “discipline” has appeared to us, it is because something in us was ready, even if we did not know it – by which I mean: even if we were not aware of it. If we trust the reactions of our physical body instead of being afraid of them, we can start again to understand the logic of its reactions. Again, this is not about old wives’ beliefs, about going backwards, about obscurantism. It is a question of another kind of knowledge, one that is known to everyone, but not recognised in its fullness because it is disturbing.
When there is an infection, an illness, or any other dysfunction that obviously bothers us, our body spontaneously rebels, trying in every way to solve the problem, to regain the lost balance. It raises its temperature, calls on its reserve weapons such as antibodies of all kinds, as well as on its friends with whom it is in symbiosis – antibiotic-producing bacteria, macrophage viruses, and so on. This healthy revolt can sometimes turn out to be violent and rapid, but in reality most of the time it starts very gently, slowly, we may not even notice it at first. Other times it is resolved before we are aware of the reaction, and here again it all depends on the state of the body, and despite everything it may be necessary to support the nature that is working within us. Here, everyone takes responsibility. If you have been capable of taking care of your body, letting it work on all the little problems without forcing it, leaving it free to express itself as it wishes, not much will be needed to give it a helping hand; sometimes all you need is a bit of rest, or the occasional help of competent people. It is upstream that we need to consider what is going on in our bodies; a healthy reflection on life, its movements and its nature can only do good.
What is fascinating about Aikido is to rediscover the traces left by our old masters, to see how each of them made this art their own, to create their own life. There is no point in copying them, it is better to learn from their postures and their writings. Find companions who can help you practise in a healthy way, where your intuition is awakened, where your body becomes as supple, agile and fearless as it was in childhood, and where you regain what you should never have lost: a certain valour.
Aikido is not a trampoline on which one exhausts oneself jumping, constantly perfecting one’s technique, but always falling back to the same spot due to gravity. It is a formidable path where the difficulties are proportioned by the very nature of the path, by our abilities at the time, by our perseverance and our sincerity. Doors open which lead us to a finer awareness and sometimes even to a jubilant state when the sensations that run through us become “ONE”2 with our physical performance devoid of all pretension but close to the maximum simplicity. As I saw the joy and ease with which certain teachers practised, and the results of the research and simplicity of many of the masters I knew, my desire to reach their level, or at least to come close to it in this life, grew.
The old masters, each with their own method, guided us towards what we are deep within ourselves. But the work that needs to be done is up to each of us, be it physical or philosophical. Everything always depends on us, even if we have been deceived by false prophets or boastful charlatans who are ready to do anything for the crumbs of power they can get from their deceptions. If we look at the achievements left by our predecessors on this path, if we know how to use their teachings, if we know how to recognise them without making idols or saints of them, we will see that the path, however arduous and obscure, is not so difficult. A lifetime is not enough to discover it, but life is enough by itself if you live it to the full.
Régis Soavi
Article by Régis Soavi published in July 2022 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 10.
Interview with Régis Soavi
Why did you start Aikido?
I started Judo-jujitsu, as it was called at the time, in 1962 and our teacher presented it to us as “the way of suppleness”, the use of the opponent’s strength. I was nearly twelve years old and I loved the techniques, the imbalance, the falls, which could also be a way of overcoming the technique we had undergone. Our instructor used to talk to us about hara, posture, and we knew that he himself was learning Aikido and that he had the rank of “black skirt”, which was very impressive for us. The events of 1968 turned me towards street fighting techniques, kobudō, and different tactics. However, in 1972 I wanted to take up judo again, and I signed up with Plée sensei on rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève. You could practise judo, karate or aikido for the price of a single membership fee, which was ideal for training. But judo had changed: weight categories, working on a special to win a fight – I was very disappointed. One evening after the session I stayed to watch Aikido, Maroteaux sensei was leading the session and I was immediately won over.
Why continue?
In Aikido I have found much more than an art, I have found a very rich “Path” which, like any other path, only needs to be explored further. Each day’s session allows me to discover a new aspect, to feel that I can go much further, that I am just on the edge of something much broader, as if an ocean were opening up before me. Beyond the pleasure I get from it, I think it is important to bear witness to its existence.
Which aspect speaks to you most: martial, mystical, health, spirituality?
There is no separation for me between all these things, they are interdependent.
Why are you creating dojos rather than practising in gymnasiums?
I understand your question, it would be so much easier to use existing facilities – nothing to do, not even cleaning, everything would be taken care of by the management. We would be entitled to complain if it is not clean enough, to grumble if something is not right, and in any case we would just be temporary passers-by. For me, on the other hand, the dojo is of crucial importance. Firstly, because it is a dedicated place and therefore provides a different atmosphere, free from the constraints of the authorities, a place where you feel at home, where you have the freedom to organise yourself as you wish, where you are responsible for everything that happens. Being put into this situation is what makes us understand what a dojo is, it changes the game, it allows a practice that goes beyond training and leads individuals towards autonomy and responsibility. But the main reason is that from the perspective of KI the place becomes charged, in the same way as an old house, an ancient theatre or certain temples. This charge allows us to feel that another world is possible, even within the one we live in.
You set up several dojos and other venues as soon as the 80s. The Floreal Garden1 – a place for children –, then several painting workshops, as well as a music school – Music in the bushes2. Why all these places? What do they have in common?
My desire has always been to encourage the freedom of bodies and minds, with the aim of bringing them together. To be successful, this work requires a very broad vision, free of ideology, free of mind-numbing systems, free of competition, always in search of sensitivity – which seems to have become a disease or a defect in our society – and spontaneity – among other things. To create a kindergarten to provide the basis for an education in freedom, thereby encouraging non-schooling; to create “painting-expression workshops”3 in the spirit of Arno Stern’s work, which are like bubbles and liberate human beings from the neurotic sclerosis that surrounds them; to give adults and children the chance to develop a passion for music – particularly classical music – thanks to a notation known as “plain music”4, which allows them to play immediately and to discover the pleasure of playing without having to endure the rigidification of the mind and body organised by the specialists of music theory and music teaching in general. All in the service of the human being and the possibility of harmonious development of body and mind.
You cultivate a position of non-master, do you not? By being both the sensei, the one who shows the way, the one who takes responsibility for teaching, and at the same time an ordinary member of the association, who takes part in the day-to-day tasks and worries as much about the heating as about a leak or DIY.
I can see that you understand my position very well. This attitude is a necessity for me, there is no question of me losing myself, abused by a false power that I would have acquired by taking advantage of subterfuges and pretence but which would flatter my ego. My search in this direction stems from Non-Doing and concerns all aspects of my life. It is and has been a long and hazardous process, ‘without fixed reference’ as Tsuda sensei wrote5. This orientation is an instrument, an essential tool to enable the members of the associations to move towards their own freedom, their own autonomy through the activity in the dojo. To sum up my thoughts, I would like to quote a 19th century philosopher whom I have appreciated for a very long time and whose importance has always seemed to me to be undervalued in our society:
‘No man can recognize his own human worth, nor in consequence realize his full development, if he does not recognize the worth of his fellow men, and in co-operation with them, realize his own development through them. No man can emancipate himself, unless at the same time he emancipates those around him. My freedom is the freedom of all; for I am not really free – free not only in thought, but in deed – if my freedom and my right do not find their confirmation and sanction in the liberty and right of all men my equals.’ 6
What was Tsuda Itsuo like and what struck you about him?
He was a man of great simplicity and at the same time great finesse. The fact that he also spoke and wrote French perfectly allowed us to communicate in a way that I could not find anywhere else with a Japanese master. He was also an intellectual in the best sense of the word; his knowledge of the East and the West enabled him to get across a certain type of message about the body and freedom of thought, particularly in his books, which is still unequalled today. He met Ueshiba Morihei in 1955 as Nocquet sensei’s translator and began practising in 1959, when he was already forty-five. He was his student for ten years, but as he was already a Seitai practitioner and translated O-sensei’s words for French and American foreigners, he was able to grasp the depth of what he said as well as the importance of posture, mind and above all breath (Ki) in the first part of Aikido, which seems to have been forgotten today – to my great sadness.
How can one find the balance between teaching and personal practice?
Quite simply, I have been practising Aikido for fifty years, every morning at 6.45am for an hour and a half, 365 days a year. Of course, I also practise Katsugen Undo (which Tsuda sensei translated as Regenerative Movement) there too – I could say – every day, if only, at the very least, through the Seitai hot bath7. As far as teaching goes, I have workshops about once a month, whether in Paris, Toulouse, Milan or Rome.
Have there been any changes in your practice or teaching?
Of course! How could it be otherwise? If we practise sincerely, the practice extends to all aspects of our lives. I find it hard to understand people who have given up or go in search of other arts because they find Aikido repetitive. Is life, when fully lived, repetitive? Every moment of my practice provokes changes, evolutions and even upheavals that have led me to question myself and go deeper. This is what gives me joy in my Aikido practice. Even the most difficult moments, and perhaps those more than others, have been vectors of transformation and enrichment.
Your master, Tsuda Itsuo, once gave you a koan, did he not?
Yes, but I find it difficult to tell the exact circumstances. First of all, I must explain that Tsuda sensei knew how to talk to people’s subconscious. Whenever he did this, it was a way of giving them a helping hand, but he hardly ever spoke about it. He said that Noguchi sensei did it routinely because it was part of the Seitai techniques. One day, following a discussion, he said to me ‘Bon courage’, a fairly banal phrase, but the tone he used, obviously relying on the ‘breathing intermission’, overwhelmed me and made me react, giving me an inner strength I had not suspected.
Another time it was more important because it was then that he gave me the koan. As I was telling him about my difficulties with work (how to earn a living for my family and myself, etc.) and how to find a way to continue practising, or even to set up a dojo since I was going to leave Paris for a few years and be 800 kms away, he began by explaining to me that in the Rinzai Zen school (I had just read The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi8 and he knew it) the master gives his disciples koans they have to solve. Suddenly he said to me ‘Impossible’, ‘here you go’! Then he left quickly, leaving me stunned and completely dumbfounded. I have to say that at first I thought it was absurd and ridiculous. He had already given me a direction for my practice some time before, when he specifically chose the calligraphy entitled MU9 as a gift from my Parisian students. But this time I was shocked, I did not understand. Mu seemed to me a real koan, already known, listed, acceptable, but ‘impossible’ did not make sense. Why say that to me? It was over the years that the ‘answer’ became obvious.
What role does Katsugen Undo play in your practice?
Oh, it is of prime importance, but to answer your question, here is an anecdote. We were at a restaurant with Tsuda sensei, when Noguchi Hirochika – Noguchi sensei’s first son – who was sitting next to me suddenly asked me: ‘Katsugen Undo, what does it mean to you?’ My answer was as immediate as it was spontaneous: ‘It is the minimum’, I replied, and I have not changed my opinion since. Tsuda sensei really liked this answer and he used it in some of his lectures during workshops. The ‘minimum’ to maintain balance, to allow our involuntary system to function correctly so that we no longer need to worry about our health, no longer need to be afraid of illness.
Does Aikido without Katsugen Undo make sense to you?
Yes, of course, although it all depends on how you practise. It is just a shame not to take advantage of what can make us independent, of what can awaken our intuition, our attention, our ability to concentrate and free our mind.
You have been contributing to Dragon Magazine for many years now. What do you get out of it?
It allows me to get a message across and at the same time forces me to be as clear as possible about the teaching of my master Tsuda sensei, and therefore about our school. It is also a way of stepping out of the shadows while keeping things simple, without advertising or making a fuss. The fact that I regularly read articles by my contemporaries as well as young teachers brings me a lot and allows me to see and understand the different directions in which Aikido is heading and their reasons for being, even when I do not agree with them.
Is writing important in Budō?
Writing is always important because it is one of the bases of communication – ‘words fly away, but the written letter remains’. However, without real practice there is a risk that it will remain in the realm of ideas and only satisfy the intellect, in which case the target is missed.
Have other masters also left their mark on you?
I am lucky enough to belong to an era when it was possible to meet a large number of first-generation sensei. The 70s were very rich in this respect, and we went from training course to training course, listening attentively to their words and postures to get the best out of what each of them had to offer. I would therefore like to express my gratitude to all those who taught me, my master Tsuda Itsuo sensei, Noro Masamichi sensei, Tamura Nobuyoshi sensei, André Nocquet sensei, as well as those I had the opportunity to meet. I prefer to mention them in alphabetical order so as not to suggest anything about the importance they have had on my practice: Hikitsuchi Michio sensei, Kobayashi Hirokazu sensei, Shirata Rinjiro sensei, Sugano Seiichi sensei, Ueshiba Kisshomaru sensei, as well as – although I have never practised Karate – Kase Taiji sensei, or Mochizuki Hiroo sensei whom I met thanks to Tsuda sensei and who left an indelible mark on me. I cannot forget Rolland Maroteaux sensei, who was my first Aikido teacher and who introduced me to my main mentor: Tsuda Itsuo sensei.
Régis Soavi
Interwiew with Régis Soavi published in April 2023 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 13.
by Régis Soavi
All aikidoka have heard of Ma ai, because it is one of the foundations of our practice. Unfortunately, talking about it and living it are two very different things. As it is known in all martial arts, it is easy to find numerous references to it.You can conceive this idea intellectually, you can write about it and develop a whole discourse about it, but “nothing beats experience”, as my master Tsuda Itsuo used to tell us.1
I will try, therefore, to explain the inexplicable through concrete examples or situations.Read more
by Régis Soavi
‘“Whether they are one or many does not matter, I put them all in my belly,” said O sensei’. With these words1 Tsuda Itsuo sensei once answered2 one of my many questions about the practice, especially how to defend oneself against several partners.
As a young aikidoka, I tried to drink from all available sources, and my references were Nocquet sensei, Tamura sensei and Noro sensei. But of course I also found them in the one I felt closest to: Tsuda sensei. In the early seventies, we were very fond of anecdotes about the martial arts, the great historical masters, and especially O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei. We would also go to buy the “super 8” films that were available in that temple that was the martial arts shop on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (in Paris), fascinated as we were by the prowess of this great master. Although profoundly materialistic, I was not far from believing in something magical, in extraordinary powers granted to some beings more than to others. Tsuda Itsuo brought me back down to earth, because what he was showing us was very simple, but even so, it was still completely incomprehensible. I was already familiar with the techniques he showed us, but he did them with such simplicity and ease that it disturbed me, and only strengthened my desire to continue practising in order to discover the “secrets” that enabled him to do what he did.
When he spoke of breathing he meant the word KI, that was the translation he chose to express this “non-concept” that is so common, and so immediately understandable in Japan, but so difficult to grasp in the West. He explained that, when uniting your breathing with your partner or partners, you can achieve primordial unity. The breath becomes the physical support, the concrete act, that makes it possible to unite with others. It acts physically as a kind of gentle constraint on the partners’ bodies. We all know what I am talking about, it is absolutely no mystery. There are people who are able to make others feel uncomfortable, others who know how to impose themselves, impose their breathing, sometimes leaving the person they are talking to unable to utter a word. In martial arts – and this is particularly evident in the art of swordsmanship –, it is a matter of desynchronising breathing in order to surprise and destabilise the opponent. In many cases, the crucial moment is when the beginning of the opponent’s inhalation coincides with the end of the other’s inhalation, in other words the beginning of the exhalation. It is during this interval between inhalation and exhalation that you strike. This moment, known as “the breathing intermission”, is the ideal time to use your physical strength in a fight and defeat your opponent. In Aikido, however, the same moment is used to enter into the partner’s breath, into this path which is the path of harmony, where the aim is to unify the breaths and reach a common breath.
In the beginning it is easier to practise with only one partner, but it is important not to become fixated on him or her, to remain available for other interventions. This availability is achieved through inner calm, which begins with knowing the techniques well and not panicking. Even so, it will take a few years to become calm in such circumstances, which is why you should not wait to start working in this direction. I would say that, for me, practising with several partners, more than a performance to be executed, represents a pedagogical orientation. Aikido is a whole, you cannot cut it into slices. It is a global approach to teaching, not a school type of teaching validated by grades and exams. Whenever there is an odd number of people in the group, we can take advantage of this to work in threes, but this will not be enough to acquire the right reflexes and the right attitude to adopt. Whenever the group allows it, i. e. when there are not too many differences in level, you can get everyone to practise in groups of three or even four partners.When both partners seize Tori together, and with both hands, it is Tori’s technique and ability to concentrate the power in the hara through breathing that will be decisive; the suppleness of the arms and shoulders will allow the energy, the ki, to circulate to the fingertips, and to spurt out beyond them, causing the partners to fall to the tatami. However, when working with alternating attacks, the greatest difficulty lies not in the execution of the techniques, but rather in Uke’s role.
Too often Uke does not know how to behave and waits for their turn to attack. My teaching also consists of showing how to position oneself, how to find the angle of attack; in this case I play Uke’s role, exactly as in the old koryū. I show how to turn around Tori, how to feel the flaws in their breathing, in their posture, and how Tori can use one partner against the other, I do this slowly so that Tori does not really feel attacked, but rather disturbed in their habits, in their mobility or in their inability to move in harmony. The forms of the attack must be very clear; the aim is not to demonstrate the other person’s weakness but to allow them to feel what is happening around them without having to look or fidget, but rather to develop their sensory capacity. They must not become attached to the constraints imposed by each seizure but, on the contrary, realise that these constraints can be an opportunity to go beyond the situation, even a godsend.
Movement takes on a very special value when there are several people around us. If you watch the traffic on a motorway at rush hour from the top of a bridge overlooking it, you will be amazed at how vehicles brush pass each other, overtake each other, slow down, speed up and even change lanes in a kind of ballet that is not controlled by any higher authority but, in truth, by each individual driver. You might expect to see a lot of accidents, or at least sheet metal crumpling in the space of a few minutes, yet that is not the case – everything goes smoothly. Of course there are accidents, but very few compared to what we can imagine or see from our observatory.
If you practise with several partners with the same level of concentration, attention and respect for each other as you would when driving a vehicle of any kind, because it is our body – and not an extension of our body’s consciousness, as can be the case with a car – it becomes much easier. I will say it again: it is necessary to have a good technique, not to be afraid of what is happening, but to be calm and confident, while being alert and aware of what is happening around us. The difference with the example I have just given is that the partners are trying to touch us, hit us or stop us, unlike the cars, which are avoiding each other. Just like the car, for example – which through anthropotechnics becomes like an extension of our body, whose dimensions we are aware of to the centimetre, even to the millimetre – it is now a question of seizing the opportunity to feel our sphere, no longer as a dream, an idea, a fantasy, an imagination or an esoteric delirium invented out of the blue by some magician or charlatan, but rather as a concrete reality accessible to everyone, since we are already capable of doing this in the car if we pay enough attention.
Then it is a matter of playing with this sensation, this expansion: as soon as the spheres brush against each other, they expand, retract, move constantly, responding to needs without having to resort to the voluntary system. It is the work of the involuntary, the spontaneous, as if the movements were done by themselves, precisely and with ease. It is then that one enters the practice of Non-Doing, the famous non-action, the Chinese Wu-Wei, it is then that what seemed mythical becomes reality. The aim of training with several partners is to lead us towards Non-Doing. This practice can take place in the middle of a crowd, in a department store on sale day, or on a more everyday basis in the metro for city dwellers. The game is to feel how to move, how to get around, how to manage to pass through the empty spaces between people.
O-sensei was a master also in the art of moving through crowds. His uchi deshi used to complain that they could not keep up with him in the middle of the crowd, when they had to take the metro to accompany him to a demonstration or when they had to take the train with him. Although they were young and vigorous, they had enormous difficulty moving through the crowds at the station, whereas he, who was very old and rather frail at the end of his life, was able to weave his way through the crowd with surprising speed.
The art of blending into the crowd, of going unnoticed, can be a natural disposition, or a deformation – sometimes due to trauma – that leads to suffering: to be the person who is unseen, the one who is unnoticed, who becomes invisible. But it can also be an art, and it seems that O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei has excelled here as well. Sometimes it is necessary to melt away, to blend into a crowd for example, to fade into the background to go unnoticed. In this case, our sphere becomes transparent, but at the same time it remains very present, coherent, stable and powerful. It creates an empty space around the person that is difficult to cross, making it difficult to attack or even approach.
I had the opportunity to experience this during demonstrations with my master Tsuda sensei, but I think this was even more striking after the sessions, when we would have coffee or tea together in the dojo just outside the changing rooms where we could manage to clear a small area. There was a big low table and we would all sit around it, more or less huddled together, except for sensei. There was always a space on either side that seemed impassable, and it was not just respect that prevented us from sitting there. There was a very concrete, very real emptiness, solid as a rock. Tsuda sensei never seemed to pay any attention to it; he drank his coffee, chatted, told stories and then, after some half an hour or more, got up and left. But the emptiness remained: even if we sometimes stayed a little longer, no one occupied the empty seat, something remained there. This is what I call the art of creating an impassable space around oneself, an art that can hardly be practised, rather it is a skill that emerges naturally, that emerges when one becomes independent, autonomous, when one has passed the first stage of apprenticeship, or when the need arises.
The problem is not the number of attacks, but our ability to remain calm in all circumstances. Who can claim this, and is it not a myth? If the attacks are conventional or planned in advance, like a kind of ballet, one steps outside the pedagogical role of Aikido. It will be nothing more than the repetition of gestures that can admittedly be refined or made more aesthetic, but without depth. It will be a performance that, however professional, however admirable, will no longer be about Aikido, which, in my opinion, will have lost its value of profoundly changing the human being.
Would you like to hear about the next article?
Article by Régis Soavi published in January 2021 in Self et Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 4.
by Régis Soavi
From September 2023, in the Itsuo Tsuda School dojos in Paris, Toulouse and Milan, in addition to the daily sessions, a weekly Aikido session will be reserved exclusively for women.
Perhaps it is important to make it clear from the beginning that this is not a new version of Aikido, or even a softer Aikido, and certainly not “women’s Aikido”, but “chosen non-mixed Aikido”, conceived as an act of “empowerment”.
In principle, it is not aimed at female practitioners who already know our School and who already come to the other sessions, although they are welcome to be Senpai or to help newcomers discover the practice. The aim is to allow new participants to practise Aikido in a way that respects their diversity, and thus to have a different vision from those spread by the various media, which all too often seek sensationalism, exaggeration and even vulgarity. We have all heard the words of a companion or friend who, after hearing us talk about Aikido, has said “no, no, it is not for me, it is too violent” or “it is a man’s thing”. Today, we need to present Aikido as a realistic way to allow women to rediscover “a self-confidence” that is often altered by the dominant atmosphere in the martial arts, and to assert themselves not as a separate community, but rather as a group that emancipates itself – a group that leaves behind a certain type of social relationship in order to try to find, find again or continue the path, “the way” – that is endlessly to be rediscovered – towards a simpler, more peaceful and thus more real humanity.
Proposing a separate session for women in a martial art as specifically recognised as Aikido is nothing revolutionary or new to us, as women have always been numerous and very often the majority in the Itsuo Tsuda School. But there is the danger that creating an additional session of this type will be so misunderstood by a large proportion of both male and female practitioners, whatever school they come from, that this innovation will be seen as awkward, disruptive, pointless and therefore counterproductive. I am afraid that this misunderstanding will not be limited to those involved in our art, because I am already hearing a lot of criticism, both in form and in content, which would have its own raison d’être if today’s world were really what it claims to be and not what it really is. In my opinion, this approach has become even more necessary in the twenty-first century than in previous centuries, simply because of the ideological modernisation of the mind, which would have us believe in a new, more equal normality when it is, in fact, nothing more than the reification of the old world.
When Barbara Glowczewski writes about the Australian Aborigines, she gives us the reasons for this need for “entre-soi” 1, which, in my opinion, has always existed, even if it has been hindered or disguised so as to persist despite societal disapproval: ‘If this demand for an “entre-soi” exists, it is because historically there has been a disappropriation, a dispossession of what belonged to them, or rather of what signalled their belonging, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of the land, they have developed over centuries, even millennia.’ 2
That says it all.
Perhaps because, since I have been practising martial arts for 60 years and Aikido in particular for 50 years, I have always been interested in the Yin side, which is so important in our art as an intrinsic part of the whole and which is so often belittled – just as the Ura side has often been devalued in favour of the Omote, seemingly so much brighter and therefore wrongly considered stronger, more “valid” in a scale of values that has been distorted for centuries.
Perhaps these aspects represent what I lacked or, rather, what I had difficulty developing naturally in me within this very Yang society, and which the teachings of my master Tsuda Itsuo urged me to seek out, to rediscover within myself. Surely it is also what I imagined I had to suppress or at least moderate in order to survive and try to live as I thought I wanted to, as society suggested. It is also thanks to my personal family life, with all its richness and above all its radicalism in relation to the social world, that I have been able to find my way into this universe, too often ignored by half of humanity, which is the world of the feminine – a world that is neither totally Yin, as some would have us believe at first sight, nor devoid of Yang, quite the contrary.
As for Tsuda sensei’s Aikido, it allowed me to grasp another dimension that went far beyond what I had been able to perceive in my initial approach to the martial arts. Already in 1982, for that matter, Tsuda Itsuo presciently wrote: ‘Aikido, conceived as a sacred movement by Mr Ueshiba, is disappearing to make way for athletic Aikido, a combat sport, more in accordance with the demands of civilised people.’ 3 He had this way of touching our sensitive points often with just a few words, of opening doors in our minds to make us (his students) reflect on the concrete, on everyday life.
Getting off the well-trodden beaten track, ploughed by the ploughshare of conventions and the heavy wagons ballasted with prefabricated ideas is, to be sure, a difficult job but this job is more than necessary.
The time has now come to step out of line, to take advantage of a state of consciousness that has emerged in the West thanks to the feminist movement, thus echoing the demands of previous generations, before new ideologues in the service of power – or rather the powers – confuse everything that is true in this emergence with a supposedly innovative discourse, recycling old worn-out refrains, mixing them when necessary with the ideas in vogue, at best thinking they are doing the right thing, at worst acting as lackeys of the dominant ideologies.
If Aikido is an art that emancipates the individual – and this is its main raison d’être in our School –, then it is necessary, indeed imperative, to open our eyes to the world around us. This emancipation, however, must not be limited. Even if it is sometimes painful to look things in the face, it is always very healthy to do so.
Observing our art being without any heirs and the consequent lack of interest it seems to arouse among teenagers and young adults – and very notoriously in half of humanity (the female world) – has become a matter of fact for a great number of male and female martial arts teachers. The most common response to recruiting new practitioners is to offer demonstrations of effectiveness and comparative trails between different trends, schools or different arts, or even to mix techniques from all over the world in order to create a melting pot that will – so we think – appeal to as many people as possible! What if the problem was not there? What if it was not at all where we are vainly digging and striving for a solution?
An emancipated person is an autonomous, independent, free person: this is the direction of our research. By creating spaces of freedom, places that are different by their very nature, we can make it possible for conditions that allow for the fulfilment of being to be put in place in a truly autonomous way. Dojos are such places. But who knows that?! The fear of finding the same conditions as in everything that surrounds them and “discreetly” oppresses them does not encourage women to enter one of our dojos to see what really happens there, disillusioned as they are by the unsuccessful attempts they have already experienced or by the falsehood of the often soothing, albeit socially acceptable, discourses. It seems to me that we need to create situations along the lines of American affirmative action, which I believe is wrongly translated [in French] as “positive discrimination”, and which was made possible by J. F. Kennedy’s initiative at the beginning of the 1960s. A new situation, a positioning of the dojos that allows women who, although attracted to the martial arts, do not want to face sexism once again (even if it is unintentional and kind). Allowing them to try – because they have their own relationship with their bodies, different from that of men, which for once will not be reproached or accepted in a condescending way – to find pleasure as well as efficiency through physical development in the movements, stability and balance in the harmonisation of breathing without ambiguity or complacency. As there is no competition, they can discover the full potential of their “being”, of the totality of their body and mind in an environment made safe by the non-mixed aspect. The martial side, which is not forgotten either, will allow them to rediscover their abilities and confidence in the face of adversity in a world dominated by masculine power.
Since Louise Michel and her fellow sisters during the Paris Commune, and even before them, since Olympe de Gouge at the dawn of the French Revolution, women have been calling for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (or Sorority) for all without ever finding it, except for a few rare historical moments, and even then in a very relative way.
Now, what if Aikido were this driving lever that could change our society, the instrument that, by freeing itself from habits, preconceived ideas and the accoutrements that have been added to it, could once again become – or at least come closer to – the ideals of its founder Ueshiba Morihei, who saw the world as one big family?
O sensei insisted on the importance of the balance between Yin and Yang, on their alternation within Unity. Tsuda sensei always talked about Ka Mi breathing, which also alternates between breathing in and breathing out within Life. In both examples, they were actually talking about Tao, One. To return to this search for unity rather than separation, it is sometimes necessary to take a step back – as any good sociologist would do – to analyse what has brought Aikido to the impasse it is in today, when in the 1960s and 1970s it was considered to be one of the most important martial arts, both from a philosophical point of view and in terms of its physical aspects, accessible to all and everyone, regardless of age or physical form.
Tsuda sensei, like all of O-sensei’s students, had his own – very special somewhat – way of communicating what he had seen and understood in his master’s teaching. From the beginning, his research was directed towards Non-Doing. Not a young man – he was forty-five when he began practising Aikido with Master Ueshiba –, he discovered something that young Uchi-Deshi could not see or understand, as Tamura sensei explains so well4. In fact, Tsuda sensei did not teach, he passed on to us what he had discovered with the masters he knew, including Ueshiba sensei, Noguchi sensei and Marcel Granet and Marcel Mauss. This transmission made a deep impression on me and has been the guiding principle of my teaching over the years. It has enabled me to speak to both men and women, regardless of gender, age, level, physical ability, difficulty or even disability. It has also been an opportunity for me to improve my teaching and to insist on certain aspects in order to move towards the freedom and autonomy of the individual.
Aikido is about overcoming conflict: ai-nuke, it is about understanding how to deal with problems in society. Tsuda sensei writes: ‘Master Ueshiba’s Aikido, from what I sensed, was completely filled with that spirit of ai-nuke, which he called “non-resistance”. After his death, this spirit disappeared, only the technique remained. Aikido originally meant the path of coordination for ki. Understood in this sense, it is not an art of combat. When coordination is established, the opponent ceases to be the opponent.’ 5. It is up to each and every one of us to take control of this instrument, because it is in our hands that it can become truly effective, not through speeches but by serving as an example of the possibilities within our reach. By opening our bodies, we open our eyes to reality. Now or never, it is up to us teachers to allow our art, meant to be more clear-sighted, to be the art that surpasses the ancient arts, drawing on its origins, which are not to be denied but understood as the – certainly archaic – a bygone era.
By creating the necessary conditions to enable women to reclaim, at least in our School, what has eluded them and been missing for so many centuries, we are creating a context, an environment, an indispensable atmosphere, an essential framework, so that this work of reconquest can be accomplished. In a way, these dedicated sessions are merely a way of creating a situation of rebalancing that should extend to all areas, in the martial arts as well as outside in society, and primarily to every aspect of daily life. Kᴜɴɪɢᴏsʜɪ Takako sensei, one of the few female students at the Kobukan Dojo, recalled these words from O sensei: ‘Whether you practice the tea ceremony or the flower arrangement, there are points in common with Aikido, since the whole world (Tenchi) is made up of movement and calm, light and shadow. If everything moved and changed then everything would be complete chaos, right?’ 6
‘Aikido: an art which emancipates people, an art which emancipates itself’, an article by Régis Soavi published in April 2023 in Self et Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 15.
by Régis Soavi
Shisei is the reflection of the soul as well as the health of the body, both physical and psychological. It is the indisputable detector of a state, permanent or temporary, for those who know how to read the posture in the expression of its manifestation of life. ‘[P]osture is the product of unconscious movement.’ 1
Modern scientific research has shown that, apart from problems of body or mental structure, illness or age, posture is most often the result of education and the efforts we make to adapt to our cultural and social environment. It is therefore through a mixture of the voluntary and the involuntary that we achieve the posture we desire. We must realise that, unless we become rigid, the involuntary, whatever we call it (unconscious, subconscious or autonomous nervous system), always takes precedence over the voluntary. However, it is often difficult for us to accept this, to be fully aware of it. The proof of our lack of understanding is our desire to correct our posture using the voluntary system, in the hope of compensating for a lack, an indisposition, personal suffering or for all sorts of other reasons, each of which has its own value in our eyes.
Our involuntary system is at the service of the life that works within each of us. It is there, among other things, to correct our postural difficulties and to help us maintain as natural a balance as possible so that life can continue within us. And this, sometimes, even at the cost of pain or deformity, if we resist its regulatory impulses and persist in refusing to let go, thus stiffening ourselves by fighting against it. It is therefore important to stimulate this involuntary system through exercises that, instead of endangering it or trying to dominate it, give it the freedom to do its job and bring us back into balance whenever necessary.
Katsugen Undo, introduced in France under the name of Regenerating Movement by Tsuda Itsuo sensei in the early 1970s, was exactly the answer that many of us martial arts practitioners were already looking for at that time to improve our posture. Of course, this was not the only method that existed, and some found in various disciplines or therapies means that allowed them to move forward without harm. But it was obviously not within everyone’s reach, either financially or in terms of the commitment it required in continuity, endurance or time.
This method of activating the involuntary, Katsugen Undo, discovered by Noguchi Haruchika sensei, has been practised by thousands of Japanese people for over half a century. Because of its simplicity, its philosophy and the very low cost of initiation and membership, not only it is an activity that is not only accessible to everyone but, above all, it is of great help to everyone thanks to its ability to solve numerous postural problems by activating the involuntary system. It is an opportunity for anyone who wishes to find their own independent path to health. A large number of researchers, doctors and shiatsuka who had focused their research on the benefits of a flexible, strong and healthy posture, leading individuals towards autonomy and independence in the management of their own health, visited Noguchi sensei to make contact and exchange their points of view and even their techniques, such as Moshe Feldenkrais, whose method is well known in France, or Kishi sensei, who developed his own technique under the name of Sei-ki.
Not so long ago, a mirror was placed in front of the mouth of a dying person in order to determine whether there was still a little life left or whether death had already come. This method, although primitive, gave an indication, albeit a relative one, but it clearly showed the importance attached to breath, to respiration, and thus to this manifestation of the life of the person in front of whom it was placed. Today, the mirror is no longer enough, we test brain activity in the hope of not being mistaken about the person’s ability to return to a normal life, in any case we have applied the imposed protocol, we have put the machines into operation, so we are legally protected. Breath, however, is something very different from lung breathing, because it carries a much greater energy, although few people are aware of this or recognise it.
Breath is the food of the posture, simply because of its internal composition, the visible and invisible elements it carries. Who can believe in a strong posture, in the real power of a person, when you can see that their breathing is blocked? You will not expand your breath with exercises, these will – perhaps – simply free the psyche, calm the spirit, so that the Ki can circulate freely again in this finally tension-free body.
The search for a posture at all costs entails risks for the body, especially when the proposed techniques include exercises designed to stiffen it in order to conform to an idea of the body publicised today by social networks. Images and representations play an increasingly important role in everyday life, to the detriment of a simple reality that is considered unattractive. The postures that emerge from the presence of the Old Masters are less and less attractive, because they are too often misunderstood and seem to be hidden from most people. It is only after many years of practice that the inner eyes open to reveal to us what we might have seen, had we not been blinded by the spectacle of the world.
When Tsuda sensei writes to give us a better understanding of O-sensei Ueshiba, he always does so in a special way, and it seems important to me to find the testimonies of masters who, like him, knew the founder of Aikido:
A good balance, a good Shisei, requires a good, well-positioned centre, but how do you find it, maintain it and keep it? Tsuda sensei recounts3 that during the meditation that O sensei called “Ka-Mi” (meditation practised standing at the beginning of the session), he would say to his students: Ame-tsuchi no hajime “put yourself at the beginning of the Universe”. Today, it has become very difficult to propose such an image, which runs the risk of not being understood, or of being understood only literally, which amounts to a purely mental understanding when this is something completely different. Only experience can lead us to the realisation of this centre. We must go to the heart of our sensibility, be without thought, be truly present “here and now”. Science has broken this simple relationship with our environment, with what we can feel, we no longer even know who we are or where we are.
It seems to me that there was a time when the human being did not ask themselves any more questions about their position in the universe than were necessary for them to live their daily life. Space, planets and constellations were of little importance, except for what directly affected their daily life, agriculture, the weather, the movement of animals and their reproductive cycles. The knowledge of astrology was aimed at the human being and what was around them. Where they were became the centre of their life and therefore of their universe. It was thanks to this that they felt part of a world, “their world, their cosmos”. Science has expanded our concept and perception of the universe, which is all well and good, but the result is a destabilisation of our reality.
The living being felt themselves at the centre of the planet, “their earth’, wherever they were, wherever they lived. Then came the onset of mental disorganisation. Although it was necessary for them to escape the religious oppression of the Middle Ages, it came as a shock, followed by upheavals that were to become increasingly disturbing. First they were taught that the Earth was round like a ball, then that it revolved around an axis, then that it revolved around the Sun and finally that the Sun was at the centre of the solar system. The human being then found themselves off-centre, no longer the centre of a universe but cast outwards. As if that was not enough, they learnt that the solar system was part of a gigantic galaxy, the Milky Way, a white trail that they could see in their sky, that the solar system itself was in competition with other solar systems, black holes and so on. But here again they found that they were not the centre of this galaxy, but rather on one of its outer edges, a sort of horn of stars in a distant periphery. Even more recently, it was discovered that this galaxy is almost nothing compared to the billions of billions of billions of galaxies that are known, or simply guessed at, or conceptualised through the art of mathematics. The human thing has found itself very small, insignificant even in the face of all that surrounds it.
The question remains: how to find, to retrieve your centre in these conditions?
At the beginning of the Aikido session, right after the funakogi undo, the “rowing movement” as O sensei’s young students called it, comes a kind of meditation in movement, but very slow at first, tama-no-hireburi “the vibration of the soul”. It is practised with the hands clasped, in front of the Hara, the left hand on top of the right. The hands are made to vibrate, not excessively, but regularly. One of the peculiarities of this meditation is that it should be done during a single inhalation, which should be very, very slow. This exercise should be repeated three times, each time slightly accelerating the rhythm of the vibration. It was just before this practice that O sensei would make evocations, invoking aloud the names of the Kami that Tsuda sensei passed on to us in the last years of his life. For me, it is like a crack, a small space, a small opening, and at the same time it is a direction, a door and a key that allows me to re-centre myself. Every morning during pratice, it allows me to sneak into what, despite everything, I am aware can be “a risk”. The risk of falling into a parallel mental universe, a kind of schizophrenia or mystical vortex from which it is difficult to escape. However, one need only keep a cool head, physical and mental lucidity, in order to remain present to oneself.
O-Sensei used Shinto rituals as a kind of transposition of his sensations – in the same way as a writer, musician or painter transposes their sensations when composing a work, or introduces us to a world of their own. In Shinto, Ameno-minaka-nushi is considered to be the Kami Centre of the Universe, and is the first evocation. Then it is the turn of Kuni-toko-tachi, Eternal Earth, the materialisation of the world – as a human being, as a practitioner, we take shape, we realise matter, what we are so to speak, almost flesh and blood. Last, Amaterasu-o-mi-kami presents herself to our consciousness, and there is no alternative but to accept her. A feminine principle, Amaterasu is the4 Kami Sun, both life and the stimulus of life, creation. Between each moment of vibration, the vibration continues, nothing stops, the rhythm of the oar movements, funakogi undo, accelerates from slow to medium-fast to very fast. Tsuda Itsuo sensei explained that this rhythm reminded him of the recitation of the Noh which he had studied for almost twenty-five years, and in which there are three different rhythms that follow each other: Jo, Ha and Kyu5. For us Europeans, we can, for example, evoke the musical rhythms of largo, andante, then presto, prestissimo. Tsuda sensei gives us some indications of his own understanding of O-Sensei’s invocations:
Our mental state can only be reflected in our posture, no matter what theory, perhaps, we made our own. Everyone’s posture is influenced by the moment one is experiencing, by the people around us, our immediate or distant surroundings – in fact, by all internal and external circumstances. Our ability to maintain a correct posture, capable of reacting, is nevertheless something that can be worked on and give good results if we do not go against what is good for the body and what we are deep inside ourselves.
‘Mirror’, an article by Régis Soavi published in April 2024 in Self et Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 17.
by Régis Soavi
There are several ways of considering at Jiyūwaza work and each school has its own way of seeing and practising it. As far as the Itsuo Tsuda School is concerned, it has undoubtedly made it one of the basis of its teaching and pedagogy.
Although Tsuda sensei was Japanese, he rarely used technical terms from his mother tongue. An intellectual of great subtlety, writer and philosopher, lecturer and Seitai technician, he attached great importance to being understood, if possible, at all times. Therefore, as he had a perfect command of the French language, during Aikido sessions he spoke only French. For me, who followed all the sensei who came to France at the time, it was quite strange to hear him explain or show a technique without even saying its name in Japanese. On the other hand, some students who only knew his Aikido were used to it and were not at all shocked. Personally, I have maintained the practice of using Japanese names as a means of communication in my teaching, only when it is indispensable, and this has become a tradition in our dojos. That is why in our school, what we call “free movement” at the end of each session, just before doing the kokyu ho, is an exercise that could be called “Jiyūwaza”. It is a kind of light randori, and it is a very important moment, because the spaces between people are reduced by the fact that everyone is moving in all directions at the same time, and everyone acts as they please following their inspiration, depending on their partner, or the angle at which they are in relation to the other. Sometimes, without transition, while continuing the exercise and without anyone going to sit down, I make people change partners. Then, after a few minutes, I say “change” again, and finally, I announce with a smile “general brawl!” and there is a joyful scrum, in which everyone is both Uke and Tori, in turn and at the same time, it is a bit of a mess but in a light way, so that no one gets hurt, and yet it is important that everyone gives their best according to their level. This is an important exercise that I often use in workshops where there are a lot of people, because it shows what we are capable of doing in a chaotic situation. It is essential that the attacks made are not violent, that they do not cause fear, but that they are firm enough to feel the continuity of ki in the gesture. If they are superficial or hesitant, you are wasting your time or deluding yourself about your abilities. It is a difficult learning process that takes years, but it is of great pedagogical importance, which is why we practise “free movement” in pairs every day at the end of each session.
While watching a documentary on evolution that one of my students had sent me during the lockdown, I was astonished, like him, to discover the visual representation of the sphere surrounding a very special fish belonging to the Mormyridae group. Although they have been known since ancient times – curiously, they were often depicted in the frescoes and bas-reliefs that adorned the tombs of the pharaohs – we have just discovered some remarkable qualities about them. They are fish with a bony skeleton, which is already quite rare, and furthermore have unique abilities. They hunt and communicate by means of electrical impulses, emitting small electrical discharges (between 5 and 20 V), extremely short, less than a millisecond, which are repeated at a variable rate without interruption for more than a second. A special organ produces this electric field that surrounds the fish. By converting the electrical impulses into sound and then into lines, we get an image like the one in this article, and we can thus visualise the sphere of these fish, which they can also use as a defence system. Thanks to this field, they can distinguish a predator from a prey or from one of their own kind. When a predator enters this field, it distorts it, and this information is immediately transmitted to the cerebellum. Their cerebellum is considerably larger than the rest of their brain. This ability to generate and analyse a weak electric current is useful for orientation in space, and enables them to locate obstacles and detect prey, even in murky water or in the absence of light.
The human sphere may be no more than a mental representation of people’s unconscious capacities – we will perhaps know in several years or centuries – but that in no way diminishes its reality, as felt by the practitioner of martial arts, or its effectiveness. Ki, that mysterious feeling of our own energy, our observation, the atmosphere, which all peoples have known and passed on in their cultures without being able to give it a precise definition, could well be the answer, although considered unscientific, it has an empirical reality which is attested by the experience of many masters, shamans or mystics. If we look to cognitive sciences for answers, we can find elements that, taken together, give substance to this research.
The cerebellum plays an important role in all vertebrates. In humans, its role is absolutely essential for motor control, which is the ability to make dynamic postural adjustments and direct the body and limbs to perform a precise movement. It is also a determining factor in certain cognitive functions and is moreover involved in attention and the regulation of fear and pleasure responses. It contributes to the coordination and synchronisation of gestures, and to the precision of movements. In case of a simultaneous attack by several people, martial arts – and Aikido in particular – must have prepared the individual, through repetition and scenography in kata or free movements, to provide the necessary responses to get out of such a situation. When it comes to survival, the “organs” that are the cerebellum, the thalamus and the extra-pyramidal motor system must be ready. The learning must have been of a high quality, including surprise, attention and even a kind of anxiety, so that the involuntary system can draw on these experiences to make the right gestures.
Jiyūwaza is like a dance where the involuntary is king. It is not about being the all-powerful leader over subordinates or minions, but rather about entering a subtle world where perception and sensation lead us. Like the fish mentioned above, it is about feeling the movement of the other the moment it unfolds and touches our sphere. Above all, we must not start in advance, with the risk of the attack changing as we go, but rather be in a position, a posture, that elicits a certain type of gesture and therefore response. The technique must not be predictable or foreseeable, but adaptable and adapted to the form that is trying to reach us. A rereading of Sun Tzu offers us some choice quotations, such as: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.’ 1. Knowing, while not knowing what is going to happen: how is this possible? It is through the fusion of sensitivity with our partner that we can discover how to behave, how to act, how to react without prior thinking, without hesitation. Little by little, this kind of exercise creates a kind of trust in which all answers are possible. This is the time to go further, to ask our partner to be more subtle, and also more persistent. Whenever possible, he should reverse roles and present himself as if he were Tori instead of Uke.
When practising with different partners, or when it comes to stepping out of the comfort of everyday practice with people we know, in order to express what some call our potential, various reactions of tension occur, the body, fearing this different encounter, stiffens and becomes rigid. Tsuda Itsuo sensei provides us with an answer, or rather deciphers the situation through a text by Takuan which he quotes, while developing two or three concepts for us Westerners that shed light on the behaviour and resources that we need to find deep within ourselves.
Takuan’s formula is to live the present to the fullest, without being hindered by the fleeting past.’ 2
For each of us, mastery, however relative it may be, is always the result of a lifetime of work and practice, regardless of our abilities, difficulties, or sometimes even our ease. Frédéric Chopin, having just played fourteen preludes and fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach by heart, said to one of his pupils during a private lesson: ‘The final triumph is simplicity. When you have exhausted all the difficulties, and have played an immense quantity of notes, simplicity emerges in all its charm, as the final seal of art. Anyone who expects to achieve it at the outset will never succeed in so doing; you cannot begin at the end.’ 3
Whether you are a musician, a craftsman, a Zen monk or a martial arts sensei, it is the sincerity of your work and the joy of sharing that lead us to simplicity, to Fudōshin, the immutable mind.
Would you like to hear about the next article? Subscribe to the newsletter:
‘Fudōshin: the immutable mind’, an article by Régis Soavi published in October 2020 in Self et Dragon Spécial n° 3.
Photos credits: Bas van Buuren, Quinn Berentson (image extracted from La fabuleuse histoire de l’évolution: le Rift Albertin [The fabulous story of evolution: the Albertine Rift], available online)
by Régis Soavi
When we try to unbalance a person we know instinctively where we must touch, be it physically or psychologically. In most cases, we must reach the person’s centre in order to weaken them or make them vulnerable.
It is hard to reach the centre of the partner’s sphere when the rim is powerful because all actions seem to bounce off the surface or slip as if on a smooth layer, elastic and capable of deforming itself without losing its density, therefore without being penetrated nor reached in any way. Everything depends on the way each of the partners will know how to use their central energy, their ki, and will succeed in doing so, be it in the role of Tori as well as in that of Uke.
Needless to say that other factors just as important, like determination, the urge to win, form an integral part of this sphere and can change the outcome, because ki is not an energy, that is to say, a kind of electricity or magnetism, as Western people are used to consider it nowadays. Ki is the result of multifactorial components which, having taken a certain form, becomes tangible even if it is hardly analysable and nearly unmeasurable except through its effects.
In all cases, one of the core elements of the action carried out will be the posture; not only the physical posture, but its energy balance, its tensions, coagulations, the areas where they are stuck, imprisoned, along with its relations – as well positive as negative – with the rest of the body and the resulting consequences. A science of human behaviour based on physical observation, sensitivity to the flows that go through the body and anatomical knowledge is of prime importance when needed in the practice of quite a lot of occupations. All the same, even for a dilettante or an amateur, such a science can help us understand those around us or get out of trouble when necessary.
One of the goals of that science – Seitai – is to gain a better understanding of human beings in their movement in general and unconscious movement in particular. It is a high-quality instrument which has already provided evidence of its value in Japan as well as in Europe and can be hardly neglected when we practice a martial art. Though it had been taught in France for over a decade by Tsuda sensei through the practice of Katsugen Undo, his conferences and the publication of his books, the ignorance of Seitai originator Noguchi sensei’s work in Western countries was a hindrance to its diffusion.
Today, Seitai calls for more recognition, in order to enable anyone taking interest in it to find elements that will bring them a better understanding, at least theoretical. It is thus important that Seitai becomes known to be better understood and accepted. That is why, from time to time, I modestly give to interested people a few indications, especially on Taihekis, which present – even if in a somewhat caricatural manner – a kind of charting of the human territory as regards ki, its circulation as well as its passageways, bridges, entry and exit points, etc.
One can better understand Taihekis and Seitai by practising Katsugen Undo, which is at the basis of the return to the physical balance and sensitivity that are required to approach this field of knowledge in a practical way. One can also, at least intellectually, go straight to the information source, by reading or rereading the books Tsuda sensei wrote in French – the basic principle being summarised in this “definition” he himself used to give:
The philosophy underlying Seitai is based on the principle that a human being is an indivisible Whole, which distinguishes it clearly from the Western science of the human, founded on an analytical principle.’ 1
Some people have a body with harmonious proportions, large and square shoulders, long legs, they look extremely steady, for many people they represent an example of the ideal human being – woman or man. But if we observe their behaviour just as they move, they tend to lean forward (this is one of the characteristics of type 5 people, who belong to the “pulmonary” or “forwards-backwards” group).
As a consequence, when they have to bend, they propel their behind backward and sometimes press their hands on their knees to compensate. We can easily recognise them because, even motionless, they often cross hands in their back in order to remain balanced; this is not a habit, it is a need for rebalancing. This is clearly the sign of a pelvis which lacks balance and solidity, the centre, the Hara remains vulnerable despite all the efforts. During an encounter or a training, it is yet enough, if we have taken the time to observe properly, to take advantage of the moment when the partner is moving – and thus leaning forward – to enter under the third point of the belly, about two fingers under the navel, and suck them or let them slide above us, regardless of the chosen technique.
This sounds simple when we read it but, though this is only one aspect of things, discovering and understanding postures are probably among the elements that have the greatest importance. At the beginning, during the learning phase of martial arts, some knowledge is needed to be able to perform the techniques on a concrete level; nevertheless it is through a training based on sensation and breathing that we acquire the ability to seize the right moment and be “in it”. Moreover, the work of observing partners, if we know about postures, can only be good for us; it can be a decisive plus in the case of a competition or if we have to determine whether there is real danger or merely intimidation.
Sumotoris, with their corpulence, their very low posture, the way they move, seem to be ideal examples of stability and balance, at least physically. Though their training emphasises certain tendencies they already have and reinforces their abilities in the direction of solidity, it might deform others for the sake of prospective success.
Anyway, from the point of view of Taihekis, they cannot escape their basic tendency. Of course there are Sumotoris of all types, but some tendencies, some Taihekis are more represented than others. In the case of Sumotoris belonging to the vertical2 groups, there are few of type 1 because this kind of deformation quickly causes their elimination. The reason is that from their very early age they turn out to be quite incompetent, even when they are strong physically they are very easily destabilised. The main cause of this lies in the way they approach action. They always follow an idea of a preconceived fight or they follow their perception of the fight as it progresses, and thus they are always late and surprised by the action of their opponent.
On the other hand, type 2 sumotoris, when they have observed their opponents’ most recent fights properly, when they are well guided, can define a strategy which, if not disturbed by imponderables, can lead them to victory. They have an excellent knowledge of physiology and body anatomy as well motionless as in motion, which enables them when they want to unbalance their opponent to do it with best chance of success, because the ground has been well prepared at least theoretically. They also rely on the logic and thinking stemming from the previous fights because this is what guides them – rarely sensation or intuition. Once they have become Yokozunas, they retire and dedicate themselves to writing books, articles about their life, their training, or else use their reputation in order to support righteous deeds, etc.
For some people, unbalancing means winning, by charging and then taking advantage thanks to a direct frontal attack. It seems to be the best solution if not the only possibility occurring to their mind, and in no case can they resist it. These persons always ready to fight, to react, are generally very physical in their reactions. When they react with attacks or psychological replies, for instance little insidious sentences, one can easily see that they twist, their pelvis no longer being in the same direction than the central line of their face. One can also notice that, in order to prepare for immediate action, their body shows a torsion that strengthens their fulcrums. This torsion, when permanent, is an obstacle to free movement for the person who has it and must bear it. If one fails to normalise it, a way out could be managing to use it, say, in a work or an activity that requires a good sense of competition. The people with this type of deformation suffer the consequences in spite of themselves. They show an almost permanent tension and therefore a lot of difficulties to relax and take their time. This leads to difficult relationships with others because they eternally feel in competition.
Having a knowledge of Seitai and more precisely of Taihekis enables us to understand this type of behavioural tendencies better. It makes it possible to know when and how to take action without falling into the trap of rivalry that these people try to set up around themselves in order to prepare for defence and consequently to attack. Individuals of this kind belong to the “twisted” group and everything is based on their having unconsciously a sensation of great weakness that they will never admit. Basically they feel in danger permanently, that is why they consider the best defence to be immediate attack, because it surprises the opponent and is meant to leave no occasion for reply.
Sometimes, a little sentence or a few well-placed words can change a situation – for better or for worse. If one can breathe deeply and concentrate ki in the lower abdomen, by taking action at the right moment one can bring down a whole building and transform what seemed to be an impregnable fortress into a funfair cardboard-paste decor. Abdominal respiration is part of the secrets available to all practitioners provided they direct their attention to it and keep training in that direction. According to Seitai, people whose energy naturally concentrates in the lower part of the body, at the risk of coagulating in absence of normalisation, are classified either in so-called “twisted” group (mainly3 type 7) or in the “pelvic” group.
I would like to elaborate on those within this group (type 9 people4) who have a tendency to close the pelvis – namely the area at the level of the iliac bones – because they represent a tendency which, for Tsuda sensei, stands at the origin of humanity. In these historically very distant times, survival from a physical perspective was paramount but sensitivity as well as intuition were also indispensable qualities. These qualities, precisely, enable type 9 people to be one step ahead of others in case of danger because their intuition makes them feel whether they should answer an act of threat or if it is merely a provocation, moreover they know whether this provocation will be followed by an action or if it will deflate at the slightest breeze.
‘Intuition cannot be replaced by either knowledge or intelligence. Intuition does not generalize. In many cases, it is knowledge and intelligence which distort intuition.’ 5
A person of this type being present in a human group never leaves anyone indifferent, even if one is unable to know or perceive easily why that is so. These persons behave in a way that sometimes surprises most people, either because of their rigidity – for they can very easily become dig in their heels – or because of their concentration power which is most unusual in our world where dispersion and superficiality are the norm.
‘When they concentrate, they do not concentrate just a part of their physical or mental functions. They concentrate their whole being.’ 6
Their concentration can be perceived through the intensity of their gaze, which is already extremely destabilising in itself; we need only see again the few movies that we know about O-sensei – who belonged himself to type 9 – to be persuaded.
The posture of Sumotoris when about to fight is highly suitable for a type 9 person since ‘[t]here is a big difference whether the pelvis is open or closed with the persons of this type. They can squat right down without raising their heels off the ground, and can stay in this position for a long time: it is their position of relaxation. When they stand up, the weight shifts from the outer edges of the feet to the root of the big toes. This is their position of tension.’ 7
Aikido leads us to stability and balance. Although by means of different exercises, Seitai also appears as a way following the same direction. The combination of both – Aikido as a martial art and Seitai through Katsugen Undo as proposed by Tsuda sensei – has allowed our School to continue in this direction, back to simple yet essential sensitivity, in a world being more about insensitivity and stiffening for sake of protectiveness. Only by recovering our intuition and getting our receptivity active again can we be actors of our life.
Would you like to hear about the next article? Subscribe to the newsletter:
‘To unbalance is to destabilse’, an article by Régis Soavi published in October 2022 in Self et Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 11.
Crédits photos : Bas van Buuren, Yann Allegret, Paul Bernas
