Tag Archives: Manon Soavi

Without Fixed Reference, A School Without Grades

21 December 2025 name

Tsuda Itsuo sensei said, ‘There is no black belt in mental emptiness’¹, emphasising that what is essential cannot be measured or compared. Following this line of thinking, Régis Soavi sensei made the radical choice in the 1980s to establish a school without grades. This choice stands out in our competition-based society.

An infinite horizon

Disclaimer: this article is in no way intended to claim that this choice is the best one, or to denigrate grades or anything else. It is simply that the riai of our school (the consistency of its principles²) follows this path. This article describes another possibility, without seeking to evaluate one system over another, but rather in a spirit of discovering another culture.

The choice not to have grades of any kind is something that sometimes surprises or disappoints people. Indeed, some people feel the need to measure their progress and have milestones, which is understandable given the context in which we live. But this particular feature is also an approach that liberates and relieves many people! Here at least, in our School’s dōjōs, there is no measurement, no comparison, no hierarchy.

In a world where everything is quantified: the vitamins we swallow, our productivity, our hours of sleep, even the speed at which our planet is dying, everything is measured and calculated. A place without grades is a bit like moving from the horizon of a city, made up of landmarks, neighbourhoods and buildings, to the horizon of the ocean. It is liberating and slightly exhilarating.

sans grade pliage du hakama — Leaving time and space for other possibilities

Without fixed reference

Tsuda sensei wrote that with children we are ‘without fixed reference’³, meaning that we cannot refer to external, objective data: at this age, this height, this ability, this need. Yet this is what most approaches to childcare suggest! It is the spirit of systematisation. For Tsuda sensei, it was a question of sharpening one’s ability to pay attention, awakening one’s intuition and feeling the baby’s needs through the fusion of sensitivity. A sensitive dialogue, unique because it is different for each person and each moment, with our intuitions being verified through the baby’s reactions. The nature of the relationship then shifts from the pursuit of performance (raising a baby or taking a grade) to the quality of the relationship, of the ever-changing present moment. A quality that cannot be evaluated externally, as it must always be renewed.

Similarly, a school without grades does not provide fixed objective benchmarks, this technique, this speed, this precision or anything else. Since we start with the individual and everyone is different, no one can be compared to another. In our style of Aikidō, each person develops, through a common technical form, their own specific style, which not only suits them, but also fits in with the cycles of life, the ages and the states of each individual.

It is in our relationships with others that we can measure how far we have come, both through our own observation and through feedback from our partners and sensei. Or by going to see other teachers during occasional courses. Because without an external judge, there is no punishment and, above all, no reward! Of course, this does not mean imagining ourselves to be brilliant and all-powerful! In that case, our partners and sensei will be sure to bring us back down to earth. It is about rediscovering the joy of doing things for their own sake. It is also about rediscovering time, a time that is not linear, because our “progress” is not a straight line with an end point. Rather, it is a circular evolution: ‘Eastern thought does not proceed by demonstration, it is not oriented towards a final and definitive meaning, but moves in circles of successive experiments so that understanding springs from a return to the very centre of the question.’⁴

It is obviously possible to combine a grading system with the idea of an endless path; the great masters have always done so, but in our school we decided to establish this paradigm from the outset.

sans grade hakama — A simple act, always renewed

The right moment

Once this model has been discarded, we find ourselves in a situation where we start without a hakama, and we then have the opportunity to discover the right moment to put on this much-vaunted hakama. In the philosophy of Non-doing, it is a question of rediscovering the right action, one that is neither calculated nor determined by our “small intelligence”, the calculating will that clings to small goals, but by the “great intelligence” that expresses itself if we really listen to it⁵.

Some people put on the hakama after a year of practice and others after ten years. In fact, it does not matter except to themselves and their ability to sense the right moment. But for many, grasping that moment is very difficult. Many miss this opportunity to rediscover the meaning of the right moment through wearing the hakama. Whether through excessive levity, fear, anxiety, pretension, misunderstanding, or a thousand other reasons. We are faced with ourselves.

It is also an opportunity to discover the difference between choice and decision! Tsuda sensei attached immense importance to decision-making, as he puts it:

‘A decision can be made very quickly depending on circumstances, but it can also take a long time to mature.

Most of the time, we confuse the act of deciding with that of selecting. But they are two completely different things.

Selection involves the comparison of several possibilities and the choice one makes among them. It is an act of intelligence.’⁶

‘It is not the same with the kind of decision that determines our direction in life. That kind of decision is not an act of intelligence but an act of instinct.’⁷

‘Real decisiveness is that which responds to inner tension which has accumulated to the maximum degree. Without inner tension, no decision can be made. The more courage, sacrifice of self-esteem and material benefits a decision requires, the more consequential it is.’⁸

By offering practitioners the right conditions to sense the right moment and make a genuine decision, we use the hakama as a tool to guide them along this path to autonomy: deciding for themselves. This may seem trivial, but for many it is not easy and the right moment will be missed.

Accompanying each person on this path is also a rich learning experience for the more experienced, who must be careful to act in a spirit of Non-doing: sometimes letting things mature, often increasing internal pressure, rarely agreeing! However, no course of action can be determined in advance; here too, one goes ‘without fixed reference’, but when the action is right, it is obvious. For this action to arise, one must empty one’s mind and have no preconceived ideas. This support can only be provided if, and only if, the person considering wearing the hakama is “thirsty” for this transmission. It is their availability and their positioning that determines whether or not this is possible.

Giving, receiving, returning

The practitioners’ journey begins even before they put on their hakama, with the act of folding that of a senior practitioner. Here again, the absence of grades can be a little disorienting at first. Our approach is always that the act should have meaning in itself, not out of respect for tradition. However, we do not view each other with forced egalitarianism. Many things are taken into consideration: age, years of practice, but also aptitude or inner attitude. Sometimes a person will have an aptitude or affinity for a weapon or a certain type of technique, or may simply be able to help someone older than them through deeper breathing. Ultimately, it depends on many factors.

So why fold the hakama? To show gratitude? Yes and no. Folding the hakama is not simply a direct expression of gratitude for something. Sometimes it can be, of course, but there is much more to it than that, such as a quality of relationship. This relationship can be likened to what anthropologists have called the ‘gift economy’.

Highlighted by Marcel Mauss and Bronisław Malinowski in the early 20^th century⁹, it can be said that this system is based on the triple necessity of: giving, receiving and returning. Unlike the market economy (of which bartering is a part), the gift economy does not expect reciprocity. It implies that person A offers wealth to person B, without person B having to give anything in return or feel indebted to A. On the other hand, it is an act that exists within a context (family, culture, society) – in our case, the dōjō and practice. The gift economy therefore involves giving, receiving and returning within the context, but not necessarily to the same person, nor with the same value, nor at the same time. What matters is that the circulation of wealth continues, that there is no stagnation or accumulation.

In our case, the wealth is a teaching or an attitude, a moment of practice, etc. The person who has received it will continue to circulate wealth by giving it to others. They can also fold the hakama, but if we understand the meaning of the gift economy, we understand that folding the hakama is not a way of repaying what the other person has given us. We are not even, because folding the hakama is not giving back but giving in turn. Folding the hakama also implies that the senior person receives! For the person to whom the hakama is folded, it is also a gift that “obliges” them, in return, to continue returning, and so on. This is why it should not be systematic, otherwise we lose the meaning of the act, the meaning of giving, receiving and repaying.

This cannot be imposed, otherwise we fall back into the hierarchical binary system. That is why we leave everyone free to follow their own path, to understand in the short or long term, because ‘[t]rue morality arises from within’, as Tsuda sensei said¹⁰, echoing anarchist Kropotkin on this internal wisdom of living beings. But since children are taught from childhood to respect people according to the hierarchy and authority they exercise, we completely lose the sense of simple and natural respect. This respect that emerges when we are respected. We let time and practice work so that the obligation imposed by our habits and education falls away, and respect finally emerges.

Other possible horizons

Recently, researcher Heide Göttner-Abendroth theorised in her work on matriarchal societies that these are gift economies (useful clarification: matriarchal societies are not the opposite of patriarchy, they are egalitarian, matrilineal societies where women, and particularly mothers, are at the centre of the clan, in an acratic position, i. e. without power).

Göttner-Abendroth even explains that ‘[t]he economic principles of matriarchal societies are inextricabl[y] interwoven with spiritual principles.’¹¹ ‘The guiding image for the economy is Mother Earth herself, and as with earth, sharing and giving away out of an abundance are its supreme values.’¹²

Motherhood being, obviously, the gift of life without expectation of return, these societies consider motherhood to be a cardinal value, not the fact of having biological children or not, but the ability to give and the state of mind that this implies. In these societies, we can even talk about social motherhood practised by both men and women, regardless of whether or not they have biological children.

It is therefore an attitude to life, a position of respect and care, obviously directly linked to the gift of life on this planet, the Earth. Today, society is only just beginning to become aware of the interconnectedness of all living things and the inextricable links between humans and other forms of life. But while science has progressed, society’s mindset is evolving very slowly and our values are still predation and competition for resources considered inert – in short, patriarchal capitalism.

What is the connection between our small Aikidō school and Katsugen Undō and these major global issues? What is the connection between a hakama and a society practising the gift economy? I would say that, on our own scale, we are helping to create space-times where other values prevail. Without travelling to the other side of the world, we can voluntarily take a step back from comparison and focus on the concrete experience of ki, thus rediscovering the feeling of life in all things that guided our ancestors¹³. Feeling begins with knowing how to feel oneself! Independently of the projections, judgements and ideas we have about ourselves. The hakama, folding it and putting it on, can, if we are able to grasp it, be an opportunity to experience another paradigm for ourselves.

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in July 2023 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 14.

Notes

1
[He also wrote in his first book The Non-Doing: ‘The important point […] is not the technical details so much as the fact of emptying one’s mind. […] Can one speak about a qualified doctor in the science of empty-mindedness or about a black belt in the art of complete self-abandonment?’ (Chap. XI, 2023, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 119 & 120)]
2
[ri-ai: 理合(い)]
3
[see the last three chapters (XVIII, XIX & X) of Even if I do not think, I am, 2020, Yume Editions (Paris)]
4
Gu Meisheng, Le chemin du souffle [The Way of the Breath], 2017, pub. Les Éditions du Relié (Paris)
5
[for reference on small/great intelligence by Zhuang Zi or O-sensei Ueshiba, see Régis Soavi, Sara Rossetti, Manon Soavi, Itsuo Tsuda – Calligraphies de printemps, [Itsuo Tsuda – Spring Calligraphies], Yume Editions, 2017, pp. 257–9]
6
Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. VI, 2021, Yume Editions, p. 46
7
ibid., p. 47
8
ibid., p. 49
9
[see e. g. Mauss’s essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies]
10
[see The Way of the Gods (op. cit.), Chap. X, p. 76]
11
Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies — Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe, Glossary, ‘Matriarchal economy’, 2012, pub. Peter Lang (New York), p. 466
12
ibid., Chap. 14, ‘14.7 Understanding the structure of matriarchal societies (continuation)’, p. 322
13
[see Noguchi Hiroyuki, The Idea of the Body in Japanese Culture and its Dismantlement, ‘2. Perceiving Life in All Things’]

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External Things are Neither Certain Nor Necessary

19 December 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

Max Stirner wrote in 1844: ‘there are […] intellectual vagabonds to whom the ancestral home of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to content themselves with the limited space anymore ; instead of staying within the bounds of a moderate way of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what grants consolation and reassurance to thousands, they leap over all boundaries of tradition and run wild with their impudent criticism and untamed skepticism’.¹

Tsuda Itsuo sensei is known for his ten books, sometimes also for his calligraphy imbued with Chan philosophy (Zen in Japanese), or for introducing Seitai to Europe. His school of thought, ‘the School of Respiration’², although relatively modest, has had a lasting impact on the thousands of people who have been to his dojos or read his books. However, one should not imagine that his path to wisdom was a long, quiet river. On the contrary, it was his rejection of the certainties of the past that pushed him towards another path. Tsuda sensei was undoubtedly an ‘intellectual vagabon[d] to whom the ancestral home of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive’, as Stirner puts it.

When he was born in 1914, his father was a wealthy Japanese industrialist who had settled in Korea, then under Japanese rule. It is not possible to know exactly what motivated Tsuda Itsuo’s rebellion against his father and his departure at the age of sixteen. Nevertheless, we know that there was the way his father behaved after the death of his mother and older sister³. There was something unacceptable to the young man that Tsuda Itsuo was at the time, but his father expected him to resign himself, to endure and to remain silent. Added to this suffering was his encounter with a young Korean girl (whom he would eventually marry fourteen years later, when he found her again during the Second World War). This young girl, with whom he fell in love, allowed him to witness some of the immense suffering of the Korean people, who were then being ruled with extreme violence by Japan.

At sixteen, having completely broken with his father, he renounced his birthright and left, alone, with no certainty except that it would be unbearable for him to continue on the path that had been laid out for him. So for four years he roamed, as a vagabond, through China and Manchuria, spending two years in Shanghai. He found the city to be extraordinarily cosmopolitan, with French and British concessions on one side and a strong presence of Korean, Japanese and Chinese anarchist movements on the other.

certitude intérieure incertitude extérieur — Accepting external uncertainty

It seems that Tsuda Itsuo did not like certainties, because at the age of twenty he left for Paris, knowing only a few words of French, in search of freedom of thought. When he arrived in 1934, he found himself in the midst of the Popular Front movements, strikes and mass demonstrations of the time. It was a movement of a force that is difficult for us to imagine today, and one that was crushed by the war, wiping out the revolutionary working-class youth of the time. Little by little, Tsuda Itsuo settled in and began studying at the Sorbonne with Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet. He was in contact with the intellectual circles of Montparnasse, and I believe I can say that he planned to stay in Paris, at least for a while. But in 1940, the world was plunged into war and he was conscripted by Japan. To his great despair, he had to embark for a country that he ultimately knew nothing about.

What awaited him in Japan was the chaos of war, nationalism and total uncertainty about the future. Perhaps extreme situations reveal those who collapse and those who have the strength to continue on their path. I do not know if Tsuda sensei had any certainties, but the fact is that he continued on his path despite the war. His interest in Sinology and ethnology remained undiminished; on the contrary, he published translations and articles. After the war, his life seemed to “stabilise”. Married and employed (he worked for Air France as an interpreter), he nevertheless continued to explore tirelessly. His encounter with Nō, then with Seitai and its founder Noguchi Haruchika (with whom he studied for twenty years), and finally with O-sensei Ueshiba and Aikidō were the decisive factors in the development of his philosophy: Non-doing and the notion of Ki.

certitudes — _External things are neither certain nor necessary_, calligraphy by Tsuda Itsuo

Cultivating uncertainty

One might think that at this point, certainties would set in, as is often the case with people of a certain age after a tumultuous youth. But this was not the case. At the age of fifty-six, he returned to France with no promise or guarantee, as he himself wrote⁴. Living frugally once again, in a maid’s room near the Gare du Nord in Paris, he began to write, directly in French. He also began teaching Aikidō and spreading Katsugen undō (the gymnastics of the involuntary in Seitai). At the age of sixty-eight, in his eighth book, he wrote:

‘From the current point of view, I am a reckless man. I do not take precautions against microbes, viruses, pollution, diseases. I am neither protected nor armed against dangers. I do what I like to do, without bothering anyone.

It is not my place to impose my ideas, saying, “Do what I say, not what I do”.

Such a formula belongs to the great and powerful, not to me. My formula is: “I live, I go, I do.”

When I do something, it is not to conform to a moral, social or political purpose. I do what I feel inside, what I can do without regret. I’m not looking for an outside utopia. I seek inner, unconditional satisfaction.

It is in calm and deep breathing that I find my true satisfaction, in spite of the many annoyances of modern life. I have overcome difficulties, and will do so for as long as I live. This is how I find the pleasure of living.’⁵

Tsuda Itsuo also left us valuable teachings through his calligraphies. On the subject of uncertainty, we find this sentence from Chuang Tzu, which he wrote in calligraphy: ‘External things are neither certain nor necessary’⁶. External things come and go, misfortune and happiness, nothing is predictable and nothing is in itself misfortune or happiness. However, it is difficult to truly accept this uncertainty of external things, as we have seen for ourselves during the two years of crisis we have just experienced. Months of instability and crisis which, without being the equivalent of war, have worn us down and exhausted us. We have been able to gauge, on our own scale, how difficult it is to carry on, and the effects are still being felt.

Inner strength

The flaw in Western education is that it tends to make us focus solely on the voluntary aspect of the individual. So, to compensate for this weakness, human beings display their certainties on the outside while remaining very uncertain of themselves on the inside.

Tsuda sensei’s teaching redirects our attention to the unsuspected capacities of the involuntary⁷. Listening to our inner needs as they express themselves and give us directions to follow for ourselves, while remaining unpredictable and open to the outside world, since nothing is certain or necessary. It means trusting in human adaptability.

Having never been to school, I had to deal with a procession of people who projected their own concerns onto our choices and who were convinced that my parents were ruining my future prospects. However, one thing is certain: the future is always uncertain (and sometimes does not even exist). So I lived my childhood in the present moment rather than being dictated to by a non-existent future. In the joy and confidence of doing things for themselves, in the moment when interest was present. My parents had moments of doubt, of course, but they were convinced that living like their elders was simply not living but dying slowly. They preferred to choose uncertainty by taking a different path. Because the inner certainty that the most important thing was to live in the present never left them. Not going to school was an incredible opportunity to learn to rely on one’s own resources to face the inevitable difficulties of life.

Practising an art such as Aikidō means, at least on the tatami mats, having to rely on this spontaneity because, regardless of technical training, it is impossible to predict everything. Bodies are often more or less paralysed from within and bodily activity is frozen (bodily activity understood according to J. F. Billeter⁸: ‘the totality of energies and unconscious activity that nourish and sustain conscious action’). But then adaptation and integration no longer take place. Thus, an art that sets the body’ resources in motion again, that reintroduces play, is truly beneficial, even though it is not a therapy. Life resumes through the body.

This is why Aikidō must not become a sterile technical catalogue, with predictable attacks and standard responses. The element of uncertainty must be maintained using various teaching methods such as jiyū waza or working with multiple attackers, for example. When I began studying the jūjutsu techniques of Bushūden Kiraku ryū, what was formative was stepping outside the framework of Aikidō and rediscovering certain techniques that were very similar to Aikidō, but in a different way; this broke the mould and allowed me to continue Aikidō with an internal sense of the possibilities of atemi, kubi shime, kaeshi waza, etc. Without necessarily applying these elements to every technique, the simple fact of having felt them in my body allowed me to position myself differently.

Manon Soavi — Cultivating inner tranquillity

Creativity

Aikidō obviously trains us to sense situations where we need to leave or act before it is too late. This is, of course, a basis. But it has more to do with intuition and the individual’s potential for creativity, as expressed by researcher Arno Stern, than with control: ‘To create is to acquire freedom from the grip of consuming society. When I speak of freedom, I do not use the word lightly; it is both the condition and the goal of education that engenders creative action. Creativity does not mean the production of works. It is an attitude towards life, an ability to master any given aspect of existence.’⁹

There are many examples in martial arts. Because what makes an art effective is not the range of techniques, but first and foremost the human being and their ability to react. There are, of course, many stories and tales of martial arts that illustrate this, but I would like to conclude this discussion by telling you a story that places Aikidō in a reality where there is no certainty about the outcome (the external) but there is clear evidence of the need to face up to it (the internal). It is recounted by the daughter of Aikidō pioneer, New York Aikikai founder and O-sensei direct student Virginia Mayhew:

‘When I was seven my mom and I moved to southern California and lived in a old motel in downtown Los Angeles. Late one night, when we were returning to our room an angry man wielding a bat blocked our path and demanded our money. My mom tried to reason with him and offered to share her money. That just seemed to make him angrier and he came at my mom swinging his bat menacingly above him. I remember being frightened the minute my mom moved towards him. I didn’t understand irimi then so it didn’t make sense to me why she would move towards a man who was about to hit her with a bat. The actual confrontation lasted only a matter of seconds. The bat never connected with my mom because all of a sudden it was in her hands and then she had the guy’s wrist in a painful wrist lock. She leaned down close to him and said, “I am not going to hurt you but you should know that it is unwise to attack a woman especially when her child is present. When I let you go you’ll leave peacefully but we will be keeping your bat.” When she finally did let go of his wrist her would-be attacker couldn’t flee fast enough.’¹⁰

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in January 2023 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 12.

Notes

1
Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property, ‘1. Humanity’, ‘1.3. The Free’, ‘1.3.1 Political Liberalism’, transl. & intr. by Wolfi Landstreicher, 2017, pub. Underworld Amusements (Baltimore), pp. 129–30
2
[see e. g. Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. I, 2023, Yume Editions (Paris)]
3
[see e. g. The Dialogue of Silence, Chap. XVI, p. 135–6 (mother), and Even if I do not think, I am, Chap. IV, p. 34–5 (sister), pub. Yume Editions (resp. 2018 & 2020)]
4
[see the beginning of the Foreword of his first book The Non-Doing (op. cit.): ‘In 1970, at the age of fifty-six, I abandoned my job and launched myself into an adventure which showed no promise or guarantee.’]
5
Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. III (end), 2021, Yume Editions, pp. 29–30]
6
Régis Soavi, Sara Rossetti, Manon Soavi, Itsuo Tsuda – Calligraphies de printemps, [Itsuo Tsuda – Spring Calligraphies], Yume Editions (Paris), 2017, p. 354
7
[see e. g. the last words of the Foreword to his 7^th book Even if I do not think, I am (op. cit.): ‘As for me, I try to direct your attention to the unsuspected wealth of our unconscious being.’]
8
see the works of sinologist Jean François Billeter on Chuang Tzu or his book Un paradigme [A Paradigm], published in 2012 by Allia (Paris)
9
Arno Stern, L’Expression — ou l’Homo-vulcanus, 1973, pub Delachaux & Niestlé (Paris)
10
Shankari Patel, ‘Irimi’, 13 April 2014, on Feminist Aikidoka blog

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The Art of Dissatisfaction

18 December 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

Ikebana master Mei Ando Keiko recounts how, as a child, she would watch her grandmother practising her art:

‘I saw her take two leaves from the plant and place them in front of the tokonoma, on a perfectly ironed white cloth where a small number of other plants were already arranged. Then she went to the cupboard and fetched a dark-coloured, rustic bowl. Sitting in the Japanese style on the tatami-covered floor, she placed a kenzan in it and poured water from a small watering can. With great calm, she then took a branch and began to observe it carefully, her hands moving slowly and lovingly. When it came time to cut the branch to adjust its length or remove leaves, she did so without hesitation.

So as not to disturb her, I sat just behind her and watched her carefully handling these simple and modest materials. In the end, she had once again created an ikebana that captured the essence of things and was full of charm, and a deep sigh of admiration rose from within me.

[…]

One day I exclaimed, “I wish I could arrange flowers as well as you do in your compositions!” and she replied simply, “I too would like to be able to make my Ikebana a little better!” This statement struck me because, until then, I had thought that my grandmother, having reached the pinnacle of the Way, always felt satisfied with her compositions. I understood, however, that this response did not stem from false modesty and did not contain any judgement about her own abilities. It was a sincere expression of the feeling of something unfinished that only she, in her heart, could know.

[…] With these simple words, my grandmother had unwittingly revealed to me the full depth and beauty [of the Way].’¹

This feeling of something unfinished or a dissatisfaction, which is a sting of a sort, is very typical of Japanese masters in their arts. But I think this feeling is very far from the frustration and deep dissatisfaction that many people experience in our time. In our dōjōs, in our practices, we are sometimes confronted with the difficulty of putting into perspective Ways that require perseverance and continuity, while we increasingly seek quick satisfaction. The very notion of effort is no longer very fashionable, or if there is effort, there must be results, a return on that effort. The problem is that the search for a result, for a predetermined goal, conditions the action and therefore the result.

I observe two trends that seem quite widespread: one where we see everything as bleak, with no future and no hope, which is a depressive state. The other where we try to focus on what brings us satisfaction and pleasure. It is quite obvious that depressive states or suicidal thoughts are not very liveable conditions for humans, but I would like to question the other stance here: the search for a state of satisfaction. And, of course, to question the position of budo and what it can lead us to understand. I am not seeking to oppose two positions, but to explore a question. Are we more fulfilled because we are satisfied? Or rather, what kind of satisfaction are we talking about?

The pursuit of satisfaction has gained momentum in recent years; some people keep gratitude journals where they write down the positive things that have happened in their day. Others change jobs or cities to be in an environment more in line with their visions and values. Last, well-being and fulfilment are constant concerns for many people. Some point to the paradox of a humanity that has never known such a high level of material well-being and yet continues to feel uncomfortable in its own skin. We are surrounded by material comforts, and yet we are still dissatisfied. Are we like spoilt children?

What is more, we know that satisfying all our desires would not even give us real, deep satisfaction. In the end, we are a bit like what Johnny Hallyday sang in the song L’Envie: ‘I was given too much, long before desire. I forgot my dreams and my thanks. All those things that had value. That make us want to live and desire.’

Long ago, ancient tales warned us against forgetting, against the dissolution of the Self that comes with the fulfilment of all desires. Like those tales where we enter an inn and never come out, caught up in a life of pleasure and immediate satisfaction that sometimes even leads us to death. Does this mean that we must follow an austere moral code or a life of labour? Do those who have less than us not aspire to this comfort? Should we stay in a job that does not suit us, that bores us? Or stay close to toxic people? A priori, no, of course not; so should we follow our dreams?

Dissatisfaction, a powerful driving force

Our actions have unconscious motivations that we justify after the fact, but what triggers us to act is indefinable. We enjoy playing the piano, flower arranging, cooking or martial arts, but why, all things considered, we do not know. Practising these arts gives us both deep satisfaction and dissatisfaction. That is why we keep coming back to them again and again.

In Japanese culture, there is an interesting concept that cultivates this slight dissatisfaction as a driving force. For example, in Seitai, parents are advised not to feed their babies 100%. Tsuda Itsuo talks about “the spoon less”. If parents are attentive and focused, they can stop feeding the baby just before they are “too full”. Just one spoonful less. Of course, if the baby cries, it means they are still hungry and need to be fed, but when the pace of eating slows down, if you pay close attention, you can tell when one less spoonful will not make any difference. This slight dissatisfaction stimulates the baby’s appetite instead of “filling them to the brim” and making them feel completely full and content. It also keeps the baby’s sensitivity alive, as they know, to the nearest bite, what they need and what they do not, without being confused by other messages such as feelings, propriety, finishing their plate, pleasing their mother, etc. The same is true of the hot bath in Seitai, where you get out of the bath a few seconds before complete relaxation, just before you become like a boiled vegetable, so that the body has benefited from the relaxation and getting out gives it a “boost”, a surge of energy.

Karate master Shimabukuro Yukinobu refers to hara hachibu, a principle from the Okinawa Islands, which consists of stopping eating when you have reached 80% fullness². I think it is a bit like the same idea.

In fact, it is dissatisfaction that drives a child to walk, talk, jump, run, etc. If they were only seeking a feeling of bliss, they would remain at the same stage: pampered by their parents! Of course, this is in no way to justify abuse, but rather to point out that, here too, the best is sometimes the enemy of the good. It is not by adding more that we feed better. It all depends on our perspective. Tsuda Itsuo remarked: ‘I have been fortunate enough to know some aspects of the Japanese tradition. My experience may still be superficial, but it offers a striking contrast to modern thinking. The point here is not material satisfaction, but the deepening of our sensitivity.’³

Dissatisfaction drives us to improve ourselves.

When used properly, the sting of dissatisfaction drives us to continuity and perseverance. Speaking of his practice of Aikidō, Tsuda sensei wrote:

‘For me, learning to sit down and stand up is already huge. I continue to discover new facets of both. I am far from satisfied with what I do. This dissatisfaction always propels me forward, towards complete satisfaction.’⁴

‘On the other hand, I know a man who is a billionaire in spite of himself and he’s as miserable as can be. He is young, handsome, intelligent. He lacks for nothing. He can have anything overnight. But even this ease exasperates him. He does not know how to find true satisfaction.

The spontaneous is something we feel. It is ki. It is the invisible, the imponderable seeking to take a tangible form. If the form is satisfying, the spontaneous dies out.

Ki dies on taking form, this is the point in common that I found between Ueshiba and Noguchi. Understand here: ki in the sense of impulsion.

We’re hungry. We eat. We are full. We don’t want to hear another word about food.

But the value of human beings is in their ability to find the ki that is never satisfied. Mr Ueshiba told me what his Aikido would be like when he was one hundred and fifty years old. He died at the halfway point.’⁵

Itsuo Tsuda respiration — Tsuda Itsuo: ‘I live, I go, I do.’

Dreams or illusions

The problem with dissatisfaction arises when it overwhelms us. Work, family, boredom, commuting, cars, feeling fed up – when the world shrinks around us, we seek escape. So we dream. And another trap closes in on us because the injunction to “live your dreams” has become nothing more than a compensatory phenomenon. Paradoxically, we encourage people to chase their dreams, but this becomes an illusion, a mirage that keeps them where they already are.

As philosopher Henri Lefebvre analysed in the 1950s: ‘dissatisfied, suffocated, the individual feels as though he is dying before he has lived, and is forced into the insane situation of pleading for a “repetition” of the life he has never had.’⁶

‘In their work as in their “private” life and leisure activities, most people remain imprisoned within narrow, out-of-date frames of reference. Even if they are worried or discontented, even if they want to smash these social limits, they have no clear idea of the possibilities.’⁷

Accustomed since childhood, it is difficult to break out of the consumption-compensation relationship of leisure and tourism, to break out of compensation and return to a lived, direct relationship, to an enjoyment of the act as proposed by the Situationists, for whom Lefebvre was a source of inspiration.

I believe that intense, in-depth practice of an art form can help us reconnect with reality. In the case of Aikidō, this art brings us into contact with the fully experienced act, the present moment. Not the absurd (derealised) reality of our daily lives, but the reality of sensation, of contact with others, the reality of the body. When practising Aikidō, we are no longer in the context of work or leisure; it is a practice that calls for the totality of the individual. It is not just a question of the number of hours practised. Obviously, practising every day helps, but it is not essential. After a while, whatever we do in life, Aikidō, and also Katsugen Undō in our school, become the axes that articulate our existence.

Finally, to paraphrase an author talking about the act of revolting: practising in a dōjō is a situation where ‘by giving oneself to it unreservedly, one always finds more in it than one brought to it or sought from it: one is surprised to find one’s own strength in it, a stamina and an inventiveness that is new, plus the happiness that comes from strategically inhabiting a situation of exception on a daily basis.’⁸

Thus, little by little, our whole life “becomes” aikidō. And we find ourselves ‘inhabiting a situation of exception on a daily basis’.

This is often what masters exude; their lives are total. Their entire lives are a constant journey and a quest to go beyond what, even now, dissatisfies them.

Tsuda Itsuo always brought everyone back to their own decision by saying:

‘My formula is: “I live, I go, I do.”

You will say that I am selfish, because I only speak of what is happening inside of me. It is true that I do not say like so many philanthropists:

“Do not worry. I will do everything for you. I will eat for you, I will digest for you, I will defecate and urinate for you, I will breathe for you.”

I say coldly:

“I will not do anything for you until you are determined to do it on your own.” ’⁹

Manon Soavi

Would you like to hear about the next article?

Article by Manon Soavi published in April 2022 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 9.

Photo credits: Bruno Vienne, Bas van Buuren

Notes

1
Mei Keiko Ando, Ikebana, Zen Art, Chap. X, ’My Grandmother and Her Ikebanas’, 2017 (French transl. from the Italian), pub. Centro di Cultura Giapponese [Eng. transl. from the French, pp. 140–1]
2
interview by Léo Tamaki, Yashima #11 [in French], March 2021 [hara hachi-bu: 腹八分]
3
Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. VII, 2023, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 72
4
Tsuda Itsuo, The Path of Less, Chap. XVIII, 2018, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 174
5
ibid., Chap. VIII, p. 87
6
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life — Volume I — Introduction, ‘3 — Marxism as Critical Knowledge of Everyday Life’, 2008, pub. Verso (London & New York), transl. 1991 by John Moore, p. 141
7
ibid., ‘6 — What Is Possible’, p. 247
8
The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, April 2015, transl. by Robert Hurley, pub. Semiotext(e) (South Pasadena – California), the Intervention Series, p. 219
9
Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. III (end), 2021, Yume Editions, pp. 29–30

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT

Between Submission and Rage: Fear

18 December 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

Everyone experiences fear to varying degrees, but we do not all experience the same fears, and when we talk about fear in general terms, we tend to refer to it in masculine terms. While fear is obviously not exclusive to women, there are specific aspects to female fear in our world, and that is the angle I have chosen to explore here.

Women always face double or triple penalties. If you are a poor man, life will be difficult, but if you are a poor woman, it will be worse. If you are an immigrant, life will be difficult, but if you are an immigrant woman, it will be worse, and so on. There is always an accumulation, because being a woman is already perceived as a “handicap.”

The subject of fear and its relationship to martial arts was already not an easy subject for men. But for women, it is something else entirely. For women, fear is often a daily companion with many faces. There is a real education in fear in the education of girls. So while it may not be worse than for men, I believe it is absolutely necessary to hear this point of view as well, because as Howard Zinn says, ‘Until the rabbits have historians, history will be told by the hunters…’¹ Women must tell their own stories. They must tell what fear does to their relationship with the world and what it does to their bodies.

To begin with, we need to look at, as philosopher Elsa Dorlin suggests:

‘What it feels like to be a woman’

Women are particularly familiar with fear because they grow up in a world that is rather hostile to them. The degree of hostility depends on the region of the globe where you are born. Of course, for each woman, it will depend on her upbringing and experiences. Nevertheless, we can identify broad outlines and societal trends.

As we know, it is from childhood that boys are able to develop and experiment with their agility, strength, bodies, and power. In contrast, girls’ space is very often reduced to static games and cute little toys. Their minds are preoccupied with concerns about appearance, which distracts and consumes their energy. Their bodies are not developed and they will rarely, if ever, discover their power. Added to this is a whole myth of male superiority that fuels a culture of submission and a norm of ‘defenseless femininity’. Philosopher Elsa Dorlin, who studies how the dominant classes ‘disarm’ the dominated populations at all levels, explains the policy of making it impossible, unthinkable, to defend oneself. She calls this phenomenon ‘the factory of disarmed bodies’. Or how ‘it is a question of leading certain subjects to destroy themselves as subjects […] Producing beings who, the more they defend themselves, the more they damage themselves.’²

This is how fear is transmitted over generations. Being a woman so often means bearing fear. A fear that is disconnected from real situations, that becomes a background, like prey that is unaware of itself. Of course, it is so unbearable that many women fight against this fear. Some succeed more or less in escaping it. Nevertheless, although it is not very pleasant to look at or acknowledge, I believe we need to look a little more closely at this position of prey.

Elsa Dorlin dissects this cultural positioning of women as prey, which has been attached to them for too long. Through her analysis of a novel³, she provides a striking demonstration of this, and I can only quote long passages to convey its meaning. The character in the novel is called Bella.

‘Like millions of others, Bella is an unremarkable young woman whom no one is supposed to remember. She has no ambitions or pretensions in life, not even the simplest, most stereotypical happiness. […] Bella is an anti-heroine, an anonymous character, a woman who passes by and hurries on, a shadow in a crowd. And Bella is so ordinary that she can represent all women. […] Who has not once felt Bella’s existential mediocrity, her own anonymity, the familiar fear that accompanies it, her dashed hopes, her exhaustion from fighting for her rights, her claustrophobia at living in her cramped space, at surviving in her body, her gender, her humility in enduring her social hardship, her only demand to live in peace? Because we experience, almost daily, in repetitive and diverse ways, this myriad of insignificant acts of violence that ruin our lives and constantly test our consent.

[…]

The first pages describing Bella’s life implicitly outline what could be described as a phenomenology of the prey. A lived experience that we try by every means to endure, to normalise through a hermeneutics of denial, attempting to give meaning to this experience by emptying it of its unbearable, intolerable nature. […] She tries to live as usual, to reassure herself by pretending that everything is fine, to protect herself by acting as if nothing had happened, by derealising her own apprehension of reality – across the street, a man watches her day and night from his window, but perhaps it is she who thinks that a man is watching her. Bella lives in a constant state of trying to attach little importance to herself: to her feelings, her emotions, her discomfort, her fear, her anxiety, her terror. This existential scepticism on the part of the victim stems from a generalised loss of confidence that affects everything that is experienced and perceived, the self. Then, when denial becomes impossible, Bella “takes it upon herself”: by curling up in her body, staying hidden in her flat, shrinking her living space which, despite all her efforts, is violated. She lives in the banality of the daily life of a prey who wants to ignore herself, arranging her life to save its meaning’.⁴

In this passage, Elsa Dorlin demonstrates how this factory [of disarmed bodies] is being operated on women. Of course, this is a novel, but sometimes fiction is the best way to express reality: this paralysing fear, more or less permanent, that we try to deny in order to carry on living. It is an instilled, cultural fear that prevents us from acting and continues, time and again, to turn women into bodies of victims. We have all felt it to a greater or lesser extent. We have all fought against this fear in order to live anyway. To come home late, to travel alone, to accept an invitation, to work. We are forced to overcome this fear, otherwise we do nothing.

Unfortunately and paradoxically, this instilled fear and our efforts to overcome it short-circuit our instincts, including the necessary fear that allows us to sense danger and react to it in one way or another.

Phenomenology of the prey

The real prey, the animal hunted by a predator outside its species, pays close attention to itself and places immense trust in all the signals of instinctive fear. By refusing to pay this attention to themselves, women put themselves in even greater danger. Still following the analysis of the novel, Dorlin continues:

‘Bella’s story is also the story of a neighbour, an ordinary man who lives in the building opposite and who one day decided to assault her. Why? Because Bella seems so pathetic, so fragile, already such a “victim”. And if we are all a little bit like Bella, it is also because, like Bella, we first started to stop going out at certain times, on certain streets, to smile when a stranger spoke to us, to lower our eyes, to not respond, to quicken our pace when we went home; we made sure to lock our doors, draw our curtains, stay still, and not answer the phone. And, like Bella, we spent a lot of energy believing that our perception of the situation was meaningless, worthless, unreal: hiding our intuitions and emotions, pretending that nothing outrageous was happening or, on the contrary, that perhaps it was not acceptable to be spied on, harassed or threatened, but that it was us who were in a bad mood, who were becoming intolerant, paranoid, or that we were just unlucky, that this kind of “stuff” only happened to us. Precisely, Bella’s experience is a sum of commonly shared fragments of experience, but also a meticulous description of all these prosaic tactics, of all this phenomenal work (perceptual, emotional, cognitive, epistemological, hermeneutic) that we do every day to live “normally”, which amounts to denial, scepticism, and makes everything about ourselves seem unworthy.’⁵

This lack of attention to oneself and one’s feelings begins in childhood, which is when the distortion of perception occurs. How many little girls will hear, ‘He pushes you/hits you because he likes you. He’s a boy, it’s normal.’ Explicitly or implicitly, little girls are taught not to listen to themselves. This leads to a paradoxical situation in adult women, where they feel like prey and are afraid, but must constantly deny the signs. Because the predator, the enemy, is not of another species! A rabbit will never have the slightest doubt about a fox’s intentions. But for us, who are of the same family, he is both a potential enemy and a potential friend, lover, husband, father, boss, colleague… How can we maintain our discernment? These paradoxical injunctions poison the lives of most women in the long term. So we fight against fear with the energy of despair. We try as best we can to assert ourselves in this world. And one day it cracks, and rage replaces submission. Sometimes it allows us to react, but often it destroys everything around us.

Reshaping our relationship with the world

What can Aikidō do about this state of affairs?

I believe it is possible to bring about change in this state of affairs through the body. For it must be said that this endeavour to dominate operates very deeply in the body: ‘The object of this art of governing is the nervous impulse, muscle contraction, kinesic body tension, the release of hormonal fluids; it acts on what excites or inhibits it, lets it act or counteracts it, restrains or provokes it, reassures or makes it tremble, causing it to strike or not to strike.’⁶ In the education of girls, as with adult women, the long-term practice of Aikidō opens up a whole new perspective.

One day, during an Aikidō session led by my father, Régis Soavi, who has been teaching in Paris for fifty years, he said: ‘Before asserting yourself, you have to position yourself.’ This sentence struck me as the perfect definition of what Aikidō could be for women. Rather than trying to assert ourselves, to make demands on a society that does not listen to us or rejects our perception, we must first learn to position ourselves. Positioning ourselves in the martial sense of the term, therefore a question of Shisei. In the end, not being prey is a position, a posture. It is not about being a rabbit that arms itself to defend itself, but rather, through one’s inner posture, saying, ‘You may be a fox, but look, I am also a fox, not a rabbit.’ When we are positioned, self-assertion is there.

Position yourself before asserting yourself

Aikidō allows us to create new practices for ourselves that transform our reality and our relationships.

The first step is to rediscover, not an illusory neutrality, but the indeterminate, the sensation of life before separations. In our school, the Itsuo Tsuda School, we begin with meditation, then spend about twenty minutes practising movements and breathing exercises which, although they may resemble warm-ups, are not. One could say that it is a communion with space, with the life that surrounds us. It is a moment when each person is within themselves and with others in a common, indeterminate breath. Ueshiba O-sensei said: ‘I place myself at the beginning of the universe.’⁷ This statement, although it may seem far-fetched, actually gives us a much broader perspective than a simple exercise. Forget who we are, where we are, and simply breathe. Gradually, the breathing deepens and calmness arises, and we begin to rediscover the individual, before categorisations, separations, and culture. It is a bit like blowing on embers to rekindle a dying fire.

As we practise alone or in pairs, our bodies become freer and our movements more fluid. Regular practice, daily if possible, over a period of time, is necessary to gradually reshape our relationship with the world. To rediscover a body that inhabits its space, that occupies the street, that establishes a different way of being. As I said, it is not about becoming superwomen, capable of defending ourselves like heroines. It is not about fighting back blow for blow. It is about re-educating our bodies and minds in order to have a different Shisei, a different positioning in our lives. It is about no longer finding ourselves “prey” while ignoring warning signs.

The teacher’s role is to act as Uke as much as possible to help practitioners feel all the possibilities available to them, the Atemis, the Ma-ai, the Hyōshi, everything that will make a difference before they are completely blocked. If fear overwhelms us, we will overestimate the attacker and, paralysed, the situation will worsen. With practice, we can keep our breathing calmer and, without overestimating ourselves, position ourselves. This is why the attack must be committed, representing a certain danger without completely blocking.

This will also enable us to stop stagnating in a situation before reacting to it, whether it be at home, at work, or elsewhere. At the same time, we will no longer be polluted by unnecessary fears and anxieties that do not correspond to the situations that make us cower. Please note, I am not saying that victims of assault should have reacted. We know that shock is a human protective strategy and that sometimes the best thing to do is not to fight back in order to stay alive. My point does not necessarily concern extreme situations of great violence, but rather those that are mundane, supposedly “minor”, but which we have been taught to fear and which, when accumulated, are devastating.

It is not easy to change, to break out of the dualism of submission or rage. That is why it is through practice that the body rediscovers its capabilities and the mind calms down and finds peace. In the story I mentioned, Bella’s story, the novel only really begins when Bella reaches a turning point, when she finally decides that enough is enough. So she grabs a hammer. She is surprised to find that she finally has the strength to lift it, surprised that it has always been there, within reach. And the game of massacre begins, to the point that this novel caused a scandal in England because of the violence in the second part.

I am not trying to legitimise the violence in this novel; that said, how many great works, from historical novels to Westerns, from Ben-Hur to The Count of Monte Cristo, have made revenge the driving force behind men’s actions… But let us move on. I believe that we can have this revelation of our own power long before we reach the extremes of destroying ourselves or others.

As we practise Aikidō, which reconciles us with ourselves, we can rediscover a sense of power. Not a power that crushes others, but the power that comes from the hara, the centre of the human being. It is a centripetal process sometimes referred to as empowerment, when people take hold of ways of being, of self-practices, to unravel the domination exercised over them and regain power over their own lives. In the 1960s and 1970s, American feminists used this term to promote a form of liberation that was not dictated from outside – where women would once again be told what they should be, what a “free Western woman” is – but rather a centripetal emancipation, relying on the means available to each woman to respond to problematic situations themselves.

From this perspective, Aikidō can be a process of empowerment that allows us to revive our own internal resources and minimise the “radio interference” of cultural fear. Then our Shisei, our attitude, will be like that of the bird in the saying⁸:

The bird does not fear that the branch will break, because its confidence is not in the branch, but in its own wings.

Manon Soavi

Would you like to hear about the next article?

Article by Manon Soavi published in January 2022 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 22.

Photo credits: Paul Bernas

Notes

1
[quoted in 2015 French biographic documentary Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine [Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States]]
2
Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence [Defending Oneself. A Philosophy of Violence], pub. La Découverte (Paris), 2017
3
Defending Oneself (op. cit.), an analysis of Helen Zahavi’s 1991 novel Dirty Weekend
4
ibid.
5
ibid.
6
ibid.
7
[see for instance Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, Chap. XVIII, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 148, as well as (same author & publisher) The Way of the Gods, chap. XIII, 2021, p. 101 (1^st ed. in French: 1976, p. 132; 1982, p. 96)]
8
[This saying can be found online verbatim in French. It may have been inspired from Victor Hugo: Be like the bird, who Halting in his flight On limb too slight Feels it give way beneath him, Yet sings Knowing he hath wings. (1836, Songs of Dusk, ‘In the Church of ***’, VI). Another possible source is José Santos Chocano: The bird sings even though the branch creaks, because it knows what its wings are capable of.]

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT

A School of Sensation

17 December 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

Nowadays, some of us no longer want to feel. We no longer want to feel heat, cold, pain or fatigue. As individuals bend to social imperatives, norms and advice, neglecting the body’s own needs, they become desensitised. Often, we no longer feel precisely whether we are hungry or not, whether we want fennel, cheese, or meat. Some people no longer know whether their feet are hot or cold. And ultimately, feeling scares us.

Increasingly, because of the conditions in which we live, we are losing our ability to feel. To feel our environment, others, and above all, ourselves. Yet how can we determine our own destiny and find our way in life if we cannot feel? Or if we cannot feel with sufficient sensitivity? In Tsuda sensei’s teaching, this question was paramount, and he used the practices of Aikidō and Seitai as tools to rediscover sensitivity, that much-maligned ability so often confused with mawkishness¹. My father, Régis Soavi’s first dojo, opened in 1984, was called The School of Sensation, which shows how important this is in our School.

For Tsuda sensei, a process of sensitization begins when we regularly focus our attention on phenomena that we usually overlook. He wrote about this in his inimitable style:

‘It is not for me to say that one system is better than another. That is the domain of politics and reformers. I’m content just to sniff out scraps of information, here and there, and wonder if the smell comes from the wine of Bordeaux, the beer of Belgium, or from onion soup. And I wait for confirmation.

My observations are not scientific, they are simply sensations. My feelings are more or less dulled, like those of all civilised people who have received a modern education, that is, who are under the pressure of various systems.

However, I try to revive my feelings, to purify them, so as not to confuse wine with beer’².

But what is the point of reviving one’s sensations, one might ask? For many people, sensation is rather cumbersome. Or perhaps we should only feel good things, things that are fun and beautiful. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), sensation is a whole, inseparable and necessary to human beings. It is ‘a vital activity that enables [civilised men and women] to grasp the real world’³, said Tsuda sensei.

Through his philosophical research and dual training (Japanese for body practices, Western for anthropology and sociology), Tsuda Itsuo attempted to show what we lose by becoming insensitive. To show that despite the apparent short-term advantages of no longer feeling, we come out diminished, weakened. His journey led him to understand that the more we surround ourselves with objects and technologies that help and support us, the more we rely on them to do things, and the more we gradually lose the ability to do things ourselves.

This is not a bad thing in itself and is part of our evolutionary capabilities. Palaeo-anthropologist Pascal Picq writes on this subject:

‘Technical and cultural innovations are in fact the causes of our biological transformations. […] Since Erectus, behavioural and cultural factors have themselves become drivers of evolutionary change: biology and culture are weaving increasingly complex interactions, even into the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human.’⁴

Problems arise when we are so supported from all sides that we become incapable of doing things for ourselves. It is not a question of rejecting all technological progress, but of taking into account what we lose with each dependency. Tsuda sensei regretted that ‘[w]e are flooded by rubbish science that removes any chance we have of exercising our ability to focus our attention and to feel.’⁵

"Sei" la vie, calligraphie de Itsuo Tsuda. La sensation de la vie — _Sei_ [Life], calligraphy by Tsuda Itsuo.

Perceiving life in all things

Tsuda Itsuo, as a Japanese man and with his anthropological perspective, highlighted the differences in approach between East and West. Not to rank them or pit them against each other, but rather so that they could enrich each other. Among the main features of the traditional Japanese vision, Noguchi Hiroyuki (from Seitai creator Noguchi Haruchika’s family) talks about the notion of Perceiving life in all things as an essential axis of the concept of life for the Japanese. Acknowledging the omnipresence of life was the cornerstone of the Japanese human experience and gave everyone the certainty that all things are connected. It can be said that Western society, which has been built since the Enlightenment, is based on reference points external to man, such as the movement of the planets for its calendar, the division of time based on mathematical calculation, the measurement of temperatures by a centesimal scale, etc. The predominant character is one of abstraction and objectivity.

Yet we all know that an hour spent in pleasant company passes more quickly than an hour on the underground or at the office, if we are bored. It even passes more quickly than fifteen minutes waiting for a bus. It is all about the frame of reference: to be organised as a society, we need an external frame of reference, but human perception is based on our own frames of reference, which are our sensations, which are totally subjective and depend on our state of mind, the situation, etc.

In contrast, more than a century ago, Japanese society was entirely based on direct experience and the sensitive relationship between humans and their environment and themselves. The point of reference was sensation. For example, the traditional calendar was calculated according to the rhythm of the seasons and the life cycles of animals. Thus, it changed every year and placed more importance on how people experienced the seasons than on dates. In music, it was the rhythm of walking that set the tempo, not the metronome. Similarly, in all areas of craftsmanship, masters (dyers, potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, etc.) considered the materials they used to be alive. What mattered most was the sensitivity that was exercised in the relationship between man and the material he was working with.

It is also worth noting that all ancient cultures had this type of individual-based approach as long as they were not systematically organised by official knowledge, which was often disconnected from the changing reality on the ground. This practical knowledge, in touch with people’s reality, is called vernacular knowledge. Anthropologist James Scott gives an example:

‘A case in point is the advice given by Squanto [a Native American] to white settlers in New England about when to plant a crop new to them, maize. He reportedly told them to “plant corn when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear”.’⁶

James Scott points out that a farmer’s almanac would have indicated a date or a period, but that a date would not have taken into account the differences between each year, the differences between a field in the north and a field that benefits from longer hours of sunshine. A single prescription is ill-suited to the context, whereas a vernacular indication is based on the person who can make this rigorous observation of spring events, which occur every year, but differently each time, earlier or later. Vernacular knowledge is not transferable or universal, but it is very true and real for those who experience it directly.

Seitai

The same question arises in relation to the body. The same reversal of the frame of reference also applies, because rather than starting from general medical knowledge, which has undeniable value but is difficult to adapt to a changing reality that is unique to each individual, Seitai does not take as its basis external references such as weight, temperature or analyses, however sophisticated and accurate they may be, but rather the individual’s overall condition. Internal sensations are the guides to balance and health.

The concept of Seitai, created by Noguchi Haruchika sensei in the 1950s, differs significantly from conventional approaches to healthcare. His view of the body’s activity is based on the observation that the body has a natural ability to rebalance itself in order to function properly. And if we listen to its need for balance, if we are sensitive enough to its signals, the body will maintain its balance on its own in most cases.

Health is not considered to be the absence of illness, as illness is merely a symptom of the body working to restore its balance. It was during his years of intense activity as a practitioner that Noguchi Haruchika realised, on the one hand, that by constantly seeking to make life easier or to protect oneself in order to stay healthy, the body weakens, leading to the need for new support, etc., and on the other hand that if the body hardens to the point of becoming insensitive, it is also weak because it lacks the flexibility that allows for responsiveness:

‘Impatient people imagine that they are in good health because they are never sick. But if the body is sensitive to a bad stimulus, resists it, overcomes it and orders itself, the body’s safety valve is working and you pass through an illness’. ‘If a leper is injured, he feels no pain. If the body does not feel that something is wrong, its restorative powers are not aroused. The body only reacts if it can feel that something is abnormal.’ ‘It is necessary to make the extra-pyramidal system sensitive so that the body’s recuperative powers naturally arise to correct even small abnormalities. It is from this point of view that I teach katsugen undô.’⁷

Katsugen undō – a practice from Seitai, translated as Regenerating Movement by Tsuda sensei – therefore has the particular function of sensitising the body. We become more sensitive, our sensations become more refined. This does not mean that we will never need assistance; it all depends on our body’s capabilities. Again, there is no absolute truth, only the sensation that guides us in knowing whether we need help or whether our body is reacting normally to a disturbance.

Over time, the sensation of our physical and mental states becomes more refined and precise. Similarly, our perception of the states of others becomes much clearer. Through the practice of Yuki in pairs during Katsugen undō, we are led not to intervene in others, but simply to merge through a light touch on the back and attention to breathing. Gradually, our perception of others becomes much more penetrating; we are no longer satisfied with the words they say to us or the social masks they wear. It is not a question of falling into interpretation or analysis. We remain simple in the face of these natural sensations, although they are often forgotten.

Exercice de sensation avec le contact de la main. — Sensitivity exercise using hand contact

Aikidō

Another tool used in our School to sensitise the body is Aikidō. People practise it for various reasons, of course, but one of the consequences of practising Aikidō can be increased sensitivity if one takes a certain orientation. Master Sunadomari’s School, for example, attaches great importance to three principles: Ki no nagare (circulation/flow of ki⁸), Kokyū Ryoku (breathing/rhythm⁹) and Sesshoken Ten (contact with the partner through ki¹⁰). It can be said that these principles are also the foundations of the Itsuo Tsuda School and that they require us to refine our senses in order to discover and put them into practice.

It is not surprising that constant attention to certain sensations develops them. Researchers studying proprioception are impressed by the capabilities of what they consider to be a sense in its own right, and one that can be trained. They are currently conducting studies to see how, in certain professions for example, we develop a keen sense of proprioception that encompasses our environment and others. This can be seen spectacularly with the pilots of the National Aerobatic Team, who perform a preparation ritual before each flight. This ritual is called ‘the music’. Sitting on a chair, each team member mimics the piloting movements of the sequence according to the leader’s commands. This is how the pilots’ minds rehearse the choreography of a breathtaking aerial display. During the performance, they say themselves that they will not have time to think; they will be guided by their internal sensations, which they train daily.

It is in this same spirit that we all practise in the morning, quite slowly. There are more dynamic moments in a session, of course, but a lot of slow work that requires a certain amount of concentration and attention to our sensations. It is also necessary to pay attention to what the other person is giving us back, as this will confirm whether or not we are in the right line and at the right angle. It is not a matter of objective measurements, millimetres or anything else, but rather the sensation of the other person, Uke or Tori, which will determine whether we have performed a correct Kuzushi or a sufficient Tenkan at that moment.

In the last part of the session, we always do what we call free movement, a free exercise where the partner(s) attack(s) Tori as they see fit. Each tori must deal with their uke’s attacks by reacting spontaneously, as it is impossible to predict the movement and there are no instructions. As we do this exercise every day, everyone participates regardless of their level. Beginners often tense up and become fearful, so Uke must slow down and make more predictable attacks so that Tori has time to sense them. The goal is not to execute the technique at all costs or to block Tori. The goal is still to practise your sense, the one that allows you to take the attack in stride, deflect it and move at the same time without calculation. Gradually, by practising slowly, you can speed up more and more, and it becomes more spontaneous. Then, the speed of the attack, its commitment, or making it less predictable, will no longer be a problem, because you will be in the tempo.

I remember very well that my piano teachers all made a distinction between when I played fast to keep the right tempo, and they would say to me, dissatisfied, ‘it’s fast, rushed, hurried’, and when, through hard work, I managed to play fast, but it seemed controlled. Then it was no longer fast. That was the right tempo, even though it was the same objective speed on the metronome, or even faster, as I checked with rage! The sensation of speed depends on the musician’s control and the listener’s perception. In short, it depends on how the unique moment is felt.

The great conductor Sergiu Celibidache refused to make concert recordings because, for him, they captured a moment that was perfectly in tune with reality, turning it into a frozen, reproducible moment that became false once taken out of context. For him, tempo was not a matter of physical time, it was not a metronomic datum but a condition for musical expression.

The sense of touch

In many martial arts, the acquisition of special abilities to sense attacks before they happen has been the subject of research and fascination. Yomi, Hyōshi, Metsuke, Yi, etc.¹¹, all these “concepts” refer to this, to heightened senses, which are obviously necessary in real combat. But there is an even more mundane sense that our society is increasingly forgetting, reaching a climax today: the simple sense of touch. Yet this primary, “simple” sense is vital to us.

It may be sad that we have to wait for researchers to confirm what we know intuitively, but touch is literally a vital sense. It is the first sense to develop in infants and the last to decline at the end of life. While the other senses decline, the skin nerve fibres that respond to touch remain active for the most part until the end. It is the first and last mode of communication between humans. More importantly, physical contact is a vital need: being touched is essential for proper physical, immune and brain development. Without regular physical contact during childhood, the consequences are numerous and catastrophic. Even for adults, being deprived of physical contact for too long leads to physical and psychological problems. According to Francis McGlone, one of the leading neuroscientists studying touch, ‘touch is as essential as the air we breathe and the food we eat. […] The risk of premature death from smoking, diabetes or pollution is around 40%. The risk from loneliness is 45%. But no one has yet really realised that what lonely people are missing is precisely physical contact.’¹²

Furthermore, according to this research, the body becomes unaccustomed to touch and therefore finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate being touched, even though the damage caused by this absence is felt. There is a process of desensitisation. This is in line with Tsuda sensei’s view that:

‘The body defends itself by grower tougher. We become immune to external and internal sensations. We do not even catch a cold. We are robust.

[…] Toughening gives us a healthy appearance, the envy of people who endlessly suffer from minor ailments. […] One gradually loses subtlety of expression and becomes stiff. Robustness has a flip side: fragility. […]

[…]

Mubyō-byō, the illness without illness, is what Noguchi called this state of desensitisation that isolates man from his environment.’¹³

Fortunately, this process is not irreversible and we can start going in the opposite direction to resensitise the body. Contact martial arts are among the last bastions – along with dance perhaps – where touching is still possible, where the information transmitted through touch is decisive for our reaction, for us to maintain or regain the sensitivity that reconnects us with our human abilities.

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in July 2021 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 6.

Notes

1
[In French, the characteristic of being sensitive – i. e. sensitiveness – has two versions, both coming from the adjective sensible (=sensitive, lit. “able to sense, to feel”): sensibilité and sensiblerie, the latter being a pejorative – because supposedly exaggerated – version of the former.]
2
Tsuda Itsuo, The Way of the Gods, Chap. I, 2021, Yume Editions, p. 12
3
Tsuda Itsuo, One, Chap. V, 2016, Yume Editions, p. 35
4
Pascal Picq, Et l’évolution créa la femme [And Evolution Created the Woman], pub. Odile Jacob (Paris), 2020, p. 243
5
One (op. cit.), Chap. XIV, p. 105
6
James Campbell Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, 2012, Priceton University Press, p. 31
7
Noguchi Haruchika, Order, Spontaneity and the Body, ‘II — Katsugen Undô’, ‘Getting the Body in Good Order’, 1984, Zensei Publishing Company (Tōkyō), pp. 71–2, 73 & 73–4
8
[ki no nagare: 気の流れ]
9
[for the interpretation of kokyū ryoku 呼吸力 as “rhythm”, see e. g.: ‘Kokyū ryoku consists in harmonizing one’s ki with aite’s’, Sunadomari Kanshu, interview by Léo Tamaki (in French), Dragon Magazine Special Aikido n° 18, Oct. 2017]
10
[probably comes from sessuru 接する]
11
[yomi 読み (reading), hyōshi 拍子 (rhythm), metsuke 目付 (“laying of the gaze”), yi 意 (Chin.: intent)]
12
Prof. Francis Philip Mcglone, quoted in Die Macht der sanften Berührung [The Power of Gentle Touch], documentary by Dorothee Kaden, 2020, Arte production [(Eng. transl. from the French, emphasis added by M. S.)]
13
Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, Chap. II, 2021, Yume Editions, pp. 22–3

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT

Being Free Makes Others Free

8 December 2025 name

[Nov. 19] Manon Soavi was invited by Italian web magazine DeaByDay to talk about “female conditioning through education” and her career path. This interview is part of a series of interviews published by this web magazine on women who are making a difference in the world every day.

The interview

1. Who is Manon Soavi?

I am 37 years old, I am French and I teach Aikido, which I have been practising since childhood. I also work in digital communication for associations. I worked as a concert pianist and accompanist for about ten years and I never went to school.

2.You didn’t go to school. How did you get through your childhood? Didn’t you ever want to go to school?

When I was five, I wanted to try school. I wondered what it would be like! I lasted four days before deciding I would never go back. I understood! I couldn’t stay in a place where if I said ‘no’, it wasn’t respected. I can totally respect rules, but respect has to be mutual, and at school it isn’t.

3. Have you ever felt marginalised? How were your first encounters with the “outside” world? What differences did you notice, if any, between yourself and others in your perception of the world?

Of course I’m a marginal! But in fact, most people feel like marginals, feel different and suffer because of it, but they don’t really know why. I know why I’m different and why I want to stay that way!

As a teenager, I thought I was suffering from a certain loneliness, a distance from other young people my age, but in the end I discovered that I wasn’t suffering from loneliness but from disappointment that the world was like that, disappointment at the poverty of human relationships. And, of course, disappointment in male-female relationships. Not only male domination, but also, and above all, the attitude of women themselves.

And over time, I realised that there is much worse. There is the suffering of loneliness in a crowd. The inconsolable loneliness you encounter at school, being alone in the face of difficulties. Alone in the face of the world. I have never been alone. My parents were always with me, every moment, until I was ready to face the world, until I was strong enough.

Sometimes people think that this is a way of overprotecting a child and that the child needs to face challenges and fend for themselves. But even from a martial arts perspective, this is absurd. You don’t send a child who isn’t ready to fight onto the battlefield. Otherwise, you’re sending them to certain death. If you give them time, young people learn, and one day, when they are strong enough, they spread their wings and are ready. And then, believe me, they can endure a lot, because the strength is inside them. Even if the outside bends, the inside does not break. The problem with external strength acquired in childhood for self-defence is that it tends to collapse because the foundations are not solid enough. That’s how we find ourselves in untenable situations, suffering from depression, burnout or other problems. We have become so accustomed to putting up with things that we no longer feel in time that we need to react. That is why it is important to rediscover the sensitivity that alerts us and the ability to react.

One of the strangest and saddest things for me was seeing the masks that everyone wore to appear different from who they really were. More beautiful, more intelligent, more funny. Obviously, women played the role of seductresses, manipulators, falsely weak, waiting for Prince Charming to finally live! How sad! All these vicious codes that determine the hierarchy of human relationships. I knew respect, but not hierarchy. And the world did exactly the opposite, with no deep respect for others, but orders, prohibitions (to be broken, of course) and hierarchy all the time. It was very depressing.

It took me a while to realise that my way of being attracted certain people. That being yourself simply proved that it was possible. I refuse to play the social game. I accept certain superficial rules that are inevitable for living in society, but I reject the essence of the game. Perhaps then some people will realise that all you have to do is stop playing. We keep our prison locked ourselves; we have the key in our hands, but we are afraid.

I can only serve to say, ‘It is possible,’ or as Fukuoka sensei said, ‘there is nothing special about me, but what I have glimpsed is vastly important.’¹

4. In your opinion, is it still possible to offer this kind of experience in today’s society?

It’s no more difficult today than it was yesterday. Times change and the difficulties are not the same. But the difficulties of being true human beings are nothing new. The only question is: what do I want? In what direction do I want to take my life?

5. Today, some feminists seem almost to want to abolish the idea of masculine and feminine. In fact, however, there are fundamental biological differences: what do you think about that? What does being a feminist mean to you?

I am in favour of respecting differences. Every individual is unique and different. Some people are tall or thin, some like sports or reading for hours, some think before they act, some eat when they are upset. We are all different, and of course biological differences matter enormously. But they should not determine our role in society, our rights or our behaviour. It’s not about creating a single model, male of course, no, on the contrary. It’s about respecting each being in their needs, in their uniqueness.

For me, being a feminist means striving for equality between men and women (which still does not exist, even in our countries), of course, but being a feminist also means being aware that women are the first to perpetuate conditioning. It is not about positioning ourselves as victims, because we are both victims and perpetrators at the same time. We perpetuate the model by educating our children, both boys and girls. So, above all, it means reflecting on our own situation, on what we convey every day to those around us, to our children, to our friends. It means reflecting on our culture, our media, our own expectations.

Being a feminist for me means no longer defining myself as “a woman”. It also means no longer seeing men as “males”. I am a feminist in the sense that it is necessary today to move forward, just as it was necessary for women in the past to fight for certain rights.

One day, perhaps, we will no longer be women or men, black or white, young or old, but simply true human beings.

6. What is the Itsuo Tsuda School and what is your role there?

The Itsuo Tsuda School works to spread the practical philosophy of Itsuo Tsuda, passed on by Régis Soavi, my father. It brings together dōjōs in Europe entirely dedicated to the practice of Aikidō and Katsugen Undō (Regenerative Movement). I am Technical Advisor to the Itsuo Tsuda School, which means that I watch for of the orientation of our School.

7. At the Itsuo Tsuda School, you practise Aikidō and Katsugen Undō (Regenerative Movement). What are their distinctive features?

Katsugen Undō is a foundation, a practice that awakens the vital capacities of each individual, and is therefore a foundation for our lives. Whatever activity we engage in, it is essential to rediscover a natural body that reacts correctly.

In Aikidō, the focus is on breathing and the sensation of Ki, which is at the heart of our school, rather than on the sporting or martial aspects. We practise by seeking fusion with our partner rather than opposition. Martial effectiveness stems from our ability to be in the right place at the right time, but this is not an end in itself.

8. There is a strong female presence at your school. Can you tell us why, given that martial arts are predominantly male territory?

From the very first dōjōs that my father, Régis Soavi, created in the early 1980s, he wanted to ‘empower women’. He has always pushed in this direction. Empowering women does not mean “de-powering” men! But in a world where women do not have power, we must give it to them in order to achieve balance.

And then, of course, it is the focus of our practice, our attention to sensitivity, which develops through the practice of both Katsugen Undō and Aikidō, that is unique. Women certainly find a path that speaks to them. But there are also many men in our school who aspire to something other than an escalation of strength and aggression.

Master Ueshiba, the founder of Aikidō, was a great Budōka, even formidable, but what makes him great is the fact that he is one of the few who has transcended the duality of combat. It was the story of his entire life. But the gift he gave to humanity was to talk about going beyond combat. That Budō could forge human beings capable of much more than just winning by defeating others. In Aikidō, there is no victory, there is a surpassing of opposition, and that is very different. It may be a utopia, but it is the hope of training people who are capable of laying down their arms without becoming victims.

We often think that in Europe we no longer fight, that we are ‘good people’! This is to forget a little too quickly how we treat those who are weaker, younger or more dependent than us. The elderly, the sick, immigrants, children, babies, all those who are not given a choice, all those who are not listened to. How we talk to the cleaning lady, how we talk to those we give orders to. Are we really that good? Are we really free from violence? When faced with adversity, our first instinct is to fight back, and women, as dominated social beings, are confronted with this every day. So finding another way is surely a more pressing necessity for women, although it is necessary for everyone.

9. How can practising Aikidō and Katsugen Undō change people’s lives, especially women’s?

Precisely because we practise in a direction of fusion and non-doing. It is not about adding something but about getting rid of what clutters us, both physically and mentally, so that our being can find room to breathe. A place where it is possible to be oneself and not to “appear”. Women in particular have little room to be themselves, and these practices can help us break free from social conditioning. It is a tool, a path. It is not about practising and waiting for a miracle that will make us beautiful, rich and intelligent. It is up to us to take the steps.

10. When did you start practising and what motivates you to continue?

I started Aikidō when I was six years old and I haven’t stopped since. I started because my father taught it and I simply enjoyed it! Why do I continue? First of all, because I still enjoy practising and I don’t feel like I’ve reached the end of my journey, far from it.

And then it’s a tool for communicating with others without going through social conventions; it’s direct communication, in silence. It’s really enjoyable to walk a path accompanied by other people who are heading in the same direction.

11. Your journey took place in France. Are there opportunities for Italian women to follow the same path?

Itsuo Tsuda left behind nine books, which provide guidance for anyone interested in his practical philosophy. They have all been translated into Italian. But to practise, it is best to go to a dōjō. In Italy, there are dōjōs in Milan, Rome, Turin and Ancona. There are courses and daily practice. The dōjō is a well from which we can draw to find ourselves.

We are the ones who must walk the path, whatever tools we use to evolve, it all depends on ourselves. On our inner decision.

Notes

1
Fukuoka Masanobu, The One-Straw Revolution, 1975, Part I, ‘Nothing at All’ (very end), Eng. trans. 1992, pub. Other India Press, p. 10

Articles_Blog, EN, FR, Manon Soavi, Non classé

To Live Utopia – Interview with Manon Soavi

6 December 2025 name

[Oct. 23] In this interview, Manon Soavi talks to us about her book Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia.

1/11: Une enfance libre?

2/11: Les racines du taoïsme et de l'anarchisme

3/11: Itsuo Tsuda et l'anarchisme

4/11: La philosophie pratique d'Itsuo Tsuda

5/11 : Les outils d'une révolution

6/11 : Le dojo, lieu d'expérimentation collective

7/11 : Un outils quotidien: le bain chaud

8/11 : La science du particulier

9/11 : Les capacités naturelles des enfants

10/11 : La société du haut du corps

11/11 : Le rapport hommes-femmes

Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia is available at your local bookshop or on L’Originel publishing website.

In this interview, Manon Soavi discusses several aspects covered in her book:

A free childhood
The roots of Taoism and anarchism
Itsuo Tsuda and anarchism
Itsuo Tsuda‘s practical philosophy: Aikidō and Katsugen undō
The tools of a revolution
The dōjō, a place for collective experimentation
A daily tool: the hot bath
The science of the particular
Children’s natural abilities
The upper body society
The relationship between men and women

To find out about meetings and events related to the book, visit this webpage.

An interview conducted in Paris at Tenshin dōjō.

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Aïkido, EN, FR, Katsugen undo, Manon Soavi

The Philosophy of Non-Doing. Meeting with Manon Soavi

6 December 2025 name

[Jun. 23] Interview with Manon Soavi for the release of Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia, published by L’Originel (Obernai, France). Interview conducted by Jean Rivest for the Réseau Vox Populi channel in Montreal on 20 May 2023.

Manon Soavi is an aikidōka and martial arts teacher in the Itsuo Tsuda School in Paris. Her entire childhood was steeped in the philosophy of Non-doing developed by Itsuo Tsuda, whom her parents met in the 1970s. This philosophy, along with the practice of Aikidō and Seitai (the Regenerative Movement), became an integral part of their daily lives. Manon Soavi never attended school, and began practising Aikidō at the age of six and studying classical piano at the age of eleven. As an adult, Manon Soavi complemented her martial arts practice with Japanese sword and jūjutsu; she also worked as a concert pianist and accompanist for over ten years. At the same time, she began teaching Aikidō and the philosophy of Non-doing herself. Today, she devotes herself entirely to passing on this knowledge.

http://soavimanon.rifleu.fr/.

Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia. Published (in French) by L’Originel – Charles Antoni¹ (2022, France).

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Notes

1
reunified since 2025 within French publisher L’Originel (Obernai)

Articles_Blog, culture, EN, FR, IT, Manon Soavi

The Path of Itsuo Tsuda – Interview With Manon Soavi

6 December 2025 name

[Apr. 23] Interview with Manon Soavi for the publication of Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia, published by L’Originel (Obernai, France). By Louise Vertigo, on AligreFM radio programme Respirations, 17 February 2023 broadcast live.

Listen to the podcast here [in French] or read the [English] transcript below:

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LV: Hello Manon Soavi.

MS: Hello.

LV: I am delighted to welcome you for the publication of your book Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master — The Art of Living Utopia, published by L’Originel. For you, the practice of energy and martial arts leads to something more, as it prompts you to reflect on and take a stance on the functioning of society itself. This is what we will discover throughout the programme. First of all, I would like to ask you to introduce yourself.

MS: Thank you for having me today. I often say that I am like Obelix: I fell into the pot when I was little, since my parents began this journey before I was born.

It started with the May 1968 revolts and the questioning of systems in the 1970s. Then their encounter with Itsuo Tsuda enabled them to truly implement and experience in their bodies and sensibilities a different way of looking at the world, at life and at human relationships. It was a turning point for putting all these ideas into practice, all the turmoil that surrounded those years: anarchists, situationists, all those thinkers who questioned the modern world. And these thoughts that nourished them found a very strong echo in Itsuo Tsuda. This encounter changed their way of life, their way of being – gradually, it was a journey.

When I was born, and then my sister three years later, something obviously continued in terms of the relationship with the children and the pace of life. In other words, there was no question of them having come all this way towards liberation, this journey to break free from these systems of domination, only to let their children start again from scratch. That’s why it was only natural that neither my sister nor I ever went to school. That’s fundamental. Because not going to school allowed us to have a very different life, a kind of continuum between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, without these separations, these boxes, these categories of child | man | woman | work | leisure – everything was intertwined. And the philosophy of Itsuo Tsuda, the philosophy of Non-Doing, the importance of the body, of the subconscious, all of that was present, omnipresent in our daily lives.

Manon Soavi en entretien sur Aligre FM — Manon Soavi on AligreFM radio (93.1)

LV: Yes, we will develop all that. You are Sensei Régis Soavi‘s daughter. Your father was a student of Itsuo Tsuda for ten years. He has been teaching Aikidō for over forty years...

MS: Fifty years now, actually.

LV: Oh, right! And could you… So I imagine it was Itsuo Tsuda who brought him to this level?

MS: My father started jūdō when he was young, at the age of 12, and pursued it for a while. Then he started Aikidō, practising with several Aikidō masters, including Master Noro and Master Tamura. He had a long journey in Aikidō… and one day (in 1973) he met Itsuo Tsuda. Itsuo Tsuda was someone who completely reoriented his practice of Aikidō. Moreover, the discovery of Katsugen Undō – which translates as Regenerative Movement – was another dimension that, too, changed the nature of my father’s Aikidō. Itsuo Tsuda became his master, the one he followed for ten years, until his death. Shortly before Itsuo Tsuda‘s death in 1983, Régis Soavi decided to move to Toulouse and open his own dōjō. Itsuo Tsuda agreed and encouraged him to continue on his path. Since then, he has continued to teach every morning for 50 years. Every morning, he teaches Aikidō. And to introduce people to Katsugen Undō.

LV: Very well, yes. I was lucky enough to have this experience with you. So now we’re going to talk about Itsuo Tsuda‘s unique journey. And first, we’ll talk about his influences. Who was he? And perhaps we can start by talking a little about the beginning of everything in energy, which is the Tao. So who was he, and what was his journey?

MS: Itsuo Tsuda was born in 1914 into a Japanese family living in Korea. Korea was occupied by Japan at the time. It was a very rigid, harsh, militarised, colonialist society. At the age of 16, Itsuo Tsuda refused the right of primogeniture. He opposed his father quite violently, since he left home. He left everything behind at the age of 16 and went wandering, as he said. He travelled through China. And finally, in the 1930s, he had only one desire: to visit France. In my opinion, he had already been exposed to anarchist ideas in China through publications, and this had already made an impression on him. But when he arrived in France in 1934, it was the time of the Popular Front, a period of significant social change in France, the scale of which has been largely forgotten today, and when the anarchist movement was very strong.

These years in Paris were extremely important for Itsuo Tsuda. He studied under Marcel Granet and Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne, studying sinology and sociology. These researchers had a profound influence on his thinking and his understanding of the world and different cultures. When the war broke out, he was forced to leave for Japan. At the age of 30, he discovered his country during the Second World War. This was also a major upheaval. He would have liked to stay in France, where he still had a whole journey ahead of him. But life decided otherwise.

After the war, he immersed himself in his own culture, which he ultimately knew little about. He discovered Noh theatre and then Seitai, with Master Haruchika Noguchi, and spent the last ten years of Master Ueshiba‘s life studying Aikidō. This journey, with these discoveries of a culture where the body is not separate from the mind, where there is this feeling of life in everything, where things are not inert matter, are not separate, as much the body as the mind, nature, ourselves… We are a whole. And this is a discovery of a way of thinking that he had already approached, through ancient China, through Marcel Granet. And his research on anthropology, which he continued all those years in Japan – he translated Marcel Granet‘s The Religion of the Chinese People, he was the first translator into Japanese, it was really something he explored in depth. And this discovery of Taoism – he is a great connoisseur of Chuang Tzu.

But Japan was also closed off for 200 years. This explains why they have preserved traces of a much older, much more fundamental culture, which continues to be expressed in traditional arts.

LV: Yes. Very interesting. So, I’m going to read a passage from your book and then we’ll take a musical break, which will give you time to think about the question. Regarding the Tao, which he is interested in:

‘ “In this initiatory geography of the Dao [Tao], there is a dark threshold represented by the bottom of a mysterious valley.” The Dao De Jing expresses this in a vague and poetic way: “The spirit of the valley does not die. It is the Dark Female, […] this is the origin of heaven and earth. Indiscernible, it always seems present and never runs out within us.” Gu Meisheng explains that this is a figurative way of talking about the active aspect of the void, which he explains in these words: “The valley is both an empty and sensitive place that echoes sounds. The valley is empty, but when we shout, the echo answers us. Such is the nature of the dao. The dao is therefore a void of extreme sensitivity.” ’

We listen to Dead of Night by Orville Peck.

MS: In this excerpt you read about the Tao, Master Gu Meisheng explains it very well. Only poetry can truly convey something that cannot be expressed in words.

You are probably familiar with the Zen story about a Zen master in a monastery who asks one of the monks to clean the garden… So the monk rakes and rakes and cleans until everything is spotless, then goes to see the master and says, ‘There, it’s done.’ The master arrives, looks at it and says, ‘Do it again.’ So the student starts again, cleaning everything thoroughly, impeccably, and returns to the master and says, ‘There, it’s done, master.’ So the master comes and says, ‘That’s not right,’ and leaves. The student is starting to get fed up. So this time he leaves a small pile of dead leaves. He returns to the master and says, ‘It’s done.’ When the master arrives, he looks and says nothing. Well, that’s what the void is: the void is active. We cannot define it definitively. But it’s true that it goes completely against our philosophy, against the way we see the world today in the West, which has spread throughout practically the entire world.

This is exactly what Tanizaki lamented in In Praise of Shadows. We have this idea that everything must be brought to light, everything must be dissected, there must be no grey areas, there must be no unknowns, everything must be explainable by rationality. Except that when we dissect a human body, an animal body, whatever, the essential is no longer there anyway. There will always be that essential that escapes us.

And in my opinion, this is completely in line with the analyses of some ecofeminist thinkers, or also Mona Chollet, who talk about this whole aspect that is unknowable by rational science, but which can be felt, experienced, which is something that human beings know, to which they have a very strong connection. Ecofeminist thinkers try to deconstruct our understanding of the world to show that rationality may not be on the side we think it is, that it may not be about dissecting everything, approaching everything from the most rational angle. Perhaps there is a whole that completely escapes us, a relationship with the Earth, a relationship with living things, perhaps even a relationship with the obscure, with the body, with all those things that we have denigrated, relegated, crushed, and that we need to revalue or rediscover.

LV: Yes. Mystery is very important, it is very precious. So here we come to the principles of martial arts: cultivating sensitivity and attention. Remaining attentive to biological speed, which requires intense concentration. I took that from your book. So we were talking about gyō in the influences of this master…

MS: Yes, so Itsuo Tsuda found in the body practices of seitai and Aikidō this embodiment, this possibility of feeling. He found the dimension of ki and breathing. Gyō is a term that is often translated as asceticism¹. Except that the difference between Western asceticism is that we seek to leave our bodies through practices, to no longer feel, to extract ourselves from the body. Whereas in gyō, in the ascetic practices of Asia or even in India, at least in certain branches, on the contrary, we seek unity, the reunification of mind and body through ascetic practices. These ascetic practices influenced Me Ueshiba in particular, who passed on some of them through Aikidō. Through Aikidō, we can see a possibility of rediscovering this connection, this wholeness of being.

LV: You mentioned seitai again, and the regenerative movement. Perhaps you could enlighten us a little on this.

MS: Seitai was developed by Mr Haruchika Noguchi in the 1950s. It focuses on what makes each individual unique and indivisible, and on their innate ability to balance themselves in order to maintain their health. It is the unconscious movement of the body.

Among Seitai, which could be described as a philosophy, an understanding of human beings, there are several techniques and practices, including Katsugen Undō, which Itsuo Tsuda translates as Regenerating Movement, and it is precisely this aspect that interests Itsuo Tsuda: Regenerating Movement. It was this aspect of Seitai that he chose to pass on in France in the 1970s. He was interested in it because, with his personal orientation, his philosophy, his search for freedom for himself and others, this search for freedom and autonomy, he saw in Katsugen Undō a way to reactivate the body’s own means of regaining balance. No longer depending on an expert, an external practice, the opinion of a master or anyone else.

That’s why I compare it to what Ivan Illich called ‘convivial’ things, which are tools that anyone can use, no expertise required, and that’s fundamental to Itsuo Tsuda.

LV: Yes, it reminds me of how we work with that dimension in Qi Qong. We work with these dimensions of self-medication that are the body.

MS: Mr Noguchi said that we never stopped with the ‘you must’ and ‘you must not’, with external instructions, and since the 1950s, this has only gotten worse. Today, we must eat five fruits and vegetables a day, we must drink a litre of water, we must eat but exercise, we must do sport, but not too much… we are constantly bombarded with external injunctions…

LV: That’s true.

MS: And we forget our own biological needs, which depend on the day, the moment, lots of things, and which are not the same for us, for my neighbour, for my child; everyone has different needs and the only compass is ourselves. Rediscovering the ability to sense whether we want carrots or chocolate, whether we’ve eaten enough or not, is quite simply the beginning of autonomy.

LV: Absolutely. So now let’s talk a little about Ki, which is called Qi in China, for example. You write, ‘Ki defies any attempt at categorisation,’ said Itsuo Tsuda, who explained this many times. Here in the West, Ki is very difficult to explain because it does not fit into the system of categories. And you give this example: feeling observed.

MS: Depending on the circumstances, Ki can be translated as intuition, atmosphere, intention, vitality, breathing, action, movement, spontaneity… it is something fluid that cannot really be defined. Itsuo Tsuda also said, ‘Ki dies on taking form’². But it is something that can be felt. It is a concrete experience. He gave this example: you are walking down the street and suddenly you feel it. You feel that you are being watched, you turn around… perhaps you find “someone” watching you from behind a curtain. Maybe it’s just a cat, but either way, you felt it. You sense the intention. Obviously, in martial arts, we use it to sense the ki of aggression, of danger. That’s one form. But we can also sense the ki of danger for other reasons. Conversely, we can sense a welcoming ki, we can sense an atmosphere. We feel good in certain places. And in certain places, we feel extremely uncomfortable.

LV: And even with people. For me, there are friendships, loves of ki.

MS: Absolutely. There are people who give off something.

LV: You immediately feel at ease, immediately comfortable, because that qi – I would say qi or ki, it doesn’t matter – speaks to mine (laughs).

MS: Of course. Absolutely. The problem is that from childhood, from early childhood, we are taught not to listen to ourselves. Not to listen to our intuition, that thing that speaks to us. So unfortunately, by losing touch with ourselves, we forget that feeling a little.

LV: Very well, let’s think about that while listening to Hot Hot Hot by Matthew E. White.

LV: We’ve touched on this briefly, because it must be said that this book is very rich and I recommend it to you, but now we’re going to talk about Itsuo Tsuda‘s teaching itself. And I’m going to ask you first what he found in the practice of Aikidō by Me Ueshiba?

MS: He met Mr Ueshiba in the last years of his life. At the end of a lifetime of practice and research, Mr Ueshiba proposed an evolution of his art. He called it a path of love. I believe it is a powerful tool for human evolution. There is indeed gyō, ascetic practices, misogi, and various other things that fuelled his own research.

I believe that what fascinated Itsuo Tsuda was this master’s freedom of movement. Tsuda was already in his eighties, yet he had a freedom of movement that Itsuo Tsuda, who was forty, did not have; he already felt stiff. Through the practice of Aikidō, the daily practice of the first part, which Itsuo Tsuda called the respiratory practice, which is an individual practice with all kinds of movements that bring the body back to life, into movement, that deepen the breath, it is something that actually nourishes, that nourishes the life within us.

What is rather strange, or curious, is that even among rebels and revolutionaries such as The Invisible Committee, we find this sentence where they say: ‘the depletion of natural resources is probably much less advanced than the depletion of subjective resources, the vital resources that affect our contemporaries’. It is this exhaustion that is at issue, and it is a matter of revitalising internal resources, this root. Itsuo Tsuda said that he was there to propose ‘to revive the root’³. And I think that is what he also found in Aikidō.

In any case, that is what “this practice” taught him, that is what it gave him as a direction. Because here again, as with Seitai, where he took up Katsugen Undō, in Aikidō there were also more martial and other aspects that did not interest him, which other students of Master Ueshiba developed, each following their own path.

But what interested him was the aspect of breathing, the circulation of ki, this possibility through the body. That’s what struck him and that’s what he passed on in his school.

Itsuo Tsuda on the right, Régis Soavi in between, ca 1980

LV: It’s true that Master Ueshiba‘s aikidō is a great treasure and that some have developed their own path. And there is also Master Noro, who created a movement, an art of movement.

MS: Absolutely, yes.

LV: It is no longer a martial art but an art of movement. In fact, they were friends..

MS: Yes, absolutely. He knew Master Noro, who created Ki no michi, quite well. There was a big age difference, since Master Noro was a student of Master Ueshiba at a very young age, he was a live-in student, he was 17, 18 years old, whereas Itsuo Tsuda actually started Aikidō at the age of forty-five. And despite this big age difference, they had a lot in common, a fairly strong affinity.

The fact that Itsuo Tsuda started Aikidō so late also gave him the opportunity to acquire intellectual knowledge, as he also had a background in Sinology, to have these references because Mr Ueshiba spoke in a poetic, literary way, with references to mythology and Chinese culture. Itsuo Tsuda had a background, he was truly an intellectual, and he had the knowledge that allowed him to get into it. He was also the translator, the interpreter in fact at the beginning, and he continued to be the interpreter for Westerners who came to see Ueshiba. Like André Nocquet and others. So it was also a way for him to be very much in touch with Master Ueshiba‘s discourse, which he had to translate to make it understandable to these Westerners.

LV: Very good. So there’s another aspect that I found interesting about Master Itsuo Tsuda, which is ‘the mnemonic that consists of forgetting’⁴.

MS: (laughs) It’s about reconnecting with yourself, as he said. It’s about trusting our inner abilities, our own resources, and also our unconscious and subconscious minds.

We think that we are the ones who decide to do this or that, but in fact, 90% of our vital activity, if not 100%, is completely unconscious. We can’t speed up or slow down our heartbeat, except perhaps a few yogis, but most of the time we have no impact on our vital functions. And we have an illusion of control over ourselves, over nature, over others… we are completely under the illusion of control.

Instead of stressing out about ‘I mustn’t forget to buy milk on my way home’ – that’s stress, it’s the mind trying to remember. And we all know very well that most of the time we get home, put down our keys and say to ourselves, ‘Oh! I forgot the milk…’. Whereas Itsuo Tsuda says, ‘Visualise yourself getting off the tube and popping into the little supermarket next door to buy milk.’ Visualise this action, you can see it, OK? And now, forget about it, don’t think about it anymore.

LV: Thank you for that advice, which I will put into practice right away. So, what happens in the dōjō? The dōjō allows you to regain control over your body, and this extends to everyday life. Let me quote you: ‘The dōjō is one of those unique places where time passes differently, where the world stops for a few moments.’

MS: In our school, we have several dōjōs, which are places entirely dedicated to Aikidō and Katsugen Undō. They are not gyms, they are not sports halls, there are no other activities. They are places that are managed by associations. So people manage themselves, organise themselves. All members are responsible for their dōjō. There is no distinction between the dōjō on one side and customers on the other. Everyone is at home and at others’ homes at the same time. So it’s a space that’s a little out of time, out of this world, thanks to the direction Itsuo Tsuda gave it, and the direction that Régis Soavi, my father, has continued for 50 years, and which I myself am now trying to continue. To continue to provide this impetus. To make people understand that it’s possible to live differently.

LV: Yes, so the dōjō is the place where we come to practise the Way. I’d like to come back to this notion of martial arts, which cannot be something mechanical where the body is an object. So it’s much more connected to this dimension of breath. And therefore to spirituality. So your father recites a norito in the morning.

MS: Yes, and not just my father. We all begin the session with this norito, which is a recitation. To be honest, we don’t even know what it means. It’s a moment, a way of putting ourselves in another state, another frame of mind. Sometimes my father uses this example, talking about a Schubert Lied that is in German – and maybe we don’t understand German. Yet when we listen to it, something resonates within us. We feel it, we hear it, it’s inexplicable.

LV: Yes. There are vowels that are sacred, particularly in Sanskrit, and the sound and vibration really have an effect. So it comes from Shintoism. It is an invocation to the original gods. I will read an excerpt where your father talks about this:

‘Régis Soavi says: “The norito does not belong to the world of religion, but certainly to the world of the sacred in the animistic sense. The vibrations and resonance produced by the pronunciation of this text bring us a feeling of calm, fulfilment and sometimes something that goes beyond that and remains inexpressible. Norito is misogi. In essence, it is never perfect; it changes and evolves. It is a reflection of a moment in our being.” ’

So let’s think about that while listening to Shannon Lay‘s song Sure.

LV: So today we’re talking about Master Itsuo Tsuda. And we’re talking about anarchism.

MS: Anarchism is a word that has become taboo. A word that is associated with violence and chaos. And in fact, we completely forget, we forget, and I would even say that it is surely done on purpose to detach it from what it was, from what anarchist philosophy still is. Anarchist philosophy is about self-organisation, self-management. It is order without power. It is simply a rejection of the domination of some over others. Ultimately, it is something that is not so unfamiliar. Even before the creation of states, let’s say around 3000 or 4000 BC, there were societies that were self-managed, and they existed for many thousands of years. And even after the creation of states, there were many places on earth that continued to be self-managed, with various ways of functioning.

There are a number of historians and researchers, such as Pierre Clastres and David Graber, who have conducted research and shown that all kinds of social organisations exist. What is certain is that even if there is a leader, the leader’s role is not one of coercion, it is not to direct others. It is often a mediating role, someone who has to find a way to organise things but who does not decide anything alone. The leader cannot give orders to others. Anarchism is about rediscovering this individual power and something that is being organised with others.

Anarchist movements have been very powerful. There have indeed been a few acts of violence that have been blown out of proportion in order to discredit the movement, to discredit a whole rich and complex body of thought. There is not one form of anarchism, there are many. And this is something that greatly influenced the thinking of Itsuo Tsuda, including the thinking of my father, Régis Soavi. This search for freedom, not only inner freedom, of course, but also freedom with others.

In the dōjō, it is really a question of taking charge of all aspects of our existence. Therefore, it is important to understand that this is not a matter of freedom that is detached from reality. Aurélien Berlan contrasts the fantasy of deliverance, where we would be freed from all material contingencies, but obviously freed alongside other people who are slaves, whether they be energy slaves, technological slaves or other dominated people. So, as opposed to the fantasy of deliverance, he talks about the quest for autonomy. Taking back control of our own abilities in all aspects of our lives. This obviously ties in with subsistence feminists, who also talk about this very important aspect of reclaiming all aspects of our lives.

And that’s what we’re looking for in a dōjō. In ours, at least, there is obviously the practical aspect of the body, but there is also the fundamental aspect of this organisation, of breaking out of a relationship where we arrive, we are customers, we pay and we want something in return. We are all involved, we are all working to keep this dōjō alive so that the place exists, for ourselves. It’s not about saying we have to do it for others, I’m sacrificing myself… not at all. Each of us does it for themselves but in collaboration with others.

dojo — Dōjō Scuola della Respirazione, Milan

LV: Yes, what I find really interesting about this path – and here we find, as you mention in your book, things in common with the Kogis in particular – is that ‘True morality arises from within’⁵. This work, this inner change, will lead to outer change. And you also say that the creation of the state has led to the dispossession of the creative values of the individual.

MS: Morality comes from within, as Kropotkin, the anarchist, says, as does Itsuo Tsuda, and indeed the Kogi people. It is not a question of having external rules, prohibitions, or injunctions, but of rediscovering the morality that makes us want to collaborate with one another.

There is also the notion of attentiveness. The Kogis live without leaders. But we live with domination. We are both dominated and dominant towards others. We cannot simply say, ‘Ah yes, this is freedom, we will do without leaders and everything will be easy.’ That is not reality. The reality is that we need to re-educate ourselves to understand the attentiveness and self-discipline that this requires. We need to rediscover both our power and our capacity for organisation.

Ultimately, there is a realisation that is somewhat similar to what Winona LaDuke says about Native Americans: they know they are oppressed, but they do not feel powerless. On the other hand, white people do not consider themselves oppressed, but they feel powerless. Well, that’s exactly it. We rediscover that ultimately we are dominated, we are dominant, but we are not powerless.

I think that was also the meaning of Itsuo Tsuda‘s statement, ‘Utopia exists nowhere except where we are.’⁶ It is about rediscovering that power today and now. And I am here to say that it is possible.

LV: Definitely. (laughs)

MS: Even if it takes time! It’s not a magic wand. It’s something you have to work at, discover. It requires a journey within your body, as well as within your mind. There are philosophical tools, tools for intellectual understanding, and tools for breaking free from what we have fully integrated since early childhood. From early childhood, children are taught not to listen to themselves, not to say ‘no’, not to be themselves. So, we end up with people who internalise domination, and we have to work to break free from that, but it is possible. It is possible to follow this path and become at least a little bit freer.

LV: Yes, we are on that path anyway. So you talk about this culture of separation, particularly when you mention babies crying, saying that it is not particularly normal for babies to cry in other cultures. In Kenya, there is more of a culture of closeness and attachment.

MS: The culture of separation is a way of separating ourselves from ourselves, from our bodies, from our feelings, and obviously from each other. It means thinking that it’s normal to let a baby cry, to drag a child down the street who is screaming because they don’t want to go to school, that it’s normal, that life is like that, that in any case you have to ‘lose your life earning it’, as the 68ers said.

And yet, is that what life is all about? Isn’t it possible to refuse to play this game altogether? Can’t we rediscover that we are free inside ourselves? Of course, people will say to me, ‘Yes, but what about money? Yes, but there are debts… Yes, but we have to pay for this, that’s how it is, in life we have to suffer…’ – but who actually said that? Really? Why? In fact, maybe just, no. Maybe we feel like we have all these chains, and in a way we do, of course. They don’t just fall off with a wave of a magic wand.

But we can forge a path that brings us together and where we will realise that the children’s tears may indeed express the fundamental truth that things are not right at all!

LV: I think that’s a very nice conclusion! So Manon Soavi, I really recommend this book, The Anarchist Master, Itsuo Tsuda – The Art of Living Utopia.

Notes

1
[see also shugyō 修行 (ascetic practices), gyōja 行者 (ascetic person) and their fusion shugyōja 修行者]
2
[see The Path of Less, Chap. IX (end), Yume Editions, 2014, p. 87
3
[see The Unstable Triangle, Chap. I, 2019, Yume Editions, p. 15]
4
[see The Unstable Triangle (op. cit.), Chap. VII
5
[see Even if I don’t think, I am, Chap. X, 2020, Yume Editions, p. 76]
6
[quote from a 1975 letter written by Tsuda to Geneva dōjō (Katsugen Kai). See also The Way of the Gods, Chap. 1 & 2, 2021, Yume Editions]

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR

Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master

5 December 2025 name

[Oct. 22] We are delighted to announce the publication of Manon Soavi‘s book Itsuo Tsuda, The Anarchist Master, published by L’Originel – Charles Antoni (France)¹.

Delivery delays are affecting distribution, but it is already possible to order it from your bookshop (which we recommend) or online from the publisher (€19 plus €2.50 postage for France) or from French Fnac or Amazon.

In this essay, Manon Soavi offers an exploration of Itsuo Tsuda‘s philosophy and its points of convergence with libertarian ideals. Indeed, Itsuo Tsuda‘s philosophy draws mainly on two cultures that are rarely considered on the same level: Taoism and anarchism. Anarchism, like Taoism, is a path to freedom, but in order to bring about other modes of existence and relationship, as proposed by anarchism, humans must first and foremost rediscover themselves, their unity of being and their power to act.

In parallel, and based on Itsuo Tsuda‘s philosophical and historical trajectory, Manon Soavi brings his ideas into dialogue with those of other thinkers, philosophers, researchers and scholars, such as Miguel Benasayag, Jean François Billeter, Mona Chollet, Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, Emma Goldman… She thus addresses topics related to the capacity for self-determination, the search for autonomy, the reversal of perspectives, and the change of relational paradigms.

Click on the image to enlarge the summary:

Several events are planned to present the book and meet Manon Soavi, including on 8 November at Tenshin dōjō in Paris and on 19 November at Yuki Hō dōjō in Toulouse. For a complete list of bookshop events, visit this page.

Vidéo de présentation

Notes

1
reunified since 2025 within French publisher L’Originel (Obernai)

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT

The World We Live In

4 December 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

Our world is sick with violence (whether physical, verbal, psychological, symbolic, social, economic, etc.), sick with a dominant model based on competition, appropriation and fear that has been in place for centuries. From the powerful who own the world to our entertainment and media, violence is everywhere. The world often leaves us no choice: we either perpetrate violence or suffer it, or even both¹. For women, violence is often inherent in the very fact of being born female. Throughout our lives, we will be underestimated, mistreated and judged against the male model to which we are constantly compared. Martial arts are no exception to the rule: violence, condescension and sexist comparisons do exist. Much more than we want to admit.

Violence is therefore a festering wound that affects us all, with women unfortunately on the front line. While Aikidō is obviously not a solution to all the world’s problems, I believe that this art can be an exceptional tool for women to break free from the constraints imposed on them. It is a path that can lead us to overcome violence and escape the dualism of victim or perpetrator. To achieve this, I believe that the first step is to reclaim the issue of violence so that it is no longer seen as an inevitable fate.

Fate? Or political choices?

To do this work, we need to break free from certain deeply ingrained patterns of thinking. The historically narrow view that women have been subordinate to men since the dawn of time is no longer relevant. As some researchers have shown², during the thousands of years of prehistory, like other species in the animal kingdom, women and men gathered, hunted, cared for others, fought and used projectile weapons. As people became more sedentary, the status of women deteriorated throughout the world, but it was in Europe, during the Renaissance, that religion and political power brought about a decisive turning point in the history that shaped us. In her book In Defense of Witches, author Mona Chollet explores the immense violence of the witch hunts in Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. These mass crimes, which have been largely ignored, not only killed thousands of women and children under the pretext of “witchcraft”, but also helped shape the world we live in today ‘by sometimes wiping out entire families, spreading terror, and mercilessly repressing certain behaviours and practices that are now considered intolerable’³. The status of women was already difficult, but this historical episode marked a historic turning point in our world. Our European culture would establish itself as the dominant universal model, a consequence, among other things, of our conquests. In her book, Mona Chollet analyses the deep trauma that would remain with women and the indelible message that would be engraved and passed down from generation to generation, from woman to woman: submit! Do not rebel, for those who did so paid dearly.

Women of the 21^st century, we are the heirs to this ultra-violent past, and the wound still festers, kept alive by the accumulation of violence today. In a number of countries, it is true that we no longer risk being burned and tortured – but that is because it is no longer necessary, as we have accepted the rules of the game and have even internalised violence to such an extent that we often no longer see it! And if we ever doubt, violence will always be there to remind us, in case we forget our place.

Maître Bow Sim Mark. Experte en Fu Style Wudangquan Shaolin (Tai chi, Bagua, boxe Tanglangquan) et mère de l'acteur Donnie Yen (star des films Ip man de Wilson Yip) — Master Bow Sim Mark. Kung Fu expert in Wudangquan Shaolin Style (Tai chi, Bagua, Tanglangquan boxing) and mother of actor Donnie Yen (star of _Ip man_ movies by Wilson Yip. Photo courtesy of Bow Sim Mark Tai Chi Arts Association.)

Women and violence

As a woman who practises and teaches martial arts (aikidō, jūjutsu, kenjutsu), I cannot help but feel concerned by this issue and seek answers. While yesterday’s society told women that they should not react, today’s society seems to oscillate between perpetuating this silence and immobility and suggesting that we become as aggressive as men (at work, in love, in combat, etc.). Are we then condemned, in order to liberate ourselves, to become as violent as men? Is this desirable? And can we compete on the same level?

Should we, like Hollywood, make the same action films but with female heroes to keep up with the times? Personally, while I do not doubt for a moment the power of women, I doubt that this is the right way to express it. So how can we find the right balance?

First, we must go back to the root cause: education. From childhood onwards, boys are allowed to occupy space, run, climb, kick a ball around, compete with each other, test their bodies and thus gain confidence in their developing bodies. Girls, on the other hand, are more or less excluded from this space. They are confined to more static games and cute, frivolous toys. Not to mention the clothes “so pretty” that hinder them. Their bodies are thus denied the experience of unfolding and discovering their power. We are conditioned to internalise any expression of violence and seek to please others. Fictional female role models will also show us the way.

As I have already said, I did not go to school and was not educated “like a girl”. I therefore remember my anger as a teenager at the lack of reaction from female characters in books and films. I did not understand why they were so submissive, so passive, or why they became schemers working in the shadows, using their charms to get revenge. As a result, I did not identify with the female characters at all, but always with the male characters, who took action, fought for great causes, and were free to do as they pleased.

As adults, women still find it very difficult to allow themselves to react to violence. I am not saying that victims are responsible for their assaults, absolutely not! But we are thus doubly punished, as Virginie Despentes says: ‘An ancestral, relentless political enterprise teaches women not to defend themselves. As usual, there is a double bind: we are made to understand that there is nothing more serious [than rape], and at the same time, that we must neither defend ourselves nor seek revenge.’⁴ I recently spoke with a young woman (an engineer and team leader in her company) about how difficult it is to break out of this pattern. She said that she was often afraid of her own violence if she reacted, so she often let the aggressor have his way, waiting a little longer (it may be “just” inappropriate gestures, heavy flirting or other ordinary violence) rather than reacting and having that reaction judged as disproportionate or hysterical.

Why is this the case? Is it fundamentally feminine? Philosopher Elsa Dorlin provides some answers by discussing a process she calls ‘the fabrication of defenceless bodies’⁵. This philosopher studies the ways in which bodies considered subordinate (slaves, colonised peoples, women, etc.) find their ability to defend themselves restricted, in the broadest sense of the term. For her, if women are “defenceless”, it is because of social forces that have been at work for centuries. We are taught that if we react, things will get worse, that it is inevitable that we will be attacked at some point, and that men will always be stronger. This male superiority is often nothing more than a fantasy.

Naginat et kusarikama : Shimada Teruko. Article la violence — Shimada Teruko sensei, expert of Jikishin-kage-ryū. Photo from Michel Random’s book _Les arts martiaux ou l’esprit des budô_ [Martial Arts or the Spirit of Budō], 1977, pub. Nathan (Paris)

I was “lucky” not to be seriously assaulted; so far, I have “only” experienced “minor” assaults. When I was a young girl, for example, I slept in a shared room in a building reserved for a summer music academy. In the middle of the night, a boy entered the room, whose door had no lock (which had shocked me when I arrived). He was drunk and came in shouting that he wanted to kiss us. Half awake, I heard him lean over the first bed where another girl was sleeping. She protested but was still more or less “groped”. I hear him approaching my bed, he leans over and gets my arm in his face. He is surprised, staggers and leaves the room after a few expletives. I was lucky, yes, and I did not use “Aikidō” to ward him off. But in my mind, I was certain that I was justified in reacting immediately, and that made all the difference. I am not advocating violence for violence’s sake, but the ability to exercise one’s capacity to react, to use the rage that rises within us when we are attacked. But we did not choose to be in this situation! The challenge then is to react effectively and, if possible, proportionately, but in that order of priority.

But practising an art such as Aikidō can be, like Jūjutsu practised by English feminists in the early 20^th century, more than just a defensive art, but a “total art“ ‘because of its ability to create new practices of self that are political, physical and intimate transformations. By freeing the body from clothing that hinders movement, by deploying movements […] by exercising a body that inhabits, occupies the street, moves, balances’⁶ and thus establishes another relationship with the world, another way of being. Little by little, our posture changes from ‘how can I defend myself without hurting anyone’ to ‘being myself’ and what means are at my disposal to maintain my integrity. Perhaps rage will be needed as a force for action, perhaps it will be enough to stand up and say ‘no’. It is our determination that will change everything.

Violence or coagulated energy

When we talk about violence, we are not usually referring to the violence of the wind or the violence of the feelings that pass through us. And yet, the word originally referred to willpower, strength (the force of the wind, the heat of the sun, etc.), even deriving from the Latin vis, which can mean life force or vitality! So why is this energy, this vitality, so often expressed through destruction? Tsuda Itsuo sensei explained:

‘When this invisible energy is unleashed, it gives rise to violence without justifiable reason, and then one feels pleasure in hearing shrill cries and crashing sounds. On the other hand, when reason curbs this unleashing, the unconsumed energy coagulates and prevents normal balancing.

[…]

[…] there are a great many people who, simply in order to deal with society, run around in circles in search of an easy solution, and never find the radical solution: the awakening of the being.’⁷

Once we realise that blocking our energy and reactions traps us in the unbearable role of “victim” and can lead us to express our vitality by destroying others or ourselves, we can then take the next step: working to control violence. Stopping a hand, a word, looking the other person in the eye. Controlling does not necessarily mean restraining violence. It is not easy, but it also means assessing situations to know what the next step will be. We no longer hope that the other person will not approach us; we know that if we wait, it will be too late, and then the violence will be there. One of the tasks at hand is to be more sensitive, to feel our own state and that of others.

In our school, the tools for this awakening, which comes through the body, are Aikidō and Katsugen undō, which is part of Seitai. ‘The principle of Seitai is extremely simple: life always seeks to balance itself, despite the structured ideas we heap upon it. Life acts through our instincts and not our faculty of reason.’⁸ Thus, it is not a matter of external action or letting off steam, but rather a subtle balancing of our own energy. Through the involuntary movement that allows it to flow, it pacifies us from within.

For its part, the practice of Aikidō confronts us with the energy that comes to us from others. How do we deal with this, how do we react? In our school, the answer is harmonisation. Even if the other person is a danger, especially if the other person is a danger, harmonisation is necessary. As Ellis Amdur says, ‘There is, in fact, a naked intimacy in hand-to-hand combat […]. Expertise is not just skill at movement or technique – true expertise is the ability to be as un-barriered as a baby’⁹. Of course, harmonising does not mean giving up. It is a subtle process that leads to not really using force against force, but to guiding, to channelling that force elsewhere. It is through the areas of focus that are breathing, the development of sensation and non-doing that we practise. This is not a question of cheap non-violence. On the contrary, our dojos offer daily practice, and the intensity will gradually increase, always depending on tori’s ability to maintain these areas of focus, even when faced with attacks that become faster and more demanding. Women find a special place in this work, where they can exercise their abilities and gradually discover that ‘it is not so much a matter of learning to fight as of unlearning not to fight.’¹⁰

These two practices enable us to regain a more refined sensitivity. Often, in order to cope with things, we end up no longer feeling anything: neither suffering, nor the caress of the wind, nor, unfortunately, danger. Ellis Amdur puts it this way: ‘To truly survive in high-risk encounters, one has to develop an exquisite sensitivity to other people, both one’s own allies and one’s enemies. The development of kan [勘, intuition] is essential.’¹¹ This ability to sense others and listen to one’s intuition is essential in all aspects of our lives.

Aikidō is not some self-defence, it is much better than that, it is the possibility of rebalancing our relationship with the world. Reconciling with ourselves and the world by rediscovering our inner strength. This may seem very ambitious, but it is a possibility. I know a practitioner who, for years, following the violence she had suffered, had terrible nightmares. She would regularly wake up in the night screaming. When she reached a stage in Aikidō where the intensity of the exchanges increased, she began to react in her dreams. She still had nightmares, but she was no longer passive; she reacted in her dreams so that she would no longer be a victim. This “simple” fact was of paramount importance to her and her journey.

Naginat et kusarikama. Article la violence — Shimada Teruko sensei, cf. supra

Female gaze

In 1975, film critic Laura Mulvey theorised the male gaze in cinema, characterised by the fact that the camera always has a male point of view, looking at women’s bodies as objects. Since then, some female filmmakers have spoken of a female gaze, which is not the opposite (viewing men’s bodies as objects) but seeks to place itself at the heart of the experience of individuals, particularly women. This monopoly of representation based on the male point of view, highlighted in cinema, can be found in almost all fields.

This is especially true in martial arts, which are seen as almost exclusively masculine because they are warrior arts. But history is written by the victors. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, this is the danger of a single story: ‘Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story.’¹² Sometimes, telling the story from the other point of view means repairing deep societal traumas.

As I said earlier, the film industry today shows us more and more female heroes who fight. Although I recognised a certain satisfaction of my teenage frustration in this, I quickly grew tired of it. These women fight “like men” and are not realistic. So they are still not really the kind of female role models I would have wanted when I was sixteen. In Aikidō, as in most fields, the over-representation of men gives us a masculine universe with its physical and mental characteristics as our horizon and model of practice. Women who want to persevere often have to prove that they can perform on the same level as their male counterparts.

I am not advocating a feminine way of practising Aikidō, but rather the possibility that there are other ways of practising that are equally respectable and respected. Moreover, if the idea of a feminine way of practising Aikidō seems so unbearable to us women, it is because we still value a certain perspective, a certain way of doing things. We have done so for so long that we have internalised the superiority of a model that is no longer even masculine, but simply THE model. In order to recognise our excellence, we must compete with this model, in the same way, on the same ground, otherwise it will be a despised sub-discipline. We forget to ask ourselves the fundamental question: why is this male model more justified, more universal? It is, incidentally, a contemporary Western male model, as other cultures have had other models.

This phenomenon can be found in all fields. For example, writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō explored this issue of the Western monopoly on science:

‘I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads, which would consequently have evolved along different paths, would we not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art – would they not have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact, our conception of physics itself, and event the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners’.¹³

The trend towards “situated knowledge” in science follows the same line of thinking. Initiated by women, this trend is based on work that describes and analyses how all scientific knowledge is “situated”, coloured by culture, historical context, and the position (social, gender, etc.) of researchers. According to this trend, all knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is partial, and claiming to have neutral and objective knowledge is an illusion. It is by multiplying points of view and positions, and by explaining and accepting our situated nature, that we can move towards more solid and reliable knowledge.

Another example is that Native Americans can teach us a different way of adapting to the environment than our own:

‘Unlike European peasants stooped to the grind of agriculture, anxiously accumulating grain against future want, the Indian appeared free because confident of his ability to bear hardship; leisured because tough’¹⁴ rather than far-sighted. Would it be possible to live without worrying about the future?

Similarly, is it possible that there is another way to fight? If prehistoric women were capable of fighting, there were also the Celts, the Amazons of Amazonia, several traditions of female warriors in Africa (the Amazons of Dahomey, the Linguères of Senegal, or among the Zulus), and there were also some in China and Japan. Or even Native American women¹⁵, who could be chiefs, shamans, healers, or warriors. And then there were the women of the French Revolution, the anarchists, and the English suffragettes. And surely there were other forgotten cultures where women were the bearers of specific martial traditions, and there is no reason to think that they could not have been effective in this field, depending on the goals sought. I would give anything to see how they fought, how they took advantage of their physical and psychological characteristics.

Hino Akira Sensei recounts his encounter with Tai Chi Chuan and Shaolin Kung Fu:

‘The teacher was a woman, an old lady who was very flexible. I was perplexed and wondered if it was a form of health gymnastics or a martial art. I asked her the question and she replied that it was a martial art. I then said to her, “Excuse me, but if it is a martial art, would you be so kind as to show me what you would do against a chūdan tsuki, for example?”. She said that was no problem, and I attacked her. Before I knew what was happening, I was thrown!

I thought to myself, “It really exists!”. Although I am not tall, I was still a young man full of vigour, and an old granny had just surpassed my attack with her flexibility. I had just discovered that there really were principles that allowed gentleness to overcome strength. I was stunned, but I had just discovered one of the keys that would allow me to continue my search.’¹⁶

Why, in Aikidō, could we not also develop our own way of doing things? If Aikidō is unique, it is in its multiplicity, both Yin and Yang, masculine and feminine. It does not matter if a 45kg woman is unable to perform kokyū hō when faced with a ryōte-dori grip from a 70kg man; we are competent precisely because we do not find ourselves in that position! If we move well beforehand, or if as a last resort we headbutt or kick you know where… So why compare? Imagine an arena with a strict rule that tori must wait passively for uke to arrive and grab his wrists in a downward blocking manner. Could the 70-year-old Master Ueshiba in this situation have beaten the 40-year-old Master Ueshiba grabbing his wrists like that? Probably not if he had tried to do as the 40-year-old did. It was precisely because he had a different body, a very different feeling of attack, that he was capable of something else.

It was the same absurdity of comparison within a defined framework that enabled Anton Geesink, a 1.98m tall Dutchman weighing 115 kg, to defeat the Japanese in jūdō in 1961. But was it not absurd to get to that point?

The power of women lies in being women. As Abe Toyoko sensei, a 70-year-old emeritus teacher of Tendō-ryū, says:

‘The first [naginata] tournament I saw my teacher in, it was amazing. She walked her opponent all the way across the hall, from the east side to the west side, not using any technique, just her stance and spirit. Everyone, even the old teachers were enthralled. Then she moved to cut, just once. […] She won the match’. ‘To be like a woman is not simply to be soft. To be woman-like is to be as strong or as soft, as servile or as demanding as a situation calls for: to be appropriate and act with integrity. This […] is the heart of real budo.’¹⁷

Paradoxically, it is by developing our specificity that we can create a completely different idea of an art, of a universal science. A multiple universal full of a diversity of colours and forms. An Aikidō that embodies the diversity of human beings in general.

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in July 2020 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 2.

Notes

1
this title is a reference to The World We Live In: Self-Defence by Edith Garrud (newspaper Votes for Women, 4 March 1910)
2
cf. e. g. Marylène Patou-Mathis, Neanderthal, Une autre humanité [Neanderthal, Another Humanity], 2006, éd. Perrin (Paris), coll. Tempus; and Alison Macintosh, ‘Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe’, Science Advances, Vol. 3, No. 11, 29 Nov. 2017
3
Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, Introduction, ‘ “A Victim of The Moderns, Not of The Ancients” ’, pub. St. Martin’s Press, March 2022. [Our transl. from the original French: Sorcières, la puissance invaincue des femmes, 2018, pub. La découverte (Paris), p. 13]
4
Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, ‘She’s so depraved, you can’t rape her’ (3^rd Part), 2009, pub. Serpent’s Tail (London), p. 37. Trans. from the original French: 2006, pub. Grasset (Paris)
5
Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre : une philosophie de la violence [Defending Oneself: A Philosophy of Violence], 2017, pub. La Découverte (Paris), p. 21 or p. 66
6
ibid.
7
Tsuda Itsuo, The Dialogue of Silence, Chap. VIII, Yume Editions, 2018, p. 68
8
ibid., p. 69
9
Ellis Amdur, Steal the Technique, KogenBudo blog, 21 Mar. 2021
10
Defending Oneself (op. cit.)
11
Ellis Amdur, Senpai-Kohai: The Shadow Ranking System, KogenBudo blog, 21 Mar. 2021
12
Chimanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story (from 10’30”), UTube channel TED, 7 Oct. 2009
13
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows, 1977, Leete’s Island Books (Sedgwick, state of Maine), p. 7 (Trans. by Thomas J. Harper & Edward George Seidensticker from the original Japanese: 陰翳礼讃, In-ei Raisan, 1933)
14
Matthew Bunker Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in the Age of Distraction, Introduction, ‘Individuality’, 2015, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), p. 19
15
Patrick Deval, Squaws, la mémoire oubliée [Squaws, The Forgotten Memory], 2014, pub. Hoëbeke (Paris)
16
Léo Tamaki & Frédérick Carnet, Budoka no Kokoro (in French),‘Hino Akira, the Tengu of Wakayama’, Oct. 2013, self-pub.
17
Ellis Amdur, Interview with Abe Toyoko of the Tendo-ryu, KogenBudo blog, 21 Mar. 2021

Articles_Blog, Calligraphies, EN, FR, IT, Manon Soavi

The Empty Trace

25 November 2025 name

by Manon Soavi

‘Chouang Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher, said 2,500 years ago: “True human beings breathe from their heels, whereas ordinary people breathe from their throat.”

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.’¹

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 books²and 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.

L'ermite véritable, calligraphie de Itsuo Tsuda — _The true hermit_, calligraphy by Tsuda Itsuo

1
Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. I, 2013, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 15
2
nine books (plus one posthumous) published in French between 1973 and 1984 – still available[ – then in English from 2013 to 2025]

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, Manon Soavi

Fujitani Miyako, the ‘Matilda effect’ of Aikido?

3 January 2025 manon

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!

Tenshin dojo de Miyako Fujitani Osaka — Tenshin dojo of Miyako Fujitani in Osaka

The Matilda effect

‘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.

Miyako Fujitani senseï — Fujitani Miyako sensei

The story of Fujitani Miyako

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.

Descent into hell

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.

Miyako Fujitani et sa fille — Fujitani Miyako and her daughter

Every cloud has a silver lining

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

Aikido: being a woman is an advantage

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

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in Self et Dragon (Spécial Aikido n° 17) in April 2024.

Notes:

translated for the French Wikipedia entry ‘Effet Matilda’, preferred to the English entry (bold emphasis added by the author)
Tsuda Itsuo, The Path of Less, Chap. III, Yume Editions (Paris), 2014, pp. 33–34 (1^st ed. in French, 1975, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 31–32)

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT

Zanshin, The Spirit of The Ordinary

2 September 2020 name

By Manon Soavi

As an Aikido teacher, as well as a pianist, I went across the notion of Zanshin through several experiences along my path. When I started studying several koryūs fifteen years ago (Bushuden Kiraku Ryū, Niten Ichi Ryū, Choku Yushin Ryū, and some Shinkage Ryū), I also went deeper into this notion when working with weapons, by handling a sword, a bō, a kusarigama, or even unarmed through the many jujitsu katas which are part of these ancient schools.

Though I probably still have a long way to go in martial arts, I wish to share here some thoughts on the topic.

I notice that one of the current human contradictions is our fascination for the external force that goes along with our contempt for the sensitivity and the sensations of our body which we relegate to the level of sentimentalism. Paradoxically, our Western way of life has never been so easy, with so few physical efforts to make, and our ancestors were probably more able to endure walking, cold or even pain, given there were not as many means to take charge of the slightest of their pains, or to assist the slightest of their efforts. Yet did they lack sensitivity? I do not think they did, because the capacity to feel before thinking has always been essential to live and Zanshin, from my experience, is above all a matter of sensation and presence at the present moment.

Zanshin can be translated as dwelling or remaining spirit but for Eastern cultures the body and the spirit are not two separate things. This “remaining spirit” corresponds to a precise sensation, and it is this sensation that guides us in its application regardless of the discipline one practises. These sensations are specific either to the one who acts or to the one who receives. Zanshin is a sensation and at the same time it is a state that we (re)discover.

Historically principles such as Zanshin, Mushin, etc., refer less to ideas than to realities that have been experienced by generations of people. They bring us back to direct, real experiences, which, in order to be passed on, have been “conceptualised”. We are therefore talking about an act or a state we can recover, despite our differences of times and cultures. They are not great principles gone with Samurais and their time, not even principles restricted to martial arts. They are principles that pervade the whole culture, especially the Japanese culture, but also and above all the Chinese culture.

The image: an eye-opener

Ancient Chinese would teach through images, evocations that were to give rise, that were to reveal, within the heart of the apprentice, a sensation that would guide him/her towards the understanding of the core of the master’s teaching. A physical understanding since it was about calling on a real experience that the apprentice would be able to share. They would mainly use nature to reveal the sensation, for observing nature was at that time a life experience shared by all. Yet we also find this way of transmitting in Western arts. Like in music for instance, because beyond some basic advice, the gesture of a musician cannot be transmitted nor intellectually understood.

What makes the difference between a beginner who presses a piano key and the master who plays the first note of a sonata ? It is objectively the same key and the same mechanism to strike the string. Yet the two sounds will be completely different. It’s the master’s sensitivity that will make the difference. Hence, year after year, the apprentice will seek how to make his/her instrument resonate differently, and the master will seek how to awaken in the apprentice the sensation he [the master] has inside himself. That is why some masters use evocative words, they speak of playing “at the bottom” or of “kneading‘ the keyboard, which objectively does not mean anything at all! All these images call on our inner resources, to retranscribe onto wood and strings an inner sensation and so that this sensation would be, in addition, shared by the listener. This is where we touch on the fusion of sensitivity that allows us to feel what happens inside the other person, it is a transmission from sensitivity to sensitivity. Like a Zanshin that will be right, genuine, only if both persons can feel it.

Then, beyond what we objectively know about what Zanshin means, I find interesting to search inside ourselves which experiences we can relate this principle to. How to make it concrete for us.

The spirit of the ordinary

During the years I have worked as a musician, sometimes I have been in a state that I liken to Zanshin. When I played with other musicians and singers I had to be both totally receptive to what happened outside, to the other musicians, and at the same time concentrated on my own gestures to play my piano part. Uncertainties of a live concert are such that I could not count on the fact that everything would go as planned. This never happens, no matter how one is prepared, being on stage is a unique experience. Preparation aims at reducing as much as possible the unexpected but absolutely not at removing it. One has then to react instantly, to stick as close as possible [to what is happening] for harmony to keep on going. To be hyper-vigilant and at the same time to keep a vague concentration, because as soon as I would focus on a single part I would lose the whole. This sentence by Musashi perfectly summarizes this state for me: ‘In daily life as well as in strategy, it is necessary to have an ample and broad mind and to carefully keep it very straight, not too tight and not at all loose’¹

Musashi also said that the ordinary spirit must be the one of the fight, and that the fighting spirit must be the one of the ordinary². Yet one cannot always be on guard, hence the fighting spirit does not mean being “on guard”, it means something different… We may also suspect that this state of mind is very far from the apathy that we very often come across today. The translation of Zanshin by remaining mind might give us a hint, more than the somehow reductive idea of vigilance.

Even though today only a few of us encounter “real fighting”, we all face the many little “ordinary fights” in our daily lives. And sometimes Zanshin can pop up there too. This happened to me during some unpleasant experiences I have had.

I remember once when, trapped in a festival during several days, in a small village, all female participants were embarrassed and worried because the person in charge of the workshop, a renowned violinist and professor, would put his hands on them in an inappropriate manner. I was then twenty-one and between lessons and rehearsals, the girls would talk to each other about these very awkward moments and would fear them. During a common meal, the professor started walking along the table, passing behind each of them to give the day rehearsal schedule. I could see him approaching, dispensing caresses in the hair or on the shoulders, little equivocal jokes etc., and I could see with dismay the girls lowering down their heads and waiting for the inevitable as he passed by, or laughing with a tight laugh. It was for me inconceivable not to do something whatever, so I looked at him coming up to me, not knowing what I would do, and before he passed behind me I turned to him and looked at him right into his eyes while talking about the schedule. I know that at that moment my eyes were saying ‘No’. He stopped and did not touch me. During all the workshop I remained present, without ever being opened to it. He never touched me.

This did not happen with only one man, several teachers and other drunk boys understood they had better stay away from me. Yet what would I have done? I don’t know. In all these little situations that happened to me, what always struck me is that everything was very predictable and it was in the end relatively simple to hold them on bay, it was “just” about being there and listening to this sensation of danger that reaches us before anything happens. Of course things would have been different in case of a more serious aggression, that is a different topic, but we also come across a lot of these “small‘ aggressions which, if we endure them, being unable to react, will leave an imprint in our heart and in our bodies.

Being influenced

My Aikido work since childhood, as a path – a search – towards harmonizing with others, has helped me, I am certain of it, to go through hard times, as it has helped me to work in symbiosis with other musicians. Because our way to interact with others, either negatively or positively, is determined by our inner attitude. The fact of not fighting against the influence of the other person, would he/she be a musician or an attacker, is decisive. The fact of understanding for the two of us.

Chinen Kenyū sensei expresses it with his words: ’The technique is uke [receive], the spirit is attack. […] When one has mastered the principle of uke, there is no longer any attack or defense. Uke is beyond this duality, and this has a profound impact on our being. […] When one is at ease with facing any attack, one develops a self-assurance that allows one to welcome everything, to face anything.’³

In our life, quite often to defend ourselves, we refuse to be influenced by the other person, yet by doing so we, de facto, close the only channel that allows us to feel and act according to what the other person does: our sensitivity. It is this sensitivity that enables us to feel the other person. Being in the attitude not to refuse the other person, accepting his/her influence does not mean being submitted to it. Absolutely not. Canceling the difference between oneself and the other person and thereby allowing fusion – if they move, I move, because we are but one. There is no longer any action-response. There is One. Basically it is the same thing, whether sensing what a baby who cannot yet express itself needs, sensing the bad intentions of a person or sensing when the singer will start.

Tsuda sensei wrote: ‘Even if we understand and accept Aikido as a means of communion with the Universe, it will be purely on the spiritual plane. As soon as it is faced with real difficulties, the mind gives way to petty aggression.’⁴

While being maybe very far from the capacities of these masters, we can practise following that direction and this can be useful for our lives. In order to work in the spirit of communion the first step is to let go. If one has the head full of fears, beliefs, if one is confused then we no longer can expect the right action to spring out from our very depths. This genuine action that the Chinese call Wu Wei – non-action. We search for the exit in all directions, we try to defend ourselves, we refuse the other so to escape him/her but we bump into the wall. Fukuoka sensei used to say about the theoretical search for a genuine nutrition: ‘If you expect a bright world on the other side of the tunnel, the darkness of the tunnel lasts all the longer. When you no longer want to eat something tasty, you can taste the real flavor of whatever you are eating.’⁵

Zanshin, remaining spirit, is also a fine perception of reality that connects with the principle of yomi. We all think we see the reality, but actually quite often what we see is our interpretation of what surrounds us. Either – too naive – we lack vigilance, or – too damaged, traumatized –, we end up hyper-suspicious. And we become agressive. But whether the defensive spikes of our personal armours are turned towards ourselves or towards the others, the result will be wound and pain. And this does not enable us to live fully too. With an art such as Aikido or ancient koryūs, by putting ourselves into situation, by allowing ourselves to overcome our fears, this can help us to rediscover that we are not that weak.

Then we will discover a different way to adapt ourselves to reality which no longer means being overwhelmed by it. This is something that can be found in other arts, I find something of Zanshin in this sentence by Rikyū, master of chanoyu⁶ from the 16^th century, which one day answered to his disciple:

‘Make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so that it heats the water; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in summer suggest coolness, in winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain’.⁷

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in January 2020 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 27.

Notes

1
Tokitsu Kenji, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings, ‘Part Two – Musashi’s Writings’, ‘4. “Writings on the Five Elements” (Gorin no sho)’, ‘The Scroll of Water’, ‘State of Mind in Strategy’, Eng. transl. by Sherab Chödzin Kohn, 2004, Shambhala Publications
2
ibid.
3
Léo Tamaki, « Chinen Kenyū, au cœur des traditions d’Okinawa » [‘Chinen Kenyū, At the Heart of Okinawa’s Traditions’], review Yashima #4, May 2019, p. 26
4
Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, Chap. XVII, 2016, Yume Editions, p. 141
5
Fukuoka Masanobu, The One-Straw Revolution, Part IV, ‘Confusion About Food’, 1978, p. 126
6
chanoyu 茶の湯, improperly translated by ‘tea ceremony’, literally ‘tea hot-water’
7
Sen Sōshitsu, Tea Life, Tea Mind, ‘Host and Guest’, pub. John Weatherhill (New York & Tōkyō), 1979, p. 30–31

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, culture, EN, FR, IT, Manon Soavi

Dôjô, Another Spacetime

4 August 2019 name

By Manon Soavi

‘[…] The path to in-depth discovery of oneself […]’ said Tsuda sensei ‘is not a straight line towards paradise, it is tortuous.’ (1) Like classical musicians who spend their life in an infinite search for evolution, martial arts practitioners are on endless paths. Yet these paths are not devoid of meaning, signposts or verifications. One of the signposts Tsuda sensei left to his students is « Dōjō ».

He himself wrote on the topic : ‘As I said before, a dojo is not a space divided into parts and provided for certain exercices. Its a place where spacetime is not the same as in a secular place. The atmosphere is particularly intense. One enters and leaves the space bowing so to get sacralised and desacralised. I am told that in France one can come across dojos that are simply gyms or sports centres. Anyhow, as far as I am concerned, I want my dojo to be a dojo and not a sports club with a boss and its regulars, so as not to disturb the sincerity of the practitioners. This does not mean that they must keep a sullen and constipated face. On the contrary, we must maintain the spirit of peace, communion and joy.’ (2)

But why create Dōjōs? It is quite complicated and requires a lot of work!

To answer this question, one might want to get back to the reason why we practice. If each of us has a personal and complex answer, I personally join the opinion of those who think that we practice first and foremost to “be”. To genuinely “be”, would it be only during the time of a session.Then Aikidō is a tool to bring us back to ourselves. To start “being” on tatamis is a first step which starts with a letting go: to accept stepping onto a tatami and get in physical contact with others! But a contact different from the one which is governed by social conventions. By the way I sometimes notice the reluctance of some beginners to put on a Keikogi, as if keeping their sport trousers allowed them to keep a social identity. The Keikogi puts us all on equal footing, outside of social markers, it rubs off body shapes, sexes, ages, incomes… Of course as long as one does not show off one’s grade, one’s dan, in order to impress beginners. If our state of mind during the practice is to share this experience with a partner, and not to show that we are the strongest, then the fear of the encounter with the other person can lessen. In the Itsuo Tsuda School, there is no grade outright, this settles the matter once and for all.

Adventure starts at dawn (3)

The Dōjō itself is a place out of the social time, out of the epoch, indifferent to the geographical location, and all of this also makes us completely disoriented. In addition we practice early in the morning (as Ueshiba O-sensei used to). Sessions take place every morning, all year long, at 6:45am during the week and 8am on weekends. Whether it snows, whether the sun shines, during vacations or on holidays, the Dōjō is open and sessions take place. Beyond the arbitrary slicing of time in our world.

Dawn is also a particular time. Between awakening and practising, there is almost nothing. Author Yann Allegret had put it as follows, in an article published in KarateBushido : ‘This happens around six in the morning. People leave their home and head towards a place. By foot. By car. With the metro. Outside, the streets of Paris are still asleep, almost empty. Dawn is drawing close. The Aikidō session starts at 6:45am. The rythm of the city is still that of the night. Those who are outside have not yet put on their armours necessary for the workday ahead. Something remains suspended in the air. At dawn, as the sun rises, one feels like walking within an interstice.’ (4)

An interstice of time and space where we can start working on ourselves. Because we have to lose, at least a little bit, our usual landmarks to recover the inner sensation of our own landmarks. The sensation of our biological speed rather than the time on the clock. In order to listen to oneself, silent surroundings are needed. And in our world silence is not so easy a thing to find!

A casket

This is why in Itsuo Tsuda School we give so much importance to creating Dōjōs. Of course it is possible to practice anywhere, to adapt to any circumstances. But, is it always to be desired? To resume the parallel with music (topic I know well, having been pianist and concertist during fifteen years) one can play outside, in a gym, in a school, a church, a hospital, etc. I have incidentally nothing against the democratization of classical music, quite the opposite. But a good concert hall, this is something else. It is a casket where the musician, instead of spending his time adapting to the situation, compensating for the bad acoustics or anything else, can immerse himself into listening, search through fineness and make music arise. Living both experiences is most probably necessary for a professional. For a beginner, finding concentration and calm in the midst of turmoil or airstreams frankly seems to me very difficult.

As to Aikidō, the Dōjō is the casket of this research. If one seizes this opportunity of having a Dōjō, another perspective opens up. Because if our mind can understand the philosophical concepts that underlie the discourses about the Path, about the soul, etc, for the body to truly experience them, that’s a different story. We are often too busy, too upset, and we do have the need for a frame that fosters some particular mindsets.

We can observe as our experience grows that the spirit of Dōjō is to be cultivated both in a rather precise manner and at the same time within something fluid and intangible. The same goes for religious worship places. Sometimes a small church in the countryside, a chapel hidden around the corner breathes more silence and sacredness than an immense cathedral visited by millions of tourists. It is the same with Dōjōs. It is neither the size, neither the absolute respect of rules that make a place different. Dōjō, « the place where one practices the path », is an alchemy between the place, the layout, the prevailing atmosphere. It is not enough that the Dōjō should be beautiful, although a tokonoma with a calligraphy mounted as kakejiku, an ikebana, do create an atmosphere, but it also has to be full and lively of its practitioners!

Architect Charlotte Perriand made this remark about the Japanese house, which « does not attempt to appear, but attempts to reconcile human beings with themselves » (5). It is a beautiful definition that perfectly applies to the notion of Dōjō. To reconcile human beings with themselves and therefore with nature which we are part of. We must feel this as soon as we enter the Dōjō. Often, people make a pause, even simple visitors. It is instinctive.

The prevailing activity in the Dōjō is also an essential aspect of it. We have the possibility to take in charge all aspects of life. Members do the bookkeeping, renovation works, cleaning… Incidentally Tamura sensei used to say about cleaning the Dōjō: ‘this cleaning not only concerns the Dōjō itself, but also the practitioner who, by this act, proceeds to cleaning in depth his own being. Which means that, even if the Dōjō looks clean, it still needs to be cleaned again and again.’ (6). Sinologist J. F. Billeter talks about the « proper activity » [in French « l’activité propre », where « propre » both means clean and personal] when human activity becomes the art of nurturing life in oneself. This was part of the research of ancient Chinese Taoists. For us in the 21^st century it is still about regaining a relationship to human activity, not as something separated from our life, allowing us to earn money and wait for holidays, but as a total activity. A participation of the entire being to an activity. The contribution of members to a common work in their Dōjō also enables us to own this Dōjō, not as a property, but as the real meaning of the common good: what belongs to everybody is mine, and not « What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody so why should I care ». This perspective inversion sometimes takes time. It cannot be learnt by words or by strict rules. It is to be discovered and it is to be felt by oneself.

I am sometimes told ‘in the Dōjō it is possible, but at work, at home, it is impossible’. I am not so sure about it. If what one has deepened in the Dōjō is enough, then one will be able to carry it over to somewhere else. Ueshiba O-sensei used to say ‘Dōjō, it is where I am’.

We may not revolutionise the world all at once, of course, but each time we will react differently the world around us will change. Each time we will be able to get back to our center and breath deeply, things will change. All our problems will not be solved, but we will live them differently,our reality will then also be different.

Having no money is an advantage

For Musashi Miyamoto everything can be an advantage. During a fight if the sun is on your back it is an advantage for you, if the sun is on the back of your enemy and he thinks he has the advantage, it is an advantage for you. Because everything depends on the individual, on how one orients oneself. Thus sometimes having no money is an advantage, because then we have no other solution than to create, to invent solutions. This is how we can create Dōjōs without any subsidies, entirely dedicated to one or two practices, what was a priori impossible becomes reality.

Sometimes difficulty stimulates us to create what is essential for us. By being a tenant, by volunteering, by doing things on our own, by not looking for perfection but for inner satisfaction. By listening to one’s own inner imperative and not birds of ill omen who tell you it will never work, before anything has even started.

Temporary? Like all that lives on earth, yes, but a temporary fully lived in the present moment. To live intensely, to follow one’s path, is not an “easy” thing. But poets already gave us some advice, like R. M. Rilke: ‘ We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that should never forsake us.’ (7)

Building while accepting instability, working to be satisfied and not to get an income or a reputation, here are values that go quite against our society of immediate pleasure, of consumption as compensation to boredom. If today there is not necessarily a struggle for life anymore in our societies, there is always a struggle for owning ever more. A happiness façade, a staged life, displayed on social networks. As theorized by situationists as early as the late sixties, what is directly lived moves away through representation, life then becomes an accumulation of shows, until its paroxysm when reality reverses: the representation of our life becomes more important than what we really and personally experience. As Guy Debord said ‘In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.’ (8)

In a Dōjō we work to reconnect with the true that perseveres within ourselves.

Katsugen Undō practice, which enables the awakening of the body capacities, goes exactly in the same direction. The awakening of the living, of our deeper nature. Reality is then no longer an oppression that prevents us from doing what we want with our life but quite on the contrary, it is the fine perception of reality that shows us that all depends on ourselves, on our orientation. Founder of Katsugen Undō Noguchi Haruchika sensei wrote some thoughts about Tchouang tseu’s work. These thoughts are of great interest and I cannot resist concluding this article by the intertwined voices of these two thinkers:

‘When Tsu-yu contracted a crippling illness, Tsu-szu visited him and asked, “Do you think your fate is unpleasant?” Tsu-yu’s answer was astounding: “Why should I find it unpleasant? If changes are brought about and my left arm turns into a rooster, I’ll use it to herald the dawn. If my right shoulder is transformed into a bullet, I’ll use it to bring down a pigeon for roasting. If my buttocks become carriage-wheels and my spirit a horse, I’ll ride along on them. Then I would need no other vehicle but myselfthat would be wonderful!” This is the road Tchouang-tseu walks. Within his attitude – that whatever happens, it is proper, and that when something happens, you go forward and affirm reality – there is not a trace of the resignation that lies in submitting to destiny. His affirmation of reality is nothing but the affirmation of reality. The dignity of the man is conveyed only by Lin Tsi’s words: “Wherever you are, be master.” ’ (9)

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in July 2019 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 25.

Notes:

1) Itsuo Tsuda, Cœur de Ciel Pur, Éditions Le Courrier du Livre, 2014, p. 86

2) ibid., p. 113

3) Jacques Brel, 1958

4) Yann Allegret, « À l’affût du moment juste » [‘On the Watch For the Right Moment’], KarateBushido 1402, pub. online (Feb. 2014)

5) Mona Chollet, Chez soi. Une odyssée de l’espace domestique, Edition La découverte, 2015, p. 311

6) Noboyoshi Tamura, Aikido, Les presses de l’AGEP, 1986, p. 19

7) Rainer-Maria Rilke, Lettres à un jeune poète, pub. Grasset (Paris), 1989, p. 73 (Eng. transl. by M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Company, 1962, p. 53)

8) Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle, pub. Gallimard (Paris), 1992, p. 12

9) Haruchika Noguchi, On Tchouang-Tseu, pub. Zensei

Photo credits: Jérémie Logeay, Paul Bernas, Anna Frigo

Aïkido, Articles_Blog, EN, FR, IT, Manon Soavi

Coming Out Of the Shadows

4 February 2019 name

By Manon Soavi

I discovered late in life that I was a girl. Of course I knew it, but it did not matter, it had no impact on my life, the way I would get in touch with other people and practice Aikido. I was not aware, unlike most of my fellow women citizens, that I was a “girl”, before being an “individual”. Part of the explanation for why I grew up outside of these ubiquitous schemes is that I have never been to school.

My parents had chosen a different path, it was a revolutionary decision, it was disobedience to “compulsory” schooling as Catherine Baker recounts in her book [1]… Of course this conditioning of women does not only take place within the school environment, but also within families, social circles, the media and culture in general. In families, it is always the little girls who are told that they are “so pretty, so cute”. Whether with a judo Keikogi or a pink tutu, they are being dressed like dollies. This is so present, as plain as the nose on your face, that we no longer consider it a problem. What is wrong with complimenting a little girl, a baby, on their clothes, their curls or smile? Well, precisely because the current importance of beauty and appearance is learnt during early childhood, and because this will brand them for life. It is with all those remarks and comments, these pink toys and these smiles that future women are being taught their traditional role: to please, and to enjoy pleasing. As writer Mona Chollet puts it: ‘the consequences of this alienation [for women] are far from being limited to a loss of time, money and energy. The fear of not pleasing, not meeting expectations, the subjugation to others’ judgments, the conviction of not being good enough to deserve love and attention from others both reflect and amplify a psychic insecurity and a self-depreciation whose effects reach every area of women’s life.’ [2].

In my case, I was preserved from this situation in my early childhood, I only discovered it during adolescence, I got shocked when I became aware that I was regarded and talked to, first and foremost as “a girl”! Of course I could not bear it and rebelled, as many other women did, against this treatment. But unfortunately no one ever fully escapes a culture, a society, I am part of it and I was affected by it too. The situation of Western women is obviously not to be compared with that of other countries where women have no right. Yet can that be a reason why we should not get things to progress? Because, even though women suffer from this situation, which they themselves perpetuate by raising over and over their daughters and sons to reproduce the same schemes, it is actually humankind as a whole which loses out from this imbalance. If men can be perceived as “oppressors”, I think women have the keys to get our society out of this impasse. Kobayashi sensei’s saying ‘Freedom is expressed by moving where it is possible’ (3) supports my thought that it is for women to exert their freedom. It is our responsibility not to reproduce over and over this story. And this is where, precisely where, that for me, this issue connects with Aikido.

Aikido, a third path

Aikido can be an answer to this “fight or submit” impasse which women have to face. Because Aikido is a martial art which has nothing to do with fighting. May one dare use the word ‘non martial art’? Many Masters and great experts repeat it (again recently Steve Magson, student of Chiba Kazuo sensei, in Aikido journal): it is ridiculous to raise the question of Aikido’s “efficiency” in a “real fight situation”. It is meaningless (which of course does not mean that one should do anything). But while a high level martial expert can write this without the value of his Aikido practice being questioned, a woman saying the same thing would immediately be suspected of not being up to it, not being capable enough. This issue however precisely concerns women, because we face very acutely the question of fighting as a dualistic situation. Even if it is not about fistfighting but rather cultural and social fighting. In addition, we are as soon as we are born potential victims of violence. Maybe we will escape it, but it will then be an exception. All women live knowing they will be a victim one day or another. And when we wish to express ourselves, get a job, again we are obliged to demonstrate our value, our right to stand where we are, all along our life. And, precisely, Aikido falls completely outside this framework! There will be no winner, nor loser. Aikido is like another dimension where our values no longer hold. If practised in a certain way, it can be a tool to practice, human being to human being, without any distinction. Régis Soavi sensei writes about Aikido that it is ‘a school for life, a school that arouses the life of those who practice it. Far from being just another string to our bow, it questions the fallacies and subterfuges which our society offers’ (4). I am also inclined to think that Cognard sensei follows the same line when writing about an Aiki ritual that could change us so much as to overcome history that has been legitimating violence for centuries (3). It is a pity that women do not take hold of this tool, this art, in order to escape submission, without imitating men in position of power, but rather by entering a third path. Where no one expects them.

Following this third path has always been my direction since my childhood, by walking, of course, outside of the school system, but also by practising Aikido since I was 6. I am not saying that I always manage to find the right way, but I am working on it. Daily reviving the practice of going down another path, of getting out of situations differently. I consequently practice with my own father being my Master. At the same time, it is a chance and it is not easy. I have always seen him ahead of me, on this path. He has been walking for a long time, before I was born, and I sometimes had the impression he was an unreachable horizon in Aikido. Benevolently, but with extraordinary firmness, he guided me, held my hand, without overlooking anything but letting time work. Now I walk by his side, I also teach Aikido myself… and I can better see how fortunate I am. I wish I could prompt other women (without excluding men of course) to practice this art with the state of mind I have experienced, the one of the Itsuo Tsuda School. And to practice it long enough, because it takes time, one cannot change one’s culture in a few years. One can acquire a few techniques, some self-confidence maybe. But really deciding for a different life course will require more time. The first step is daily practice, at least regular practice, which brings us back to ourselves. Writing on a seemingly completely different topic (calligraphy), sinologist J. F. Billeter gives us a remarkably vivid account which strikingly resonates with Aikido practice:

‘In the current world, practice also brings us back to ourselves by reintroducing us to the pleasure of gratuitous gesture. Dictated by machines, our daily activity more and more shrinks to moves that are programmed, domesticated, produced with indifference, without any imagination nor sensitivity taking part. Practice remedies this gesture atrophy by arousing our stiffened abilities. It restores the pleasure of playing, it brings back to life capacities which, even though not immediately “useful”, are nonetheless essential. As the most evolved among animals, human beings need more playing than any other species to maintain their balance. Practice also affects our perception of time. In our daily life, we keep going back in time and projecting ourselves into the future, leaping from one to the other without being able to stop at the present time. Because of this, we are haunted by the feeling that time is slipping away. By lining up with ourselves, practice on the contrary suspends the flight of time. When we handle the paintbrush, the present time seems to detach from the string that tied it to the past and the future. It absorbs in itself all duration. It amplifies itself and transforms into a vast space of tranquility. It is no longer governed by the flow of time, but it resonates with moments of the same nature which we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday and the days before. These moments get threaded to each other, they create another continuity, a kind of majestic avenue that travels across the disorganized time of our daily activities. Our life tends to reorganize around this new axis and the inconsistency of our external activities stops impeding us. Daily practice performs the function of a ritual.’ (5)

Restoring sensation

But how did we get there? According to Tsuda sensei, today’s world tends to favour cerebral hypertrophy and voluntarism at the expense of the living. He said about it: ‘I don’t refuse to understand the essential character of Western civilisation: it is a challenge of the human brain to the order of the world, an effort of the will to extend the boundaries of the possible. Whether it is about industrial development, medicine or Olympic games, this character predominates. It is an aggression against nature. Superb human acts, yet without knowing it, against nature. Life suffers, despite our increased knowledge and possession.’

There also precisely lies the matter. We disconnect from our sensations, from the sensation of living inside us. It is also because women no longer feel their needs, their profound natures, that they let themselves carried away into situations that do not suit them. Too busy with acquiring and fighting, their instinct which should safeguards their life no longer reacts. It got atrophied. Even with their babies today’s women struggle to feel, to know what to do and turn to science and books to dictate them how to behave. Listening to their baby and listening to their intuition is outdated, it is archaic! And after centuries when being a mother was the only horizon for respectable women, we have nowadays achieved the feat of strength of reversing the imperative. Now, being “only” a stay-at-home mother is shabby! What a breakthrough!

Here also Aikido brings us back to our sensations. One cannot mentally compute a move. Upon an oncoming attack one has to move, it is too late to think. One has to sense one’s partner in order to move in a right, appropriate way. We (men or women) are often like the famous overfull cup in the Zen philosophy, which spills out when more tea is added. We are too agitated and too full of ourselves to be able to perceive the other. Let us not even talk about understanding them! This is also the meaning of the Non-Doing Tsuda sensei was talking about. We need to be empty, we need to start by listening. Women first should start by listening to themselves. Listening to their own body in Aikido everyday is rewriting their own experience. Relearning to trust themselves, restore the confidence in what their body says. Hino sensei makes the same observation, he writes about humans who have become ‘insensitive and incapable’ (6). He deplores the blatant lack of perception of what happens in the other person. Whether we grab his/her wrist or discuss with him/her, sensation is broken off. Intuition no longer works. We content ourselves with ‘Hi, how are you? — Fine, how are you?’, how superficial! If one is sensitive, it just takes a simple look to feel the other, to know whether they are happy or sad, whether they are half-asleep or on top form. But because of repeated stereotyped relationships we lose sight of authentic human relationships. Here again some masters have left us guideposts to reconnect with ourselves.

Tsuda sensei used to talk about intuition and authenticity of the relation we have with our child. Because, if when searching for intense sensations and experience some martial arts practitioners fantasize about past masters’ uchideshis, about experiences one can live under an icy waterfall, about the total availability for the Master, etc., there is one extreme experience which a woman can go through, a life experience rather similar to what Noro sensei recounts, he who once was Ueshiba Morihei’s Otomo. I can attest to it, it really feels like this: ‘If s/he sleeps, you have to watch over her/his sleep. If s/he wakes up at night, you have to be ready to satisfy her/his needs. If s/he gets bored, you have to entertain her/him. If s/he gets ill, you have to take care of her/him. You have to prepare her/his bath, her/his meals, and clean everything up as soon as s/he changes activity. […] It is obviously about adapting and even about becoming capable of anticipating the very precise desires in order to remain, day and night, awake or not, in total harmony.’ (7).

In total harmony with whom? With one’s newborn of course for a mother or a father! But why should one choose such a treatment? While there are so many solutions to relieve us from the burden of having a child. It is like slavery! Yet, for those who live this experience of a unique, wordless communication with a human being, it is an inestimable teaching. It is most likely when this state of fusion with the other person was reached that the genuine transmission from the Master, the transmission of the spirit of an art, could be achieved. Martial arts practitioners are looking for this life intensity! Unfortunately, when a woman experiences it with her child, this is relegated to a mere domestic task, which could be done by any underpaid nurse. Tsuda sensei used to talk about childhood as the only area where one could still live such an impossible experience. He was even saying that ‘knowing how to take care of a baby was the acme of martial arts’! Here again, if women became aware of this, would they realize the potential of hidden power they have? Would we then stop aiming at equaling men as the only path towards self-realisation?

Living in this world, while still being in another

If the purpose of our practice is human evolution, I believe the Dojo to be its casket. A Dojo can be a microcosm where we let go our social conventions, even temporarily. Through his books and calligraphies, Tsuda sensei prompts us to question the established order, to look further beyond the social organisation. If we practice in a certain direction, we can forget with whom we practice. If, and only if, we leave behind our social reflexes. It is obviously very difficult at the beginning not to bring in with us our baggage. It is as difficult for men as for women to forget who they have become in this world so to focus on what they are inside. Before any distinction, of sex, colour, age, fortune, culture, etc. Looking into ourselves for this shared humanity requires from us a voluntary act of breaking away from codes. The Dojo, its atmosphere of serenity and concentration (which cannot be found in a sports hall), the feeling of an intangible dojo, all this brings us into a certain state. The sequence of a session, with its first part of individual movements which brings breathing back to the center, followed by the practice with a partner, the harmonization of breaths, the attention to sensation. A combination that allows the Dojo to be a little bit “outside” the world, which prompts us to let go so to get into a different state during practice. Ivan Illich mentions such a state of consciousness when saying: ‘I don’t wan’t anything between you and me. [I am] afraid of the things that could prevent me from being in contact with you’ (8). In a dojo, we sweep these things away, conventions, fears, which stand between one another. It is not about abandoning our culture, no, it is simply about abandoning the manifestations of the social being in order to find each other so to walk along together.

For this to happen, we need women to wake up and come out of the shadows.

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in October 2018 in Dragon Magazine Spécial Aikido n° 22.

Notes :
1) C. Baker, Les cahiers au feu, Éd. Barrault, 1988
2) M. Chollet, Beauté fatale, Les nouveaux visages d’une aliénation féminine, Éd. La Découverte, p. 8
3) A. Cognard, « Rituel et Symbole », Dragon Magazine Spécial Aïkido n°19, janv. 2018, p. 22
4) R. Soavi, Mémoires d’un Aïkidoka, Dragon Magazine Spécial Aïkido n°19, janv. 2018, p. 60
5) J. F. Billeter, Essai sur l’art chinois de l’écriture et ses fondements, Éd. Allia, 2010, p. 164
6) H. Akira, Don’t think, listen to the body!, 2017, p. 226
7) P. Fissier, Chroniques de Noro Masamichi, Dragon Magazine Spécial Aïkido n°12, p. 77
8) I. Illich, Mythologie occidentale et critique du “capitalisme des biens non tangibles”, Entretien avec Jean-Marie Domenach dans la série “Un certain regard”, 19 mars 1972.

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