Body of the Master

The Ideal and the Real in a New Zealand Aikido Dojo

Body of the Master

Sensation and Abstraction in a New
Zealand Aikido Dojo

Paul Alan Janman

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts in Anthropology, University of Auckland, 2002. Reprinted on May 14th 2004.
Aikido and the Poetic Body (thesis revisions three years after submission)

These two and bit pages are revisionary thoughts about my thesis Body of the Master. They
are primarily the result of some thinking after a re-reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy
and studying philosophical realism with Prof. Futa Helu at ‘Atenisi Institute. Futa Helu was
a teacher and colleague of my key anthropological mentors at the University of Auckland
Drs.‘Okusitino Mahina and Max Rimoldi and I think my time with Futa has deepened my
understanding of their position.

If I wrote the thesis again it would be called Mask of the Master

The forms of aikido are the masks that we must use to reveal a primal unity. The forms are
thus the surface manifestations of the basic thing. As they are ‘at the surface’, they entail
explicit and precise demonstrations of cause and effect. But by means of these illusions or
‘the masks’, the primal unity reveals itself in moments of dizzying/distorting paradox. This
is ‘the poetry of kata’ and this is the means by which an artist – the aikido adept – has learnt
to manifest the primal unity – the deep region without cause and effect. This leads us to a
further insight, namely that the creation or presentation of working kata, forms or illusions
is the product of an only apparently personal intention. For sure, the poet has a ‘will to
express’ but it is not merely ‘his will’. This idea of ‘personal will’ is the basis of the
mistaken belief (prevalent in 'bad' Buddhism) that we have to draw back the curtain of
maya and reveal ‘a truth’ that negates individuality. This error can result in a blissful
negation of the personal will, but it also leads to a kind of passivity that achieves nothing.

I think it is the poet’s special observations of the surface causes and effects between
separate beings that reveal a deep field of connectedness. In Buddhism this is described as
the principle of ‘dependent origination’ – that when we observe things while sitting, we
perceive effects upon our selves that originate from the existence of an independent thing
that nonetheless relates to us through our senses. In contrast to the nihilistic passivity I
describe above, 'better' Buddhism interprets dependent origination actively, where a poet’s
observations provoke her ‘apparent personal will’ to go further into the horrifying abyss –
and ultimately to express the humiliating sense of change that destroys all notions of
selfhood. As this terrifying field of ‘not me’ is too scary for the uninitiated, the poet
expresses his observations in yet more specially crafted illusions – because people couldn’t
take it directly and all at once.

So I think we are getting close to an essence of poetry here as well as good aikido – it is to
reveal this ‘primal thing’ indirectly, through appearances, metaphors, associations,
allusions or illusory arrangements. Fortunately for aikido, the body can say it only a little
more directly than words. So aikido kata are the ‘body poems’ that Ueshiba left us and
thankfully they are better than the ones he wrote down!

Like all creative mythologies, however, there is a danger that aikido poems will congeal
into pseudo-history, ‘fact’ or dogma. This is the death of all expressive forms. The illusions
have to be continually remade to fit new circumstances ‘at the surface’ even though the
primal reality that they express always stays the same.

1
For Nietzsche, this explains the early effectiveness of Greek tragic drama as well as its
decline. Aeschylus and Sophocles revealed the terrifying Dionysian underbelly of things,
through the comforting clarity of individuated Apollinian dream images. When Euripides
came and abandoned the beautiful illusions in his realism, he also abandoned the ‘primal
unity’ that they reveal – the result was a crude and relatively unpoetic mere reproduction of
the surface in melodrama that relied too heavily on narrative contrivances for its
resolutions. While Euripides was still important in the development of modern theatre as a
voice of everyday people and their ethical/political concerns, he also paved the way for a
trivialised drama (with the exception of The Bacchae of course).

So ‘a direct experience of reality’ in aikido is to experience the world as a mass of

individuated beings that are nonetheless connected on a common plenum of existence. As
you can see, the ‘aesthetic’ is not an entirely rational process but neither is it without
rationality – there are both forms and formlessness. In its poetic aspect the formless is also
fundamentally 'indirect' through the form.

On a slightly more mundane level of philosophical consistency, I have realised certain basic
problems with my thesis. Futa Helu’s point of view on Scientific and Mythical Thinking (In
Critical Essays, 1999) has been very useful in this respect.

There is a theoretical problem with my thesis, namely that early in the work I distinguish
between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ to make a point about the difference between ‘the body’ and
‘the soul’ or in other words, ‘matter’ and ‘ideas’ because I wanted to force ‘the material
conditions’ to be the fundamental criteria of verification. This reveals a basic assumption
that causes a logical contradiction with what I later say about the phenomenological unity
of body and mind. It also reveals basic methodological errors because these assumptions
represent a confusion between the conclusion and the hypothesis.

My basic premise also misses the significance of the distinction between facts and values. I
am now taking a ‘realist’ point of view, which does not distinguish between facts and
values because values are themselves just more facts “that we like because they advance
our socio-political interests” (Helu, 1999:53).

In other words, science is decidedly value-free and an investigation without end. In as far as
aikido is an exploration of facts about bodies, natural forces etc, then it is also value-free
and without end. However! Aikido is also mythical because Morihei Ueshiba afforded a
system of values that are overlaid on these first kinds of facts (but possibly, though not yet
conclusively derived from them – a solution to this was the original impulse of the thesis
and the cause of much confusion! I failed! But I got an A! What? There must have been
some useful intuitions in the work). These values (whether overlaid upon or derived from
material facts) represent a yearning for an end to struggle, conflict and self-centredness,
which are all very mythical characteristics and verifiable values of aikido in the context of
Morihei Ueshiba’s life and ideas. It is this ‘mythical aikido’, however, which has
sometimes concretised, become unscientific, uncreative of new theories and a kind of
neurotic wish-fulfilment in an ever-changing field (as discussed above in the comments
about ‘coagulating pseudo-history’). Ha!

2
We often hear references to ‘practicality’ in relation to aikido. ‘Pragmatism’ is also
mythical, however, as it represents the satisfaction of particular human needs (it is in
this way that the human quest for greater technology itself is also mythical). 'Pragmatic'
is thus a philosophically suspect way of characterising an aikido that is meant to be
selfless or more to the point, an aikido that is meant to be ‘natural’ (value-free/
scientific). Shouldn't we also heed Kant’s warning that being 'useful' might be the
diametric opposite of aesthetic beauty? Perhaps Ezra Pound has an answer to that from
the context of the modern surface -

"All things are a

flowing Sage Heraclitus
says; But a tawdry
cheapness Shall outlast
our days."

Paul Janman, ‘Atenisi Institute, Tonga, Autumn 2005

3
 ABSTRACT

Aikido is a martial art that originated in Japan but is now practised in many parts of

the world. It is an activity that criss-crosses and thus problematises western notions of art,

religion and leisure. I use Marx’s ideas on alienation and his formulation of the gap

between facts and values as well as phenomenological approaches to analyse over one

year’s participant observation and interviewing at Auckland Takemusu Aikido Dojo. I thus

consider the role of a vigorous corporeality and the experiential aspects of aikido that

intertwined with discursive and representational forms of memory, contribute to a

particular interpretation of the ethos and repertoire of techniques that are the legacy of

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido.

The first part of the thesis describes the historical development of the art and

particularly its Iwama-ryu manifestation. At Takemusu Aikido Dojo (now Aikido of

Auckland), such history is manifested in practices that have their precedents in ancient

Japanese ritual and religion, samurai military disciplines, modern Japanese millenarianism

and the preferences, interpretations and practices of a particular group of New Zealanders.

I found a great fluidity and multi-vocality among practitioners’ perceptions of their

practice and in cross-cultural translations. There are also discernable regularities and

patterns in motivations and perceived outcomes of training, however. There are also

commonalities in the specific kinds of relationships and obligations that are consented to

and the experiences that derive from the disciplined ritual practices of the ‘place of

learning’ (dojo). My analysis thus also reveals the alterity of the social propositions that

are presented at the dojo and the significance of “body techniques” as dynamic means of

articulating agency in a modern historical context.

Keywords: aikido, modernity, martial arts, phenomenology, embodiment.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Karl Friday has written that it takes many years of involvement in the cabalistic

world of the traditional Japanese martial arts before its practitioners will reveal their

secrets. I have had only one year in a specific “modern” aikido context and I’m very

grateful that my aikido teacher Alan Roberts Sensei was so open and frank with me about

the principles of the art from the very first. Hence my sincerest thanks and appreciation

also go to him and his wife Yuki for allowing me to do this study in their dojo. Thank you

also to all the students at Takemusu Aikido Dojo who gave me their time and support in

interviews, informal conversations and of course on the training mat itself.

Domo arigato gozaimasu!

My family and friends have all contributed to this work in one way or another and

I’m very grateful to them all. I must also give thanks for the experience, nurturing, critical

eyes and vigilance of my supervisors Christine Dureau in Anthropology and Rumi

Sakamoto in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. Great respect also goes out to

Max Rimoldi and ‘Okusi Mähina who encouraged me with their wise and compassionate

presences. Mark Busse has also been very influential on the form that this thesis has taken,

while Frank Field at Keele University is still there in everything I do, reminding me that

creative artists are often the most interesting historiographers. I had financial help from the

Anthropology Department grant-in-aid and the (NZASA) Kakano Fund and I am grateful

for those.

My final thanks go to the rest of the students and staff in Anthropology at the

University of Auckland, to my great friend Pedro Ilgenfritz da Silva for all his insights and

enthusiasm and to Echo Zeanah, my loving woman!

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Photographs…………………………………………………………………iv

Glossary of Japanese Terms………………………………………………………...v

Preface …………………………………………………………...………………….ix

Chapter One: Anthropologist and Aikidoka ………………………….…………...1

The Fact/Value Distinction – A Theoretical Orientation……………………………..6

Phenomenology and Embodiment…………………………………………………...12

Chapter Two: Historical Perspectives…………………………………………….19

Alienation, Millenarianism, Creativity………………………………………………20

Orientalism…………………………………………………………………………..27

Globalisation………………………………………………………………………...37

The Iwama Lineage……………………………………………………………….....41

Chapter Three: The Body……………………………………………………….…45

The Body in Anthropology and Aikido………………………………………...……45

Kata as Memory and Transformation……………………………………………….53

Chapter Four: The Phenomenology of Aiki………………………………………61

The Feeling of Social Techniques…………………………………………………...68

When the Words Say What The Body Means…………………………………….…82

Conclusions: Grappling with the Grain………………………………………..…91

Epilogue………………………………………………………………………..……98

List of References…………………………………………………………………101

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 LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS
(Photo. 1) Alan Roberts Sensei talking aikido. The pictures that are displayed in the
ceremonial alcove are of O Sensei (top) and his now deceased son Kisshomaru Ueshiba,
founder of the Aikikai Association, with which the Iwama Ryu is nominally affiliated. The
calligraphic scroll is the work of Alan’s teacher at Iwama, Morihiro Saito Sensei……..p.10

(Photo. 2) Using the power of kokyu, an elderly Morihei Ueshiba resists the strength of
three men with a wooden sword. This photograph was displayed in a chat room on the
Aikido Journal website (circa October 2001) with the caption and moot for discussion: “Is
this a miracle?”…………………………………………………………………………..p.30

(Photo. 3) An example of a ceremonial portrait of O-Sensei. The writing on the right reads:
“Ueshiba Morihei, Aikido Doshu” (doshu means ‘leader of the way’)………………....p.40

(Photo. 4) Morihiro Saito Sensei and O Sensei at Iwama, circa 1955…………………..p.42

(Photo. 5) Morihiro Saito Sensei and Alan Roberts Sensei at the Iwama Dojo in 2001..p.42

(Photo. 6) A young Saito Sensei training with Morihei Ueshiba in the forest in Iwama..p57

(Photo. 7) Alan Roberts Sensei demonstrates a technique and gives oral teachings as
students observe and listen (the writer is pictured centre right)…………………………p59

(Photo. 8) When the demonstration is over, students find partners and experiment with the
feeling of the techniques, as sensei circulates, giving advice and making corrections....p.59

(Photo. 9) Takemusu aikido students “clap in” at the dojo ‘opening day’ ceremony (kagami
biraki)…………………………………………………………………………………....p.64

(Photo. 10) Morihei Ueshiba performs misogi no jo during his visit to Hawai’i……….p.65

(Photo. 11) A line of students waits for instructions from their seniors at the kagami biraki
opening day celebrations in 2001……………………………………………………..…p.68

(Photo. 12) O Sensei moving toward a tree in the forest at Iwama……………………...p.72

(Photo. 13 [series]) Performance of the ‘breath exercise’ (kokyu ho)……………….p.74-75

(Photo. 14) Two advanced aikidoka practice a blending movement with their wooden
swords during a test for a third degree black belt………………………………………..p.78

(Photo. 15 [series]) Performance of the ‘first teaching’ (ikkyo)……………………..p.84-85

(Photo. 16 [series]) Performance of the ‘breath throw from double handed grip’ (morote
dori kokyu nage)…………………………………………………………………..….p.86-87

(Photo. 17) Alan Roberts (left) and Jeremy, one of his first black belt students, demonstrate
synchronised high falls at the old Takemusu Dojo……………………………………...p.99

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 GLOSSARY OF JAPANESE TERMS

aikido: Comprising of the characters ai (‘harmony’/’balance’), ki (‘energy’) and do (‘path’

or ‘way’), aikido is the name of the martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba.
aikidoka: A student of aikido.
ame no kihashi: The mythical ‘bridge to heaven’ important to Morihei Ueshiba’s
purification rituals.
awase: ‘Blending’. Refers to the simultaneity of movement between partners, particularly
in weapons practice.
budo: The abbreviated form of the term ‘way of the warrior’.
bushido: The long form of the term ‘way of the warrior’.
dame: ‘Wrong’.
dogi: ‘Clothes of the way’. The strong white jacket and trousers worn by aikido students
for training.
dojo: ‘Place of learning the way’. The training hall where Japanese martial arts are studied.
doka: The ‘songs/poems of the way’ written by Japanese artistic masters to transmit their
teachings to later generations.
domo arigato gozaimasu: ‘Thank you very much’.
doshu: ‘Leader of the way’. The title used to denote Morihei Ueshiba’s hereditary
successors in aikido.
gidayu: ‘Ballad drama recitations’ in the Japanese tradition.
haiku: Seventeen syllable poems in the Japanese tradition.
hakama: The pleated skirt worn by aikido practitioners of black belt level or above and a
traditional garment of Japanese swordsmen since the 8th century.
heiho: ‘Strategy’ or principle’
ikkyo: ‘First teaching’. One of the most basic categories of aikido techniques.
Iwama-ryu: The school of aikido that originates from the legacy of Morihei Ueshiba’s
transmission to Morihiro Saito Sensei.
jo: The four foot staff that is used as a weapon in aikido practice.
joshiki ga nai: ‘To have no common sense’.
judo: The martial art that was founded by Jigoro Kano from older jujutsu forms.
jujutsu: A general term denoting the kind of Japanese wrestling that has inspired “modern”
Japanese martial arts such as judo and aikido
kabuki: A form of popular Japanese theatre.
v
kagami biraki: The new year open day celebration at which the public is invited to the
dojo to watch aikido demonstrations.
kanji: The Chinese derived Japanese characters used to denote both sounds and concepts.
karada de oboeru: ‘To learn with the body’.
karate: The “modern” Japanese martial art founded by the Okinawan master Gichin
Funakoshi, which utilises kicks and punches more than wrestling techniques.
kata: ‘Forms’. The prescribed forms which record techniques through bodily shapes. Kata
also refer to the forms of paired practice in aikido techniques.
katachi dewa naku, kimochi: ‘Not the shape but the feeling’. A favourite oral teaching of
Saito Sensei.
ki: ‘Energy’. The concept of primordial natural energy derived from Chinese and Japanese
mythology.
ki no nagare: ‘Flow of energy’. The mode of aikido practice in which kata are practiced
with greater fluidity and movement.
ki o musubi: ‘Tying together of energies’. The mode of aikido practice in which
simultaneity of movement is sought between practitioners.
kiai: The burst of energy emitted primarily with the voice.
koan: The riddles or paradoxes used by some sects of Japanese zen Buddhism, which
systematically generate non-systematic mental states that are supposed to transcend
the habitual dualities of verbal expression.
kobudo: ‘The old way of warrior’. The term most often used to denote the “older
“classical” Japanese martial arts.
kokutai: The catchphrase often used by Japanese nationalists to describe a Japanese
cultural essence.
kokyu: ‘Breath’. A term often used by Saito Sensei to describe the level of practice beyond
kotai or ki no nagare. Kokyu also denotes a certain spiralling movement of the arm,
which generates unusual strength.
kokyu nage & kokyu ho: ‘Breath throws’ and ‘breath exercise’ respectively. Refer to the
category of techniques and the exercise, which demonstrate the principle of kokyu.
koshi: ‘Hips’.
kotai: The “static” or broken down and step by step mode of aikido practice.
kotodama: The ritual ‘science of primordial sounds’ or vibrations practiced by Morihei
Ueshiba.
kuden: ‘Secret teachings’. The term that refers to the oral teachings of martial arts masters,
which were traditionally not written down.

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makoto: Often translated as ‘sincerity’ in English, Ian Buruma translates makoto as more
like ‘purity of heart’. “No matter if the position one has adopted is wrong or
untenable: it is purity of motive that counts” (Buruma, 1984:158)
misogi: ‘Purification’.
misogi no jo: The rite of purification that Morihei Ueshiba often performed with the ‘four
foot staff’ (jo) before training or on special occasions.
mudansha: ‘Students without grades’, meaning students below black belt level.
nage: (sometimes also tori) The ‘thrower’ or the person who performs the technique being
practised in aikido ritual conflicts. The nage is thus also the ‘defender’ (cf. uke).
nikyo: ‘Second teaching’. A category of aikido techniques which involve a painful wrist-
lock.
ninja: The legendary assassins of the Japanese martial arts tradition, popularised in
literature and film.
noh theatre: One of the “classical” genres of Japanese theatre.
O Sensei: ‘Great teacher’. The term most commonly used by aikido students to refer to
Morihei Ueshiba.
Omoto Kyo: ‘The Great Origin’. The syncretist and millenarian Japanese religion, which
greatly influenced the development of Morihei Ueshiba’s martial art and thought.
onegaishimasu: Commonly translated as ‘please’ in English, onegaishimasu also has
connotations of returning a favour or reciprocity.
sado: ‘The way of tea’. A traditional Japanese aesthetic pursuit.
satori: The term which denotes ‘enlightenment’ in Japanese and which often carries
connotations of revelation or epiphany.
seishi: ‘Holy master’.
seiza: A kneeling posture with the feet and legs tucked under that is taken by aikido
students when watching the teacher demonstrate, or when not directly participating
in training or an event.
sensei: ‘Previous life’. Most commonly translated into English as ‘teacher’.
shihan: The title bestowed on a very senior teacher in aikido.
shingon: A kind of Japanese Buddhism that derives from the tantric tradition. Shingon is
often ritually elaborate.
shin-ki-tai-issho: ‘Heart/mind, energy, body, together’. This expression describes a
particular ideal that is often cited in the Japanese martial arts and achieving this ideal
state is often an end or a motive of training.

vii
shinko shugyo: The “new Japanese religions” that emerged during the late 19th and early
20th centuries.
shinto: ‘Way of the Gods’. The ancient polytheistic belief system and set of practices,
which predates the arrival of Buddhism in Japan.
shodan: ‘Beginner’s level’. Denotes the level of black belt among aikido students.
shodo: ‘The way of writing’. The traditional Japanese aesthetic pursuit of calligraphy.
shomen: ‘Front’. The name given to the ceremonial alcove at the front of Takemusu
Aikido Dojo.
shu, ha, ri: ‘protect, break, return’. An expression, which describes the life-long
relationship between a student and teacher in the Japanese arts. The student is first
protected and follows the master’s forms without question. They then ‘break’ and
make their own additions to the art. Finally the student returns to bring new
knowledge to the lineage.
shugendo: The Shinto associated Japanese belief system connected with shamanism and
the practices of mountain ascetics.
soto zen: The particular school of zen Buddhism which advocates a less severe sort of
training than the rinzai zen that it is often distinguished from.
sumo: Japanese wrestling.
takemusu aiki: A kind of formless virtuosity or a spontaneous manifestation of aikido
principles that was cultivated by Morihei Ueshiba at Iwama. The term is also often,
but not exclusively associated with the teachings of Morihiro Saito Sensei.
tanden: The centre of the body, just around the navel, which is associated in Japanese and
Chinese martial arts with the centre of strength and power.
uchi deshi: ‘Live-in student or disciple’. A student who lives at the same premises as the
master, usually for an extended period of time.
uke: The ‘receiver’ of an aikido technique. Uke is thus also the ‘attacker’ (cf. nage).
uke ni yasashiku, waza ni kibishiku: ‘Softness to your partner, rigour to the technique’. A
favourite oral teaching of Saito Sensei.
waka: Thirty one syllable poems in the Japanese tradition.
yokomen: A kind of aikido attack, much-like the mythical “karate chop” with which the
ridge of the hand is used to strike one’s partner in the ritualised conflicts of aikido.
yudansha: ‘Students with grades’. The term used to denote aikido students of the level of
black belt or above.
zen: The tradition of Buddhism which is noted for its austerity and early popularity among
Japanese warriors.

viii
 PREFACE

AI KI DO

These are the Chinese derived kanji characters, which the “founder” of aikido
Morihei Ueshiba, commonly referred to as O Sensei (‘great teacher’), used to describe the
penultimate formulation of the art. His final and more ambiguous formulation, takemusu
aiki, evokes a kind of formless virtuosity or a spontaneous manifestation of the principle of
aiki. A very partial translation of the characters above will inform what follows. The first
character ai can be glossed as ‘harmony’ or ‘balance’. The second ki connotes ‘energy’.
The final character do is something akin to ‘way’, ‘path’ or ‘road’. As a concept do
represents an intermingling of religious and aesthetic ideas. Do can suffix names of
religions like Shinto (from shindo or ‘way of the gods’) but it is also used to describe
artistic pursuits or vehicles of self-cultivation like sado (‘the way of tea’) or shodo (‘the
way of writing/calligraphy’). Indeed, “anything can be a ‘way’ of being, even that of the
bloodiest warrior, particularly if he devotes his life to something greater than himself.
Bushido, the way of the warrior, is, according to one definition, a way of living selflessly,
in service to another, be it person or cause” (Amdur, 1997a:162).
I have found in my study of aikido that even practitioners of the same “way” often
dispute its true meaning because symbolic representations of it are infinitely negotiable.
Partly because of this, partly because of its roots in early twentieth century Japanese
syncretist religious millenarianism, aikido has sometimes been called the “art of peace” or
the “way of harmony” (Ueshiba, 1984 120-121). Indeed, following Ueshiba’s cosmology
of “universal love”, aikido philosophy has often taken on overtly moralistic tones and a
complex metaphysics (Draeger, 1996 [1974]:143). This is in part because Morihei
Ueshiba’s life encompassed both violence and compassion and he often used a very
ix
rhetorical or allegorical medium to express his insights. Alan Roberts Sensei, the teacher at
the dojo where my study was based, defines aikido as “the way of unifying/united energy”
(Roberts, 2001:1,6) or “the path of the discovery of aiki” (personal communication,
24/3/02).
Aikido is nonetheless always a means of cultivating awareness of mind and body
and a unique modern martial art whose practitioners aim to neutralise the force of attackers,
while showing concern for their well-being. Aikido is interesting because as its practitioners
tell me, it teaches them to move and to feel their bodies in ways that are reported to be
counter-intuitive. Unexpected things also happen when aikido techniques are performed
correctly and practitioners reach realisations that run contrary to the prevailing
competitiveness of mainstream modern industrial societies. As I will argue, an embodied
understanding of such effective martial principles as what Ueshiba called ‘the tying
together of energy’ (ki o musubi) for example, can be revelatory about practitioner’s daily
lives and change the way that they deal with oppressive relationships. The lessons of aikido
are learned primarily through the direct interaction of bodies, which leaves me with the
difficult task of putting them into words.
I have nonetheless attempted to understand intellectually, what people do as a
matter of course, several nights a week at the dojo. In doing this I do not assume that all
people will think in the same categories or use the same kinds of abstractions that I do. I
would also like to place aikido in its objective sociological or historical context, however.
This study is thus a form of appreciation, through which we might challenge common
sense, see aikido as a cultural object and achieve an explanation that is not completely
internal to aikido itself.
To Alan, and to the students at Takemusu Dojo, I make no claims to know what
aikido is because it is both much simpler and more complex than the way I describe it. As
a relatively inexperienced aikido student, I am also in the disquieting position of knowing
quite a lot about aikido and Japanese martial traditions in general, without necessarily
being able to do it very well. Obviously, my own perceptions are bound to change as my
practice progresses but I anticipate that my anthropological perspectives will continue to
invest my developing knowledge of the art.
Although the analytical language I use must at times seem inacessible, I have tried
my best not to claim too much authority but to act as a translator and a vehicle of
communication. Hence I apologise if I seem too bold in my claims about the tradition and I
defer to all those teachers and students who have given more than I, to “the path of the
discovery of aiki”.

x
 CHAPTER ONE
ANTHROPOLOGIST AND AIKIDOKA1

Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice
Walter Benjamin (quoted in Arendt, 1968:41).

This is a study of the significance of the ritual, martial techniques and

philosophy of aikido to a small community of New Zealand martial artists. Such an
investigation also illuminates the motivations of aikido practitioners, although even in
such a small space as Takemusu Aikido Dojo, practitioners claim connections to a wide
variety of nationalities and religious orientations ranging from Buddhist to Quaker and
Christian to atheist. The dojo population is comprised of multiple ethnicities and
economic statuses from Polynesian to Melanesian, Indian, Pakeha (New Zealand
Europeans), Asian and even Ethiopian and South American.
The majority of practitioners are Pakeha, however, and of these, the majority are
male and middle-class. Virtually everyone that I encounter at the dojo spends most of
their time within a city environment and with few exceptions, is reliant on a wage-
paying organisation, not of their own creation, for their livelihood. People are
nonetheless of mixed educational and work backgrounds from manual labourers, to
white collar workers, to nurses, to business people and academics. An interesting aspect
of the sociology of the dojo was the disproportionate number of immigrants and non-
New Zealand born practitioners that trained there and this may be significant in terms of
the issues that the present work raises about the role of aikido in articulating the self
with otherness in socially alienating environments. The reasons for doing aikido are
thus also very diverse, although as a community, an organization and a school, there is
also coherence in a particular aesthetic and philosophical ethos, which I seek to
illustrate in what follows.
In terms of place, my study was located at what was known as Takemusu Dojo
on Auckland’s Dominion Road. Towards the end of the project, the dojo moved a few
blocks away to the spacious new premises of the Seishinkan (“place of the pure heart”)
on the corner of Sandringham and St. Lukes Roads. Seishinkan was an old warehouse
that has been renovated and was recently ritually transformed in a moving opening
ceremony. The old Takemusu Dojo is now an Internet cafe.

1
 In what follows, you will see photographs taken in both places although I refer
to Takemusu Dojo as the subject of the study because this is where I made the majority
of my observations. Both locations are found in areas of a great ethnic diversity that is
typical of contemporary Auckland. I remember the plethora of Asian restaurants around
Takemusu Dojo as well as well as I know the view of the Hindu temple and the spicy
delights of the Sri Lankan shops down the road from Seishinkan. Common to both
places is also the juxtaposition of a visually minimalist environment inside the dojo
spaces, with the disquieting hum and bustle of the traffic from the urban environment
outside.
In any anthropological research project, there is always the need to ensure there
are no detrimental effects to the anthropologist’s human subjects of study. When I asked
my aikido teacher to sign the consent forms that are required for University of Auckland
ethics committee clearance, however, he was indeed amused by the suggestion that an
anthropologist could do anything harmful to him. It was true, I thought, what could I do
anyway? But as I reflected on the importance of aikido to Alan’s life and livelihood and
the dedication that many students seemed to have to their practice, I realised that by
turning these people into objects of knowledge, I had to deal with a dangerous authority.
Although I seemed harmless, the ability to publish independently put me in a position of
power that was difficult to perceive. In writing about perceptions of aikido practice
among students at Takemusu Aikido Dojo, I have thus had to remain aware of people’s
sensitivities.
With Alan’s consent, I put up a poster that outlined my research aims on the
dojo notice board and sensei explained what I was doing following a ritual moment
after we bowed out at the end of class. This was a moment that he usually reserves for
notices, pearls of wisdom and oral teachings about our practice. There were no
objections from students and I was surprised after class by the keenness with which
most of them wanted to participate. All interviewees gave their written consent to being
cited in my research and for their interviews to be recorded on audiotape. I also consider
it a great advantage that I have been doing aikido on and off, in various Auckland dojo
for about three years now. My study has thus been located within a wider community of
which, I was already a member when I began my research and a new particular
community within which I hope to remain indefinitely.
In interviews, however, I wanted people to feel that they could talk relatively
freely about their practice, their teacher and their dojo, both unencumbered by the
hierarchies of the art and without posing a threat to those hierarchies or people’s

2
statuses within the organisation. In other words, as a researcher concerned with
experiential phenomena and motivations for seeking out aikido, my informants were
largely of equivalent importance except when I sought esoteric knowledge or
information about formal or official aspects of aikido. I have thus decided to respect the
anonymity of aikido practitioners in the text and to make exceptions to this rule only in
the case of well-known teachers whose opinions are relatively public.
The hierarchical grading system of the dojo counts downwards through the
‘students without a level’ (mudansha) from the ‘eighth step’ (hachikyu) to the ‘fourth
step’ (yonkyu). During training, students of these grades wear white belts over their dogi
or ‘clothes of the way’ until they reach ‘the third step’ (sankyu) when they can wear a
brown belt. After all of the kyu grades have been completed, the student tests for entry
into the group of ‘students with grades’ (yudansha). The first level in this state is called
the ‘beginner’s level’ (shodan) and this is most commonly known in English as ‘black
belt’. From there, the grades start to count upwards again, ‘second level’ (nidan)…
‘third level’ (sandan) etc.
At ‘fourth level’ (yondan) and after studying aikido for about fifteen years, Alan
Roberts Sensei is the highest graded practitioner at the dojo. He is also the proprietor of
the dojo premises and the sensei. At higher levels, teachers are often honoured with the
title ‘master teacher’ (shihan), although there are a multitude of other ranks and titles.2
Part of this thesis is an attempt to describe some of the elements of communal
organization in aikido and the ways in which these are accentuated by bodily practice.
The art is very social in its reproduction and I argue that the generation of personal
awareness, agency and intentionality that is one result of aikido training, nonetheless
requires a formal network of affirmative personal relations, obligations and
reciprocities, which make the teachings effective. As an anthropologist and an aikido
student, I have been as obliged and privileged to participate in these relationships and to
value and cultivate them, as any other member of the community.
Since February 2001, I have been almost constantly involved, to a steadily
increasing degree, in the life of the dojo. I have trained an average of two or three nights
per week in regular classes and sometimes early in the morning. In the evening sessions
I have always had the opportunity to speak with people in an informal manner about
their practice and in the mornings I often spoke to Alan Roberts as the sun was coming
up after class, before we went off to do our daily work.
I also spoke regularly to a variety of practitioners as I met them on the street, in
my office at the university, at social events in restaurants, at Alan’s house and on buses

3
around Auckland city. In gauging opinions I also consulted some of the essays that
students wrote for black belt grades, which as Tamara Kohn, one of the very few
academic writers to touch aikido, has suggested are important to her methodology
(personal communication, 18/7/2001). My use of these essays was limited, however,
because they are a new addition to the gradings and I had only brief access to them, late
in the research process. I nonetheless also found that like aikido practice itself, the oral
expressions of my interlocutors in interviews, was so much more spontaneous and frank
than written words. The students I spoke to were a mixture of those who were actively
interested in being interviewed when I posted a letter on the dojo notice board, and
those whom I approached and asked their permission, in order to gauge a variety of
opinions from different people at different stages of their practice.
Among the eight people I interviewed there were the sensei Alan Roberts, two
“black belts” (on average 5-7 years of practice) and five “brown belts” (on average 2-3
years of practice). A concentration of brown belts was fortuitous as I discovered that
besides “black belt”, it was around this grade that people seemed to experience the most
interesting transformations in the way they relate to their practice. My own experience
and that of one other practitioner represents that of the lower “step” grades and I spoke
to many beginners informally.

The underlying premise of this work is encapsulated in its title: “Body of the
Master”. This phrase stresses the point that the kinds of knowledge that aikido provides
transcend the obscure philosophical interests of Morihei Ueshiba and are able to be
understood in terms of the embodied practices that were inspired by his revelations.
This is relevant because it reflects the ethos of Takemusu Dojo and because for the most
part, the aikido practitioners that I spoke to privileged regular bodily practice over
verbal discussion in their appreciation of the kinds of philosophical and psychological
problems that aikido confronts. Talking about it was secondary, surprising and
sometimes even embarrassing for them.
In drawing attention to this issue, I depict instances of symbolic experience and
their relation to experiences of the phenomena of the natural world. Hence the
distinction between the “sensory” and the “abstract” that appears in my subtitle warrants
further definition. By the “sensory” I mean the raw qualities of sense experience like
colour, smell, sound and tension in the limbs. By the “abstract” I mean “ideal” in the
philosophical sense, or those perceptions that reveal meanings that are derived from
social consensus or social construction. From this latter experience, information may be

4
gleaned about the basic premises or aspirations of the group that reproduces it, although
my point is that in aikido, such constructions are also informed by practitioner’s
engagements with a relatively lawful natural world.3
While our understanding of what Morihei Ueshiba meant by terms like aikido
relies heavily on symbolic discourses, experiences of it in terms of a working
articulation between gravity and physical co-ordination are different. It has been
interesting for me personally to discover that among Takemusu Dojo practitioners,
certain aikido ideas such as ki (‘energy’), kokyu (‘breath power’) and even takemusu
aiki, co-exist with expressions about muscular relaxation, sensory awareness of the
body and bodily attitudes that are sometimes also paradoxical.4 People that I spoke to at
the dojo also cultivated certain ideas about the art as a specifically Japanese and thus
“oriental” cultural phenomenon in combination with what it had to offer them in a very
immediate sense, regarding the experience of their bodies, the relationship of their
bodies to gravity and to other bodies in the act of practicing the ritualised techniques of
the art.
I have thus come to understand aikido knowledge as an idealised and at times
realised, aesthetic synthesis of the categories of the “natural”, the “mental” and the
“social”, which is expressed in terms like takemusu aiki.5 Examples of the kind of
harmony expressed by this synthesis in aikido are, for example, a combined awareness
of gravity and biomechanics in relation to symbolisations or mental states. These states
also mediate an embodied involvement in reciprocal social relationships as well as
observations of the natural world. Such an ideal synthesis is only rarely glimpsed or
partially performed, however, and represents an elusive goal among aikido practitioners.
Hence, this work is also about the ways in which the sensory and the abstract relate to
one another or do not as the case may be. It is also a study of why such an ideal
synthesis of mind, body, nature and society, have been cultivated through both the
verbal and embodied forms of communication that aikido practice encompasses.
The data that I present in what follows is framed by a number of theoretical
views that are inspired primarily by the traditions of Marxism and Phenomenology.
Marx’s distinction between what he conceived to be the relatively consistent factuality
of the “material world” and the contingent “values” that human beings impose upon it
has been the starting point of my own interpretation of his work. I have used this idea in
suggesting a distinction between what I call “facts” and “values” in my analysis of the
phenomenon of aikido as both a set of embodied experiences and an ideological
construct.

5
The Fact/Value Distinction – A Theoretical Orientation

With his attempt to describe the material essence underlying the ideological
appearances of modern industry, Marx sought to distinguish between the material
“facts” and the socially constructed “values” of labour and commodities in nineteenth
century capitalism. Because of the disparities between the representations of capitalist
ideology and reality, his “materialism” was thus a means of offering practical answers
to what he perceived to be the greatest social problem of the era, which was the
dehumanisation of labour through its material subordination to the bourgeoisie. Marx
thus inspired the kind of critical theory, which prioritises the historical material
conditions of power in order to demonstrate the necessity of new cultural propositions,
rather than presenting a theory or writing an account that is commensurate with the
phenomenon (Rimoldi & Rimoldi, 1992:x). With regard to aikido, the role of a vigorous
corporeality thus becomes an interesting test for the existence of reifying ideological
constructions, metaphysical subtexts or in contrast, dare I say it; “the truth” of a
particular worldview, philosophy or practice (see Chapter Four).
As Marx’s dialectical materialism can be seen as a critical tool, it is by no means
a negation of Marx’s work if his materialist emphasis is problematised by the
proposition that the physical or the material might still be conceived as the vehicle of
the spirit. This is fortunate because phenomenological theorists have usefully pointed
out that if we are to begin to understand traditions in which the mind and the body are
not habitually distinguished then from the outset, we should not consider them distinct.
Neither should we succumb to either of the “idealist” or “materialist” extremes in our
representations of them even though an emphasis on the material serves an important
critical purpose (Jackson, 1996:25).
While a Cartesian mind:body duality continues to limit western discourses and
influence our understandings of other traditions, this should also not be considered an
exclusively “western” characteristic. The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, for
example, employed all manner of spirit/body distinctions in his esoteric discourses,
although he also believed that an admixture of the two was necessary for human
existence and that his aikido techniques were the vehicles that made this admixture
possible (Stevens, 1993:27). The ends of aikido and phenomenology thus converge in
their attempts to reunify the body and the mind.
The present work seeks to understand one way in which people in modern
societies are cultivating the ideal of reunifying the mind and the body as well as

6
resisting social fragmentation and the socio-cultural conditions that have necessitated
the kinds of creative cultural propositions that the techniques of aikido represent. In
Chapter Two I consider some of the socio-historical conditions of Japanese modernity
with regard to a history of aikido that is framed by the Marxist theory of alienation.
Evaluations of my data from the field has also resulted in a description of the form of
cultural creativity that is apparent at a specific New Zealand dojo and in doing this I
make extensive use of a phenomenological method. Hence a phenomenological
microcosm is informed by Marx’s general theories while a very local context also sheds
light on broader socio-historical problems and one way in which these problems have
been addressed.
As my basic critical premise, the distinction between “facts” and “values” is
extremely relevant to both fields. As I have implied above, this distinction also finds an
analogy in the distinction between “immanent perceptions of natural phenomena” and
“perceptions of value-laden symbolic representations”. In terms of actual cases of
human spiritual practices, I am yet to find the relevance of this distinction better stated
than in Aldous Huxley’s separation of the very socially determined religious techniques
that are founded on the manipulation of symbols, and what he characterizes as those
traditions that cultivate an immediate and bodily experience of a reality, beyond
symbolisation. In a 1959 lecture entitled Man and Religion Huxley suggests that:

…modern Europe - of course modern Europe includes America - is almost alone in

having renounced out of bourgeois respectability and Gallic Puritanism the
participation of the body in the pursuit of the spirit. In India as in Islam, chants,
rhythms, and dance are spiritual exercises. But only small corners of our tradition
have illustrated, through this permission to use the body, that the spirit may be left
more free, a fact that is so manifestly clear when we study the history of the
Oriental religions (Huxley, 1977:201).

While the lecture sometimes betrays shades of dubious generalization, Huxley

nonetheless effectively distinguishes between the kind of “mysticism” of “immediate
experience” and the kind of religion that is “primarily concerned with symbols” (p.202).
Huxley places the Japanese tradition of zen in the former category (p.211) while he
often seems to imply that Christianity belongs to the latter.
By way of challenging the kind of orientalist equations of “the body” with “the
east” that Huxley is apt to make, Michel Foucault (1988) and Talal Asad (1993) among
others, have written on the radical embodiment of religious practices among medieval
monastics in the west and observations such as these have better nuanced the
contemporary anthropology of religion (see Chapter 3). Huxley’s philosophical

7
distinction is nonetheless relevant, I believe, to an understanding of different kinds
“spiritual” practices and the relations between embodied practices and systems of belief
in the world of aikido or elsewhere, even if this distinction risks becoming stereotypical.
To quote insights gleaned from work done on a much more overtly
“spiritualised” Japanese practice, which like aikido has its roots in the millenarian
movement known as Omoto Kyo:

From my observations in the dojo and from interviews, I conclude that the
experiential, as opposed to the doctrinal emphasis in Mahikari is a strong factor
in attracting Australians to the movement. The experiences were palpable; they
gave immediate meaning to the Mahakari system of beliefs. In an age where
people are seeking concrete solutions to physical, emotional and spiritual
malaise, the experience of True Light provided a powerful environment for both
self-regeneration and altruistic help for others in a troubled world (Bouma,
Smith & Vasi, 2000:91).

Mahikari is a religion that involves prayer to specific deities, meditation and

massage techniques and I would not suggest that an experience of “True Light” is
equivalent to the experience of aiki that is so important to aikido practice, although their
sociological significances are at least analogous. Recalling Huxley’s distinction, an
experience of “True Light” would seem to be located a little further toward the
“manipulation of symbols” end of the spectrum than the sometimes forceful interaction
of bodies that constitutes what Alan Roberts Sensei describes as the “immanent
experience of reality” in his aikido.
Both Mahikari and aikido nonetheless offer good illustrations of the ways in
which embodied experience and symbolic artistry interact and move between direct
bodily experiences, and those of more verbalised, symbolic forms of communication. A
vivid example of this distinction can be illustrated with reference to my own aikido
training.
A recent seminar was given at Roberts Sensei’s new dojo by John Stevens, a
visiting American sensei, an ordained soto zen Buddhist priest and a 26-year resident of
Japan. Stevens Sensei had come to teach his particular style of aikido techniques and to
give us an introduction to the ‘sound spirit’ (kotodama) science, one of the esoteric
interests of the founder of aikido Morihei Ueshiba.
As we sat in a circle and chanted the sound of the Japanese vowel “O”, I felt the
vibration of my vocal chords resonate through my body and experienced a feeling of
well-being as the tone of my voice harmonised with those of my fellow practitioners.
After we had finished, Stevens Sensei went on to describe the sound as a manifestation
of the “abundant clouds field deity” (Toyokumono-no-kami) that “links heaven and

8
earth”. While the sound of our collective “O” was palpable, the teacher’s symbolic
description produced no deities or heavens that I could perceive with my own modern
and non-Japanese sensibility. Here, I think is a clear distinction between the sensual
experience of chanting “O” and the kind of symbolic interpretations that the visiting
teacher attributed to the syllable.
Sound spirit exercises are not included in the curriculum of Takemusu Dojo.
Located in New Zealand, the dojo is also affiliated with what has come to be known as
the Iwama-ryu (‘Iwama school’ or literally the ‘Iwama flow’) of aikido practice and the
typically unembellished ethos of Alan Roberts’ teacher Morihiro Saito Sensei. This is
not to say that Iwama practice is divorced from the “symbolic” however. On the
contrary, Roberts Sensei often uses symbolic shortcuts in kuden or ‘oral teachings’ and
he frequently characterises himself as an Iwama teacher by differentiating the ethos and
techniques of other schools and by placing particular images on his dojo walls.6
Assertion of authority and the legitimation of lineages is characteristic of traditional and
modern Japanese arts (O’Neill, 1984; Donohue, 1991; Worden and Dahlquist, 1997)
and this practice has been continued among Western practitioners in other contexts, at
times provoking political discontent among rival dojo.
Given aikido protocols, such disputes are almost never open or public and
remain in the various domains of trusted groups of disciples. Among the kinds of issues
that are raised are questions about the hereditary leadership of the aikido world and the
legitimacy of various teachers according to “quality or effectiveness of technique”7 or in
terms of “the amount of time a particular teacher spent with the founder” or “who is
doing what the founder did at particular points in his life” for example. Arguments like
these often lead to fascinating statements about the “authenticity” of particular lineages
as the “true” teachings according to the founder Morihei Ueshiba, particularly as martial
arts teachers professionalise their disciplines as careers and are forced to compete for
dojo fees in contemporary western societies without the population of adherents or
patronage to bring adequate financial support.
Aside from issues about the legitimation of a particular brand of aikido, there are
also philosophical distinctions that underpin different aikido practices as my earlier
example of kotodama illustrates8 and I give partial explanations for why these
differences may have come about in Chapter Two, the historical section of this work.

9
 (Photo. 1)
Alan Roberts Sensei talking aikido.
The pictures that are displayed in
the ceremonial alcove are of
O Sensei (top) and his now
deceased son Kisshomaru Ueshiba,
founder of the Aikikai Association
with which the Iwama Ryu is
nominally affiliated. The
calligraphic scroll is the work of
Alan’s teacher at Iwama, Morihiro
Saito Sensei.

The legacy of the founder is indeed not as coherent as many aikido practitioners
would like to think. This seems to be characteristic of human discourses and beliefs,
although it can indeed be disconcerting to us, with our cravings for absolutes and
certitude. When I gave Alan Roberts the typescript of his interview, for example, he was
surprised at its train of unfinished ideas and fragments.9 These are no doubt the
conditions that have kept aikido’s global dissemination so negotiable and open to the
heterogeneous valences and expressions of various practitioners and aikido leaders
since the death of its founder.
Much like Huxley’s distinction between “oriental” and “western” forms of
religiosity, the line between different genealogies and schools is thus no more clear-cut
than ideological claims about the “universality” or “authenticity” of a particular set of
aikido teachings. Within the Iwama-ryu itself there is no uniformity even among
different schools that claim the same lineage. The most senior Iwama-ryu aikidoka that
I met at Takemusu Dojo was Mariameno Kapa Sensei who is a ‘fourth level’ (yondan)
Maori practitioner from Hamilton. When Maria Sensei taught us aikido, there was

10
something palpably different in style from that of Alan Roberts Sensei, who is Pakeha
(New Zealand European). Whether it was ethnicity, gender or simply personality, I also
perceived differences that were reflected in the choice of words in speeches and oral
teachings given at the end of training.
During the course of our class, Maria Sensei explained to me that, “we all have
different ways and body types and different ways of moving the body according to our
different backgrounds”. Under her influence, I came to understand that the martial and
social techniques of aikido represented a kind of middle ground where practice of
ritualised conflict through ‘forms’ (kata) teaches an often amusing and intriguing means
of resolving conflict. I use these terms because the knowledge they produce is often
counter-intuitive and involves a degree of re-learning about the way in which the human
situation is perceived (see Chapters Three and Four). In this way, the techniques of
aikido offer a means of understanding the self and the relationship of that self to a
society that is involved in constant historical transformation.
I have thus set myself the task of finding out how aikido practitioners relate to
their practices and the social meanings of these practices. In order to answer broader
questions of sociological significance, I also address the history of aikido and juxtapose
this upon contemporary practices within the frameworks of phenomenology and radical
empiricism. In doing this, I combine my observations of the inherited symbolic aspects
of the dojo including the body as a system of representations, with analysis of how the
body feels in the transmission and practice of aikido techniques. It is this latter aspect
that I believe may point to something interesting beyond the limits of its symbolic
representations.
One of the basic premises of this work is thus the ontological inseparability of
the “mind” and the “body”, yet its basic methodology is that of a “radical empiricism”,
which encourages us, “to recover a lost sense of the immediate, active, ambiguous
‘plenum of existence’ in which all ideas and intellectual constructions are grounded”
(Jackson, 1989:3). In other words, a consideration of sensual or embodied experience
also enables us to begin to develop epistemological tools that might distinguish the
embodied realities of aikido conflicts and the way that aikido resolves them (“facts”)
from the more “value-laden” and potentially reifying ideologies characteristic of what
Huxley calls the religions that are “primarily concerned with symbols”.

11
Phenomenology and Embodiment

In his study of a medium’s possession by Hauka spirits in Niger, Paul Stoller has
eloquently described the problem of trying to understand such events using the
predominantly textual epistemology that derives from the triumph of “vision [as] the
king of perception in the Western Academy” (1995:15-16). In his earlier work entitled
The Taste of Ethnographic Things, he invites ethnographers to literally hear, taste and
touch the world in which they participate as an enrichment of participant-observation;
going beyond merely transforming the object of understanding into matrices of
symbolisations and systematic processes. In Stoller’s view, this is a way of resisting the
proposition that “one can separate thought from feeling and action” (1989:4). He does
this by privileging the alternative senses of smell, touch and taste, which evoke the
radical embodiment of Songhay life and culture which, he says, brings us closer to their
world (Stoller, 1989:3-11). I attempt something similar with regard to the martial arts.
This is because older kinds of Japanese artistic pedagogies often involve very
different techniques from textual or discursive exegesis. To quote Ian Buruma (Buruma
1984:70-71):

Preparing raw tuna is essentially learnt in the same way one learns, say, karate
kicks: by endless mimicking of patterns…Kata [‘forms’], whether they are a matter
of cutting fish, throwing a judo opponent, arranging flowers or indeed social acting,
should ideally become second nature. Karada de oboeru is the term for this: to
learn with the body, just like a child learns to swim, or even to bow, when it is still
strapped to its mother’s back.

This is, however, also an area in which styles of martial arts training have undergone
modification as they have moved overseas. The prominent aikido and old martial way
(kobudo) teacher Ellis Amdur, for example, has described how he has struggled with
the socially inherited habits and expectations of his students when teaching his arts
outside Japan:

I find myself in America, realising that I have to make an explicit request or order
for others to pick up on what I’m doing. American students tend to try to depend
more on a verbal and a visual understanding. It is quite common for them to
practice in front of a mirror, to ask lots of questions, and only then to finally “get
it” (Amdur, 1997a:174).

Like Amdur, Alan Roberts says that in order to keep his New Zealand students, he has
tended to increase the degree of verbal demonstration in the teaching style that he has
developed since he learned Morihiro Saito Sensei’s methods in Japan. Alan Roberts

12
Sensei often mentions the temper of his teacher Saito Sensei during his apprenticeship
at Iwama. Saito Sensei was apt to appear unexpectedly if someone didn’t stack the
dishes right, for example, and shout “no common sense!” (joshiki ga nai!), without
saying what the person actually did wrong. This kind of behaviour was apt to upset
some of the western students, and Alan Roberts interprets this as a relative lack of
awareness of social circumstance or adherence to form among westerners.
Understanding through practice is by no means exclusive to the Asian martial
arts however. It can also be very broadly traced through the western philosophical
genealogy of existentialism and phenomenology in the works of Edmund Husserl
(1970), Martin Heidegger (1962), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and the pragmatism
of John Dewey (1952) among others. In the social sciences it is also found in Alfred
Shutz (1972) and the work of anthropologists from which I have borrowed extensively
in writing this thesis: Michael Jackson (1989, 1996), Paul Stoller (1989, 1992, 1995)
and Shawn Lindsay (1996).
One of the more general themes in pragmatism and phenomenology is a
lessening of interest in foundational or universal laws in response to experience and “a
shift in emphasis from explanatory causes to creative effects” (Jackson, 1996:4). An
emphasis on lifeworlds (Lebenswelten) as opposed to worldviews (Weltanshauungen)
also encourages the exploration of existential causes and consequences rather than the
epistemological status of beliefs (p.6). Such a method encourages a negation of
cynicism and a fusion of epistemology and ontology, which cultivates the condition
within the researcher of being able to be affected by experience and to engage with
interesting alterities.
The phenomenological epoché is thus a “suspension of certitude” or a condition
of openness to novel kinds of experience and it is thus the principle phenomenological
tool in understanding difference through practical engagement. Such an approach is
also evidenced, I suggest, in Alan Roberts Sensei’s request that we “do what they’re
doing” when we visit other dojo to train, rather than arrogantly pursue our own ends or
style – the latter being an attitude that is both likely to annoy the teachers at those dojo
and to prevent us from understanding what they might have to offer.
The epoché is particularly relevant to anthropology because without the
possibility of experience, researchers who are socialized into the mores of western
academia remain alienated (Bourdieu, 1977:2) from what might be the ecstatic realities
among the people they seek to understand. Robin Horton has commented polemically
on what happens when academics are unable to take indigenous beliefs and experiences

13
seriously and describes the way in which for example, “the reality of spirits is apt to
fade, to be replaced by visions of people engaged in elaborately veiled power plays,
composing secular poetry, or participating in complicated semiological parlour games”
(Horton, 1994:386).
Horton is referring here to the kind of anthropology that arose out of what might
be called the second linguistic turn10 in anthropological analysis, which turned many
writers away from the actualisation of psycho-physical phenomena in cultural life,
toward worlds of semiotic representation. This abstraction of cultural forms as text
comes at the risk of neglecting emotional or embodied manifestations of culture. With
regard to the martial arts, for example, John Donohue’s symbolic study (1990) of three
Japanese martial arts dojo in New York describes appearances well, but struggles to
depict the kinds of palpable personal transformations that occur among those who
practice the martial arts.
“In brief” argues Thomas Csordas (1999:184) “the equation is that semiotics
gives us textuality in order to understand representation [and] phenomenology gives us
embodiment in order to understand being-in-the-world”. Hence Csordas sees semiotics
as a useful complement of phenomenological embodiment but no substitute for the
world as it is really lived. While I would agree with Csordas on this point, the relevance
of distinguishing representative and embodied experience nonetheless becomes clear in
Chapter Two of the present work, in which I consider how the radical embodiment of
martial arts practices among some aikido practitioners appears to restrict their fantasies
and discursive arrangements about oriental others.
Some of the most important contemporary ethnographic innovators have
recognised that participation in the emotional and corporeal lives of anthropological
subjects can enlighten us to the potent forces of body agency that influence social
reason. A classic example is Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) vivid experience of grief and rage
that helped him to approach an understanding of Ilongot headhunting and to “resonate”
with the Ilongot on what Jackson would call the emotional and “physical aspects of
being… the grounds of our natural humanity” (Jackson, 1996:18).
Another experiment that I found interesting was Colin Turnbull’s (1990)
account of how he cultivated both analytical detachment and sought experiences of
complete abandon in his efforts to understand the molimo ritual among the Mbuti in
Africa. Turnbull’s vivid evocations of the feelings and presences that Mbuti songs
created in him were effectively blended with more detached reflections on the symbolic
meanings of ritual spaces and liminality. More recently, writers like Michael Taussig

14
(1993) and Paul Stoller (1995) have continued to develop these methods and challenged
overly semiotic analyses, with an amplification of the role of the body and its senses in
their understandings of culture.
Jackson and Lindsay also argue for the necessity of such a shift and see
abstraction as entailing the erasure of the political agency of those described (Jackson,
1996:20-21, Lindsay, 1996:199). With these thinkers, concepts of cultural essence also
betray wider socio-historical hegemonies. Michael Jackson (1996:17) has written with
reference to the early anthropological distinction between popular and “high brow”
culture that: “the bourgeoisie denied both the sensual body and the material conditions
on which its class privileges rested” and hence “exclusion of the body from discourse
went along with the exclusion of the masses from political life”. In following such
models I privilege the role of the body and I elaborate on experiences of touch, internal
pain and even the body’s relationship to gravity as part of the immanent experience of
aikido. This is because it is this kind of experience that has become most interesting to
me in my investigation of one way in which people are attempting to resolve the kinds
of contradictions, fragmentations and behavioural complexities that modern urban
environments produce.
Recent work in methodology has often suggested a radical difference between
the insider and the outsider (Cerroni-Long, 1995) or the academic and the native that
necessitates a kind of straddling of the borders of professional and everyday life with
“multiplex identities” (Narayan, 1993 see also Abu Lughod, 1991). As a member of the
community with which I have worked, I do not subscribe to such views, although I
acknowledge that as an academic researcher, my relationship to aikido practice was
probably qualitatively different from that of the majority of my classmates during my
fieldwork, although I am by no means alone as an academic that does aikido.
I was also perhaps analytical in different ways about the kinds of things that go
on in the dojo and I often had privileged access to the private contemplations of the
ritual specialist, Alan Roberts Sensei, as well as the benefit of normal classes. I am also
quite sure that I read many more books on and around the subject than most of the other
students and I know that I did not do as much actual practice as some. I nonetheless feel
that after an extended period of interviewing and participation in the life of the dojo, I
can claim some realistic knowledge of the cultural object that I have experienced and
which has been presented to me by my historical subjects.

15
 By way of summary, I have in this introductory chapter, sketched the distinction
between ideological “values” and material “facts” in Marxian social analysis and
established some of the important differences between a more radically “sensory” kind
of epistemology and the visual/textual kind of emphasis that has predominated in the
social sciences. In Chapters Three and Four I will discuss anthropological problems that
have emerged in relation to the body as both a system of representations and a vehicle
of immanent experience and the way in which these problems are relevant to analyses
of aikido techniques, teachings and practices. In the Chapter that follows, however, I
will consider aspects of the history of the creation of aikido and the broader socio-
historical context of the re-creation of an “aikido way of being” among the group of
martial artists that I belong to and have studied.

1
The suffix ka appended to a word in Japanese means ‘student of’. Hence aikidoka means ‘student of
aikido’.
2
Alan Roberts’ teacher in Japan, Morihiro Saito Sensei currently holds the rank of ‘ninth level’ (kyudan)
and is a recognised master of the art, with an authority that is virtually unquestionable among Iwama
aikidoka.
3
What I call the “natural” in an aikido context, are the immediate conditions of “gravity”, “anatomy” or
“tactile resistance” that are strikingly consistent in human experience. Although there are consistencies, I
do not consider the natural to be a static category, however, but an object of perceptual flow that
constantly changes and demands new configurations according to the particularity of our experiences of
it. Embodied experience thus remains a kind of flux in which we avoid notions of “the universalized body
as the gold standard of hegemonic discourse” (Haraway, 1990:146, cited in Csordas, 1999:179).
4
One such attitude or basic principle that Alan Roberts encourages in his transmission of aikido
techniques is a bodily state that is both relaxed and active at the same time. This state involves a kind of
sinking into the ground while also using that firm connection to generate power at the extremities of the
body where contact with an attacker is made. As a paradox, such a state defies rationalisation and must be
perceived with the body in order to be understood.
5
For this formulation, I am indebted to Dr. ‘Okusi Mähina and his thoughts on this aesthetic synthesis in
relation to indigenous Tongan conceptions of ‘time, space and art’ (fa, va and faiva) (personal
communication, 18/8/01).
6
On the alcove shelf known as the shomen at the front of the dojo, there is also a recently discovered
document of Morihei Ueshiba’s early techniques. As Saito Sensei has been known to do, Roberts Sensei
sometimes refers directly to this during training, as a means of making technical points and by corollary,
of legitimising his transmission.
7
Discourse about “effectiveness” is ambiguous in aikido because the art has virtually no organised
competition or inter-dojo tests of technique, which are considered antithetical to its philosophy (Ueshiba,
K. 1984:15). “Effectiveness” is also ambiguous because it is often unclear in contemporary aikido if it is
a combative system, a primarily aesthetic or even scientific pursuit like dancing or physics or even a
religion, all of which would seem to imply different ends or effects.
8
It is not my purpose to make judgements about authenticity or impose my own value judgements about
the relative merits of the various aikidos, although I have now experienced several of them. My study is
confined to Takemusu Dojo and I am concerned with both sociological questions, the general theoretical
frame of “facts” and “values” or embodied experience versus the manipulation of symbols. I cannot

16
deny, however that I have found the philosophical relevance of these themes compelling, even if their
broader objective significance may be challenging to contemporary anthropological mores.
9
I should add here that judging by his comments in various contexts, Alan Roberts Sensei is nonetheless
also very aware of the ambiguities of O Sensei’s legacy. He often gives his own interpretation of what he
thinks that O Sensei meant in a particular instance and then finishes his thought with: “then again, I don’t
know, I wasn’t there!” He is also exceptionally clear when he teaches a non-Iwama technique in class and
when he is being more experimental or showing a form from another style in order to illustrate a
particular teaching point.
10
The first linguistic turn in anthropology was the widespread influence of the Jakobsonian/Saussurian
inspired structuralism of Levi-Strauss in which the meanings of cultural symbols are merely dependent on
their relations to other symbols in a system of cultural communication that is considered “universal” to
the human mind (Levi-Strauss, 1993). The second was the “interpretative”, semiological or hermeneutic
emphasis that accompanied the advent of post-structuralism and which modelled “culture” as “text”
(Geertz, 1993).

17
 CHAPTER TWO
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

I believe that aikido was created as an act of desperation, by a man hoping, groping to find a way out
of obscenity. At least I would like to think so, for then, all its so-called weaknesses and martial
insufficiencies are relevant only in the ways that they obscure or impede this intention (Amdur,
2001:internet).

My knowledge of Ueshiba’s life is founded primarily on the accounts of Japanese

speaking western interpreters who view aikido from their own cultural perspectives and
Japanese experiences. Some of these writers have tried to locate Ueshiba’s legacy in terms
of the wider historical picture or the context of the classical or other modern Japanese
martial arts (Donohue, 1987; Draeger, 1996; Pranin, 1993; Amdur, 1997). Others have
sought to demonstrate Ueshiba’s cultural innovation or attempted to place it in the context of
other discourses about religious doctrine and martial arts practices (Goldsbury, 2001a,
2001b; Stevens, 1993, 2001). Alongside the latter analyses, hagiographies have also
appeared that are written in an apocryphal or anecdotal style (Stevens, 1987, 1997).
An early life of Ueshiba appeared in novelised form in Japanese during the late 1960s
while a more conventional study was made by Ueshiba’s son and successor, Doshu1
Kisshomaru Ueshiba (1921-1999) in the late 1970s (Ueno, 1995:68). New publications by
westerners using new media, such as Aikido Journal Online and many other independent
sources, have added to Kisshomaru’s ideas with alternative kinds of evidence and
orientations, while continuing his mission of publicizing the art (Pranin, 1999, Amdur,
2000). The Internet has also added prolifically to discussions of the founder’s life and
philosophy that are often of dubious quality.
By way of summary, Ueno (1995) has usefully discerned five phases of aikido history,
to which I make only a small addition:
1) Birth of Ueshiba in 1883 and the ‘incubating period’ until the establishment of the
‘Ueshiba Juku’ at the headquarters of Omoto Kyo in Ayabe in 1920.
2) The ‘incipient period’ of 1920-25 in which the art reached philosophical and spiritual
maturity.
3) Aikido’s growth as a social movement, culminating in the Tokyo ‘Hell Dojo’
(Kobukan) (1931) until the legal foundation of the ‘old martial association’
(Kobukai) in 1940.

19
 4) Dormant period during war and occupation, until 1948 when the ‘Aiki Association’
(Aikikai) was formally recognised.
5) Second stage of growth, lasting until around 1956, when the movement spread
nationwide and overseas. [Aikido was introduced to New Zealand in the 1960s and
various different styles have emerged during the 70s, 80s and early 90s until the
present].

While empirical research about the history of aikido should ideally speak for itself, I
have also found it relevant to my argument to draw upon aspects of a Marxian theoretical
frame to structure my account. Before I elaborate upon some of the events of Morihei
Ueshiba’s life and times, I will give a brief account of the significance of this frame.

Alienation, Millenarianism and Creativity

As a product of modernity, Karl Marx’s theory of alienation is relevant, I believe,

both to the life of Morihei Ueshiba and to the importance of his invention to the lives of
New Zealand aikido practitioners. To do scant justice to a very complex sociological
argument, it can be said that the Marxian theory of alienation has at least two aspects. In the
first aspect, the wage labourer is alienated from the products of their labour by being
integrated into an abstracted system of monetary exchange in which labour and its products
are objectified as commodities. The consequences of this objectification are disastrous in
both economic and spiritual terms because “…the more the worker by his labour
appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of
life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be
an object belonging to his labour – to be his labour’s means of life; and secondly, that it
more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical
subsistence of the worker.” (Marx, 1978 [1844]:73). This in Marx’s conception is the first
aspect of the dehumanising condition in which the connection between people and sensuous
nature itself is broken by the capitalist means of production.
With the objectification of nature’s products as commodities with only abstract
monetary value comes the second aspect of the theory, namely an ethos of greed and
competition, which discourages social institutions that would preserve human relationships

20
of exchange and reciprocity. As Ollman (1971:134) has interpreted the Marxian theory,
“alienated man [sic] is an abstraction because he has lost touch with all human specificity.
He has been reduced to performing undifferentiated work on humanly indistinguishable
objects among people deprived of their human variety and compassion” (Ollman,
1971:134). As Marx himself put it, “with the increasing value of the world of things
proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men [sic]” (Marx, 1978
[1844]:71).
While these two aspects of Marx’s theory appear to be distinguishable into separate
categories of firstly, the human relationship to nature and secondly, human social
relationships, they are nonetheless unified in Marx’s general description of the kind of
“dehumanisation” that accelerated during the escalation of the capitalist mode of production
in the late 19th century. For Marx, the resolution of this problem was to be found in a
dialectical progression, which would resolve the kinds of contradictions that such alienation
caused. In Marxian theory, this was an objective historical end and its optimism has thus
contributed to its popularity among radical intellectuals and subaltern groups and the fervour
with which it has also been stated through a multiplicity of artistic and popular reactions to
alienated industrial society.
It is also interesting to note that scholars of Japanese millenarianism and other more
“spiritualised” popular movements, have pointed out the similarities between millenarian,
socialist and Marxist forms of communist utopianism (Clarke, 2000b:138; Robinson, 2001).
For Marx, the dialectical end was a classless society, for popular or millenarian movements
or those who have suffered the consequences of military, economic and cultural colonialism;
the goal has often been represented as a return to a pre-colonial way of life or at least reform
of oppressive bureaucratic governance.
As a Japanese phenomenon, aikido was a conscious and often utopian response to
the period through which the founder Morihei Ueshiba lived and a response that was also
greatly influenced by early twentieth century Japanese millenarianism. Ueshiba then
manifested very specific aesthetic and religious visions that resulted in an art that is now
practiced on all continents. In what follows, I will try to describe this process and to
illustrate some of the contradictions that emerged as he became embroiled in some of the
very same conflicts that he sought to resolve.

As a boy he was sickly and as a man Ueshiba stood at a mere five foot five. With a
driving need to excel and a youthful sense of Japanese heroism, he evidently enjoyed sumo

21
competitions as a young man and engaged in daring feats such as the salt-water drinking
competition that he claimed ruined his stomach. Ueshiba often appears to have been
disturbed and anxious in his quest for self-fulfilment and he manifested a strong religious
orientation at an early age, with a passion for the esoteric shingon Buddhism and Shintoism
of his native town of Tanabe.
To strengthen him, Ueshiba’s father encouraged him to study judo and this prepared
him for several schools of jujutsu and at least two schools of classical swordsmanship.2 In
his early years, he undertook a period of army service during the Russo-Japanese war (1903-
1906). Although it is doubtful that he saw action, participation in one of the first modern
wars of attrition must have been a harrowing introduction to the twentieth century.
When a radical young traveller, autodidact and environmentalist named Kumagusu
Minakata (1867-1941) arrived in the village, Ueshiba was among his impromptu students.
Minakata was passionate in his defence of the Kanto plains from pollution and for the rights
of the Japan’s textile workers when their wages were less than the native labourers of British
India and he would be among the first of a number of radical ideological influences on the
young martial artist. As a young man, Ueshiba helped Minakata to oppose the Shrine
Consolidation Policy of 1906, which would have deprived local shrines of “excess” property
that would have been auctioned off for development (Stevens, 1997:14). Even into old age,
Ueshiba would say that: “Kumagusu was a great man who really inspired me to study and to
think about the world at large” (Stevens, 1997:80).
From the beginning, his life was characterised by both privilege and despairing
flights and escapes that eventually led him into millenarianism and the creation of a martial
art with an ethos of socio-spiritual reform. After his army service, Ueshiba spent a short
time as a merchant in Tokyo where he quickly developed a dislike for business (Stevens,
1997:7) and in 1912, he was encouraged by his wealthy brother-in-law Zenzo Inoue to take
part in a project to colonise the Northern island of Hokkaido with a settlement of 15
families. It was during this time in Hokkaido that he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the
study of the martial art of daito-ryu aiki jujutsu under Sokaku Takeda.3
Ueshiba developed his knowledge of classical martial schools and the principles that
Takeda imparted him in his formulation of a “new” kind of budo that he would call “the art
of peace”. Mythologies of great enlightenment experiences abound, with Ueshiba
supposedly bathed in a golden light and becoming one with the universe (Stevens, 1997:45-
47; Ueshiba, 1991:14). These stories are also cited in debates about exactly when and where
the founder conceived of this “new” art out of its classical foundations. During the Second

22
World War and evidently disgusted with his government appointments in military schools,
Ueshiba retreated from Tokyo to the town of Iwama where he lived until his death. While he
returned sporadically to the aikido headquarters in Tokyo, he evidently preferred a relatively
solitary life of contemplation and practice in pursuit of what during the Iwama years he had
called takemusu aiki or the highest level of aikido mastery.
Ueshiba’s most controversial utopian adventure was when he accompanied the
leader and six others of a large millenarian religion as a kind of bodyguard on a mission to
Mongolia in 1924. The group was attacked at various times, however, and became so
embroiled in local politics that the eight men eventually faced execution at the hands of a
local militia, until they were saved by the Japanese consul.
The leader of this expedition, Onisaburo Deguchi is one of the most colourful
artists and religious leaders of recent Japanese history. The religion that he helped to create,
Omoto Kyo (‘The Great Origin’) was often millenarian in character and like many other
Japanese ‘new religions’ (shinko shugyo) of the period and similar movements elsewhere, it
was activated by experiences of marginalisation, alienation and fading tradition (Bowie,
1997:185, Donohue 1987:153, Clarke, 2000b). At its height, the Omoto Kyo religion
claimed over one million adherents in Japan and it thrived through a combination of
charismatic leadership and its roots in the popular forms of Shintoism as opposed to that
which was cultivated by the Japanese state.
The considerable publicity machine of Omoto Kyo was also critical of an
increasingly militaristic Japanese official policy. Ultimately, the religion’s perceived
“communist activity”, disrespect for the emperor’s authority4 and pacifism led to its brutal
suppression by the Japanese government. In 1921 the police descended on the Omoto
compound in Ayabe and while no concrete evidence of revolutionary intent was found,
Onisaburo and others were arrested on charges of lèse majesté and contravention of the
Press Act (Deguchi, 1967:94). Onisaburo was soon released on bail and resumed his
eccentric activities more tactfully. During the early 1930s, however, as the Japanese military
began a campaign of violence on the Chinese mainland, Onisaburo and Omoto writers
stepped up their peculiar brand of social criticism and prophecy. The result of this was that
the movement was finally crushed and its temples dynamited in 1935.
Ueshiba was influenced by the Omoto leader’s religious syncretism and his passion
for the aesthetic legacy of Japan, which he envisioned would bring unity to the Asian
continent. After a visit to the Omoto headquarters in Ayabe in late 1919, Ueshiba became a
lifelong Omoto follower. While the Omoto Kyo movement never recovered its pre-

23
suppression popularity, it is survived today by a number of “new new Japanese religions”
that cater to a different generation with explanations, predictions and means of controlling
events (Clarke, 2000b:177). Post-World War Two Omoto offshoots such as Mahikari (‘True
Light’) and Okada Mokichi’s Sekai Kyusei Kyo (‘Church of World Messianity’), for
example, still harbour millenarian views and seek salvation through the construction of
“earthly paradises” and the stimulation of artistic creation in Japan and other parts of the
world (Cornille 2000:17).
The relevance to the present thesis of the particular Omoto vision and the movements
that is has inspired is not so much their religious doctrine, but their emphasis on preserving
the aesthetic legacy of Japan in order to affect a “this worldly” renewal through art.
Onisaburo Deguchi is celebrated for the creation of his eccentric and colourful tea bowls, his
thousands of poems, countless works of calligraphy, painting, sculpture and theatrical
works. As a disciple of Onisaburo, Morihei Ueshiba also devoted himself to calligraphy and
waka (thirty one syllable poems) and haiku (seventeen syllable poems) for the pleasure of
his seishi or ‘holy master’ (Ueshiba, 1977 cited in Ueno 1995:77).
Ueshiba represented the peculiarly Japanese aesthetic path of budo or ‘the martial
way’ in Deguchi’s entourage and he taught his nascent martial arts style at the specially
prepared “Ueshiba Juku” dojo in Deguchi’s compound at Ayabe. From the early days at
Ayabe, Ueshiba was careful to distinguish his creation from the traditional budo, which
emerged out of the more amoralistic fighting disciplines of the old samurai. An emphasis on
spiritualised discourses in Ueshiba’s teachings has been noted before in anthropological
studies of aikido (Donohue, 1987) and predictably disparaged by authorities on the
“classical” (Draeger, 1996). Ueshiba’s overt pacifism has, however, made aikido, in the
words of one classical practitioner: “an aggravating puzzle… a struggle that [nonetheless]
provokes me to new perspectives in ways that I would never have come to had I stayed
exclusively with the martial traditions I found and still find more congenial” (Amdur
1997a:158, emph. in original).
The novelty of Ueshiba’s vision was to merge a martial discipline with a Mo-ist
conception of aiki as “universal love” (Draeger, 1996 [1974]:143). For him, it was only as a
defensive art that budo had any moral justification (Donohue, 1987:146). During the Second
World War, when the Japanese government mobilised the mythology of bushido or ‘the way
of the warrior’ for ideological ends, Ueshiba also increasingly differentiated his budo from
that of the bureaucratic and military elite. He once told his son that:

24
 The military is full of reckless fools ignorant of statesmanship and religious ideals, who
slaughter innocent citizens indiscriminately and destroy everything in their path. They
act in total contradiction to God’s will, and they will surely come to a sorry end. True
budo is to nourish life and foster peace, love and respect, not to blast the world to pieces
with weapons (Ueshiba, circa 1940, quoted in Ueno, 1995:83).

Ueshiba’s creation of aikido was an interesting innovation in the sense that it

inverted the bushido mythology that was cultivated by a modern state propaganda machine
in its pursuit of war. Ueshiba can thus be added to the list of activists, thinkers, artists and
organizations, who have developed different interpretations of bushido for various ends and
thus added to the term’s ideological complexity and ambiguity (Ames, 1995).

While Morihei Ueshiba has now entered the mythical ranks of Japanese sword
saints, his life, like the history of Omoto Kyo itself was also full of ambivalences. While the
Omoto Kyo religion originated as a peasant movement, its ranks later came to include many
wealthy and influential people and it developed extraordinary inconsistencies, as it became a
complex mass movement. As an often radical but ambiguous creed with its own brand of
messianic patriotism, Omoto Kyo also formed associations with conservative ideologues and
nationalists with whom it found common ground in the will to rid Japan of the bad taste of
the modern and to spread the concept of kokutai or Japanese cultural “essence” to the Asian
continent (Clarke, 2000b:143-44; Deguchi,1998:136,141).
Omoto Kyo actualised its pan-Asiatic aspirations through missionary activities,
expeditions and the formation of associations like the inter-religious Jinrui Aizenkai (pan-
harmony among humans society). The Great Monglian Expedition of 1924, for example,
was supposedly in the interests of setting up alliances that would spark off a new religious
brotherhood of all humankind. Connections have also been made, however, between
Deguchi’s expedition, a government conspiracy and the interventions of extreme nationalist
groups on the Chinese continent (Draeger, 1996:39-40; Amdur, 2001; Homma, 2001).
Members of such groups included Mitsuru Toyama and Ryohei Uchida, founders
and ultra right wing “expansionists” of the Kokuryukai (“Black Dragon Society’) and the
Genyosha (‘Black Ocean Society’). Both of these men were frequent visitors to the Omoto
headquarters in Ayabe and they also had Omoto shrines in their houses (Deguchi, 1967:139-
41). One of Morihei Ueshiba’s pre-war students, Ikkusai Iwata, has also revealed that deadly
activists and unsavoury members of the military regularly met in Ueshiba’s Tokyo dojo.
This group included members of the Sakurakai (Cherry Blossom Society), the Kokuryukai
and the Ketsumeidan (‘League of Blood’). These men were notorious for their engagement

25
in espionage and the intimidation and assassination of Japanese liberals (Pranin, 1993:86).
Tales of Ueshiba’s definitive enlightenment and spiritual transformations thus tend to
disguise the fact that his actions were frequently more pragmatic than morally perfect.
Of high social status and well connected, Ueshiba taught at the private dojos and
homes of the wealthy from 1927 until 1931 when he established the Kobukan in Tokyo. Just
before the police descended on Ayabe and definitively crushed Omoto Kyo, Ueshiba was
warned and protected by influential friends and he subsequently distanced himself from
Omoto in the pursuit of more amenable alliances. During the war, he was also persuaded to
instruct at the Nakano spy school where by his own admission, “he would teach techniques
as true instruments of death” (Amdur, 1997:27; see also Ueshiba & Ueshiba, 1964; Pranin,
1999). Despite the renowned Omoto criticism of imperial rule, many of Ueshiba’s doka
(‘songs of the way’ or pedagogical poems) also betray a high degree of patriotism and
reverence for the emperor (Ueshiba, 1991:29). His contribution to the war effort was
nonetheless short-lived and he soon resigned to Iwama where he took up a life of relative
solitude and contemplation.
The retreat to Iwama was thus the culmination of O Sensei’s having lived through 60
years of modern Japanese history. During this time he had been dazzled by charismatic
religious leaders, powerful martial artists and patriotic fervour, he had lived a life of
adventure and public engagement as he began to formulate his pacifistic martial arts
philosophy. Indeed:

…he proved pliant in the face of the government, participating in training those who
went to war. And he opened his doors to men who did not practice martial arts in the
dojo, but in the real world of politics and the even more real world of bloody knives
and smoking guns (Amdur, 1997:29).

Combining experiences of brutality with an understanding of Omoto Kyo doctrine,

Ueshiba developed the insights gained during periods of intensive training with skilled
classical martial technicians. He created an aikido that he called “the art of peace” when he
moved to Iwama to cultivate his farm budo (‘way of the warrior’) in a life of agriculture,
martial arts and religious practices. It was at Iwama that he built the Aiki shrine to the 43
deities of aikido, an Omoto temple, which is still visited annually by Omoto priests.
Ascetism, heroism and violence combined with “cosmic love” and “enlightenment”,
Ueshiba’s life was a progression from hard to soft. Herein lies the combination of violence
and compassion that make the martial tradition of aikido and the life of its founder so
enigmatic. In this sense Ueshiba can perhaps be characterised as a Japanese modernist, with

26
all the aspirations, fears and contradictions that modernism entails. For to be modern, as
Marshall Berman (1989:13-14) has argued:

is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense

bureaucratic organisations that have the power to control and often to destroy all
communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these
forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary
and conservative; alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by
the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to
hold onto something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully
modern is to be anti-modern….

Besides his adventure in Mongolia and a brief excursion to Hawaii, Ueshiba never
left the islands of Japan. His personal quest and the aikido practices that it resulted in
however, have now been given new significances in diverse and distant locations.

Orientalism

As means of “personal development”, the religious and martial arts technologies of

Asia have inspired the fascination of westerners and this fascination has often resulted in
what anthropologists, influenced by Edward Said (1978) would characterise as essentialist
“Orientalist” fantasies about exotic eastern others. Said argues that the common equation of
the East as more “feminine”, “natural” or “mystical” in authoritative western representations
of it (Said, 1995 [1978]) also reveals the positions of discursive power that western
commentators occupy in terms of a mythologised East.
The search for communion with authentic oriental others at the level of fetish and
idealisation has also characterised these discourses and although Said’s work is centred on
the Middle-East, it is still very relevant to misrepresentations of the martial arts in the West.
This is true not merely with regard to authoritative academic discourses but also to the
influence of popular media, particularly film, in which the martial arts are often glamorised
and burlesqued (Donohue, 1994; Won, 1996).
One male practitioner at Takemusu Aikido Dojo explained to me that his initial
interest in aikido came from the perception that “it was the cool thing to do, like the Bruce
Lee of sports” Another told me that he came to the art after reading a popular novel about
the early Japanese assassins known as the ninja. Numerous references were also made to
figures from the Star Wars trilogy and strange powers like “the force”, which resonates with

27
ideas about subtle “energies” in the world of aikido. This indubitably betrays the influence
of popular representations, exoticism and fantasy, yet it has also been interesting to find that
in many cases, a fascination with the exotic was also expressed in terms of a search for
alternatives to the life conditions and options of modern aikido practitioner’s own cultures.
Where people made statements about an interest in the exotic or the
“authentic”, it was usually combined with references to a perceived cultural
inadequacy that needed to be addressed. This inadequacy derived from the fact that
as one student told me:

we’re such a young kind of culture… If you look back, its not like we can identify
with… I can’t identify with my German ancestry… I’ve never been to Germany
and my Scottish or Samoan ancestry, I can’t identify with that either… I don’t
speak Gaelic, I don’t know any of their customs really apart from what I’ve read
and I certainly don’t identify with it… so I really only identify with this culture,
which is Kiwi, but it’s so young… and it’s like, almost bland. I mean there just
doesn’t seem like there’s any tradition… It’s not as fascinating as something like
aikido. I find aikido a lot more interesting. Say if you’re part Maori…. you can
follow that line and you can identify with that because their tradition is longer and
I guess its more exotic than beer-drinking and rugby.

In another example, the motivations for doing aikido and the impulse to do
something “different” was considered in terms of another kind of perceived cultural
inadequacy:

Is it something we do to be different? I guess if you’re looking at the Planet

Hollywood version of aikido5, I guess what you lose there is that claim to
authenticity. Do you feel like you’re doing history? Is it something you do with
popcorn and fries? I wonder if it’s something we do because it’s not Kiwi, because
it’s not British… it’s untainted by consumerism, it’s just intrinsically valuable… I
mean o.k., here we are in New Zealand (as a Brit in my case), doing a Japanese
martial art taught by a Kiwi… it’s not a British heritage, it’s not a Kiwi heritage, but
it’s a heritage and I think there’s something aesthetically pleasing about the fact that
it has been untouched.

Like other martial arts and eastern spiritual technologies, aikido at Takemusu Dojo
can thus also be seen as an example of cultural appropriation by a non-Japanese audience,
which stems from wanting to do something outside the mainstream and an interest in finding
roots in a rootless world. Mathews (2000:117) has modelled this phenomenon in terms of
cultural consumption and the privilege of middle class westerners, to “go shopping” in the
“global cultural supermarket” and to sample freely from eastern cultures. A degree of
cultural commodification is certainly revealed in the proliferation of aikido products that can
be found on the Internet, from carry bags to baseball caps displaying aikido related Japanese

28
characters. The presence of the dojo itself and the kinds of practices that occur there in the
imitation of Japanese terms, mannerisms and aesthetics might also be represented as a form
of cultural consumption on the part of non-Japanese practitioners.
The present case is more complicated than assertions about an exploitative one-way
cultural consumption would seem to suggest however. Japan was never officially colonised,
although it was nonetheless forcibly opened to western markets in 1868. With the influence
of foreign political, economic and educational models, cultivated by the country’s political
leaders, Japan later experienced extraordinary economic development. With this
development there also came a number of Japanese cultural forms that were critical of
modernity, such as Omoto Kyo and its later manifestations. Owing to the global influence of
many such cultural forms, as well as the contemporary economic power of Japanese tourists
and businesses, scholars have also begun to describe what might be called the “reverse
influences” of Japanese culture (Clarke, 2000a) on the western world and other non-western
countries, in an era of globalisation.
In terms of Japan and the West, consumption is better characterised as a two-way
process that has resulted in all manner of interesting reformulations of national icons and
self-images, besides the essentialisms of conservative nationalisms. In one case, Tobin
(1992:187) suggests, for example, that: “in Japan, the ‘samurai bravado’ admired by the
Japanese not only does not represent an authentic Japanese sensibility but is an occidentally
inspired burlesque of what it means to be Japanese”. The quest for an elusive identity and
authenticity is thus as much a part of modern Japanese experience as it is of the experience
of Orientalising westerners. Both the East and the West have furthermore mirrored and
inspired each other in this quest, with their own respective generalisations and fantasies.
There are generous materials in the aikido world for the field of representations,
conceptual exchanges and translations. One area of particular interest has been the
fascination with perceived “forces” or “energies” such as ki (‘energy’) or kokyu (‘breath
power’). These concepts have also contributed to mythologies about the kinds of fantastic
feats that Morihei Ueshiba supposedly performed and the mystique that he generated about
himself and his art among Japanese and non-Japanese alike.
Throughout his life, for example, Ueshiba described himself as a descendent of the
Shinto strongman Tachikara O and a human manifestation of the Dragon King Ame no
Murakumo Kuki Samuhara Ryu O (Stevens 1997:148). With his ‘sound spirit’ (kotodama)
and purification practices (misogi) he also claimed to establish a kind of ‘bridge to heaven’
(ame no kihashi), or a link to the gods that was a channel for divine power that expressed

29
itself through the performance of his martial techniques. These are the kinds of images that
give Ueshiba’s hagiographers such satisfaction (Stevens, 1987, 1997) but they have also
created conflicts about what the teachings of Ueshiba really mean.

(Photo. 2)
Using the power of kokyu, an elderly Morihei Ueshiba resists the strength of three men with a
wooden sword. This photograph was displayed in a chat room on the Aikido Journal website (circa
October 2001) with the caption and moot for discussion: “Is this a miracle?”

Among contrasting understandings of the art in both Japan and the West, interesting
boundary markers have emerged, between interpreters who prefer to emphasise the
“physicality” and those who stress the “spirituality” of aikido performances. It is a
peculiarity of Takemusu Dojo, for example, that the word ki is almost never used and this
appears to be a conscious act on the part of Alan Roberts Sensei, as one high-graded male
explained:

Alan never talks about ki but he does talk about kokyu though and I think that has more
meaning to him than ki… You know, because kokyu just starts to mean things like
extension and projection and things like that and that’s a lot more tangible than this
idea of ki, which the hairy fairy people get tied up in… energies and spiritual stuff and
it’s like, yeah you can play around with it if you want, but let’s just talk about
projection… well, just feelings you know, like can I really feel ki? Well come on you
can’t really feel ki… no you can’t, you’re just lying to yourself, you just think you can,

30
 so why don’t we just talk about projection and things that we’re feeling… this idea of
extension, you could describe these things.

This ethos also extends to attitudes about the life of Morihei Ueshiba and the stories
that surround it. Given that Ueshiba’s portrait appeared to be enshrined at the front of the
dojo and was ritually honoured with bows and claps at the beginning and end of every class,
I went to interviews expecting that a kind of idol worship might emerge from my
interviewees’ statements. Most Takemusu Dojo practitioners, however, had quite mundane
ideas of the founder’s life. While some (particularly male practitioners in the early stages of
practice) displayed an interest in fantastic anecdotes and a colourful oral history, many also
admitted a degree of ambivalence or even derogatory views of the man and his mysteries.
Some Takemusu aikido students were also quite conscious of Ueshiba’s
vulnerabilities and the obsessions, impulsiveness and belligerent moods that characterized
his personal life. Alan Roberts even surprised me in a conversation one day, by bringing O
Sensei’s “honesty” and integrity into question in the context of his Omoto Kyo esotericism.
Most of his students were also disinterested in Ueshiba’s religious views or consciously
rejected them with statements about their detachment from the “spiritual” side of aikido. As
one experienced female aikidoka told me, “to me its all about how you move your body and
your connection with the other person… it’s not about so much history or stories.”
Despite a distinct distaste for spiritualism at the dojo, virtually all of the students
whom I interviewed were nonetheless aware of the importance of Ueshiba’s values and the
uniqueness of the way in which he put them into practice. As one black belt expressed it:

I’m aware of how unusual Ueshiba was as a person, both as a martial artist and as a
very unique individual and I won’t say that I’m in awe of it, but I still think it’s a focal
point in the dojo where you reflect and think well, what values, what attitudes, what
spirit did this guy embody? How did this guy put his values into practice? How did he
manifest these principles in his aikido?

Contemporary commentators have also noted that studying a martial art like aikido
requires serious commitment, discipline and a degree of self-abnegation if one is to make
progress in it, no matter what cultural context (Kohn, 2001:170-173). This attitude was
indeed reflected among many of the aikido students whom I interviewed, particularly those
who had practiced for a number of years. While many had indeed trained under a variety of
teachers and “shopped around” for the particular spiritual technology that might satisfy
them, their practice had often come to mean much more than the consumption of idealised
images. Aikido was often described as more than “a sport”, “a hobby” or an entertaining

31
distraction, although it is nonetheless also able to fit within these categories as one brown
belt suggested:

I mean, initially you just want to go there and know a martial art so you can kick ass if
the situation sort of arose. But now it’s sort of become a… I mean yeah, it’s a martial
art and I want to sort of learn to protect myself, but it’s also a good workout of your
body and there’s all this flexibility and that. There’s a bit of rough and tumble without
all the testosterone bullshit you get from rugby and stuff like that and you can do it…
it’s lifelong, there’s sort of that challenge as well and there’s something humbling
about having a busy day at work and then coming home and getting thrown about the
mat for a while… and I want to get better.

Rather than communion with something divinely esoteric, this passage seems to
represent the most common kind of aikido experience at the dojo, namely a “leisure”
activity that is also something more. It is also vigorously corporeal, although as I hope to
show in Chapter Four, the embodied experiences of aikido can also be quite numinous. As I
personally became more committed to my training and socialised into the life of the dojo, I
also noticed that I became more “realistic” about what aikido meant. This caused me to
reflect on aikido styles that I had practiced in the past, my attitudes in relation to aikido
terms and concepts and indeed my own fascination with Asian cultures. As an
anthropologist, it is somewhat embarrassing to admit that in the beginning, I probably had
more fantasies about the kinds of powers that were at work and the possibilities that
Ueshiba’s symbolic legacy implied than my Takemusu Dojo interlocutors themselves.
My emergent realism was no doubt the result of a combination of influences
including the down to earth and often prosaic expressions of my particular aikido teacher
Alan Roberts as well as the theoretical interests that I developed during the year (See
Chapter One). The issue is an important one here, because one of the issues that this thesis
seeks to address is the extent to which symbolic abstractions contribute to fantasies and
hegemonic social constructions such as orientalism in aikido and the way that such
discourses relate to sensory experiences on the training mat itself. This is perhaps also a
good opportunity to consider more reflexively, my methodological position as an
anthropologist at the dojo and the kinds of orientalist fantasy to which I found that I was so
susceptible.
When I started doing aikido, I was a student of modern philosophy from a middle-
class family who was fascinated with all things distant and esoteric. I travelled to Africa and
Europe and spent years in Asia as an English teacher. Just back from a period in Japan and

32
carrying a souvenir wooden ninja sword from the village of Nikko, I finally became a
graduate in anthropology and decided to pursue a thesis on a “Japanese” topic.
I had completed research on the drama of Chushingura: The Forty Seven Ronin6
when I began to read John Stevens’ books about Morihei Ueshiba and his superhuman
martial artistry. As a fan of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, I rented Seven Samurai
(Kurosawa, 1954) from the video store (more than once!), and at the Auckland Film Festival
I enjoyed Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) about a gentle black
assassin in Philadelphia who surrenders himself unconditionally as a “retainer” to an Italian
mafia boss. Around the same time I watched Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(2000), and perhaps I even sought an elusive “native point of view” by setting up a Buddhist
altar in my living room.
I had already travelled in Asia, studied numerous Asian languages and practised
Muay Thai boxing and meditation in training camps and temples of Thailand. I had
considered becoming a monk in Laos, drunken tea with a master of Tai Chi Chuan in
Taiwan and read elaborate works on zen by D. T. Suzuki as I absorbed the American filtered
Buddhism of the Beat Generation. And here I was, doing aikido with a teacher who had
authentic links to the master, Morihei Ueshiba. Furthermore, it was all on my doorstep, right
here in the suburb of Mt. Eden where I grew up. “How absurd”, I thought, I had never really
needed to go anywhere! Yet unconsciously, I continued to seek satisfaction of my thirst for
the exotic, with oriental clothes, food shopping at Asian supermarkets on Dominion Road
and enthusiastic readings of Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Wilson, 1992).
No doubt I brought all of this fantastic baggage with me to the dojo and as I knelt in
a traditional Japanese position kneeling posture (seiza), I drifted off into thoughts of the
manicured pebble gardens of Kyoto. When I got up to practise the day’s moves with my
training partner, my eyes followed the sweeps and swirls of the hakama (‘pleated skirt’)
worn by senior students. As I tried to remember the “seven virtues” in their seven pleated
folds I also marvelled at the asymmetrical aesthetics of Japanese flower arrangements in the
shomen (ceremonial alcove) and the semiotics of calligraphic scrolls and their paradoxes,
when…
One day I was suddenly hit on the side of the head with a yokomen strike that came
with considerable force from the hand of my teacher. As he demanded “what’s hitting you
Paul!?” I reeled and tried to get my bearings, set up for another go at the same kata
(ritualised martial ‘form’), when… again! Sensei had driven through my lazy defences and

33
struck me once more across the nose and the occipital orbit, the sharp ridge of the eye
socket, which smarts easily on impact. My senses were both heightened and numbed.
Twice more he demanded “what’s hitting you Paul!?”
“What’s hitting you Paul!?”
Dazed and bemused, I mustered a half-hearted: “I don’t know”.
“Hmm… good answer!” said sensei as he moved on to surprise the next group of training
partners.
The importance of that moment and many others like it was that they made me
realise that when martial techniques like those that are practised at Takemusu Aikido Dojo
are manifested in very immediate corporeal conflicts, the potential for idealisation of them is
much less. Such transformations have affected many aspects of my daily life and will surely
continue to affect my future. It is also one reason why aikido still remains very important to
me and to many others at the dojo. It is this immediate and radical corporeality and the way
that it relates to a specific kind of social engagement that I also suggest, makes aikido
significant to its practitioners. It is also a significance that as many aikido practitioners put
it, can only be grasped among those who belong to the aikido community. As one very
committed female brown belt told me:

It’s not my whole social circle, but it’s really important. It’s funny how we’re all quite
insular… like when people bring their partners in, it seems like they feel awkward
because we always come back to talking about aikido. It’s something that you really
have to do to understand and I think that’s what draws us all together, because we
really do understand.

Or as another male brown belt told me:

Yeah, it’s nice to be with people who are interested in the social side as well and who
couldn’t… you know, I talk to my Dad and he says oh, yeah you’re doing a martial art,
that’s a bit weird… yeah some people ask me weird things about martial arts and think
of it as some sort of cult or something and it’s good to be around a load of people who
understand it and understand what your passion is. That’s kind of how it touches
society because some of the friendliest people I’ve met have been through aikido…
people who have offered to put us up like Maria in Sydney. She had four of us in her
house and we’d never met the woman before, but she was doing it because she knew
Alan and so she sort of accepted us and we got to meet people that we wouldn’t have
met otherwise so you see, it is touching the world and I think that’s how it does touch
the world and change society. I don’t think it can change or topple governments and
things like that but it certainly creates a network of people.

Thoughts about the creation of “a network of people” and the ethos of aikido, mesh together
in interesting ways, with some of the points I raised earlier about the Marxian theory of
alienation and the particular creative reactions that characterised the historical development

34
of the art. If we recall Marx’s description of people deprived of their human variety and
compassion due to the breakdown of human relations within modern capitalist society, then
the work of aikido still seems to represent a moment of resistance to these processes. For the
ritual experts or what Gramsci (1991) might have called the “intellectuals” of aikido the
performances of aikido indeed often appear to be conscious acts of counter-hegemonic
reform as in the case of Morihei Ueshiba or Alan Roberts. As one very well-educated aikido
student suggested:

I suspect Alan thinks of aikido as having a broader social function than simply
training people to do martial arts or appreciate aikido. I think he definitely sees it as
character transforming, I think he… which partly explains on his insistence on
sincerity when you come in and he’s actually said on several occasions, you know,
“come on! You can say hello clearly and mean it when you come in the door, you
know, it’s a social skill, you know… learn how to say hello to people!” Yeah and
learning to appreciate and to respect what other people are doing… even if someone
is giving you a hard time, is to realise that that’s the mirror you’re working on for
your technique… you know, to appreciate what they’re giving you, even if it’s not
what you thought you wanted… so creating tolerance, patience, perseverance… it’s
getting on with people, a whole range of people from different backgrounds and you
all come together and you’ve got something in common.

For the kind of aikido practitioner who starts up after walking in off the street, the
practice might not represent such an act of conscious reform, but I argue that it is still
constituted by the impulse to transform the self and to become something different in the
face of inadequacies that may have strong cultural foundations. Related to the inter-personal
dissociations that go along with fragmented social relations, I have argued that in the
Marxian theory, there is also the problem of dissociation from sensual nature. In aikido
practices, however, and this will become clearer as I describe them later in more detail, the
fragmented categories of the social and the natural seem to converge. Through the
experiences of conflict that arise in the performance of aikido forms, people are also able to
explore the possibility of this convergence through the mask of a non-verbalised ritual
practice. One very dedicated brown belt practitioner explained this significance of her
practice as follows:

It’s [aikido] more than just the self, it’s relating to other people. I used to do ballet and
well it’s actually quite similar in the way that it’s a development of body and mind.
But in aikido you don’t have quite so much individual development… like you’re not
in ballet… you’re not changing your uke [‘partner’] every five minutes and although
you’re trying to learn how your body works, it’s more just your relationship about
yourself [sic]. Aikido is even more fulfilling. It’s all still formal practice but you don’t
just have to worry about yourself… it’s very insular but aikido is also very dynamic
and about your relationship to others.

35
 I have often heard Alan Roberts talking about the greater degree of intimacy that
aikido practice involves, compared to other kinds of “hit them as hard as you can” martial
arts. According to Alan, the nature of the techniques and the kind of indirect “connection”
that is sought between practice partners furthermore necessitates a closeness that many
people also feel uncomfortable with at the beginning of their practice. As one female
practitioner explained to me:

In aikido you have contact with people that you normally wouldn’t choose to have
anything to do with and sometimes you have to get your body extremely close to
people and normally you wouldn’t really feel comfortable doing that but you have to
get beyond that boundary. I remember when I first started, I didn’t really like getting
my backside up close against some guy and to pull them in really close to me but you
have to get beyond that because otherwise you can’t move forward can you?

“Progress” in aikido is thus revealed when people move beyond their inhibitions and
take the embodied ritual forms, protocol and etiquette of the dojo to heart as they practise
them daily with their bodies. Feelings of embarrassment in performances of cultural
otherness thus generally gave way to an appreciation of the martial and social meaning of
etiquette and its significance to the personal experience of aikido practitioners. Discourses
about “purity” of technique and “authenticity” remain and these can be partially attributed to
the development of communal pride and the need for personal legitimation. Susan Howell
(1995) has also modelled the phenomenon of the search for “purity”, however, in terms of
an impulse to seek out cultural otherness, in order to fill perceived “gaps” or what she calls
“lacunae” in people’s cultures of origin (Howell, 1995).
I suggest that the existential insecurity that she describes might be elaborated with
historical reference to the general theory of alienation that is provided by Marx. Within this
frame, it is evident that the martial arts occupy a special place in the history of the western
appropriation of eastern ideas and that aikido in particular, represents a moment of agency,
intentionality and reclamation in this history, of the human relationship to sensual nature and
of less alienated forms of social relations. In its most rigorous forms, it is also a
phenomenon, which requires an effort beyond the personal desire and fantasy of
consumption or decoration. As Tamara Kohn (2001:176) has argued, for example:

People cannot casually insert a martial art or any other ‘in-body discipline’ into a
‘foreign other’ space within an ‘English’, ‘French’ or any other core identity, in the
way that they might place an ‘Oriental carpet’ on the floor next to their old English
sofa in their Victorian terraced house.

36
 What is thus interesting about practices like aikido is that through an analysis of the
role of “the body”, certain limitations can be demonstrated regarding the analogy between
culture and text while the critique of usually very literary “Orientalist” representations can
be extended. With an emphasis on the body, cultural essences are complexified and
challenged by moving away from social homogeneity and national stereotype towards a
more general understanding of the relationships of bodies and selves (Kohn, 2001:174). In
later chapters, I attempt to develop this understanding in my analyses of aikido. For the
moment, however, I complete my historical perspectives, with a consideration of aikido as a
locally originating phenomenon that is now to be found on the global stage.

Globalisation

As I indicated in the opening chapter, it would be futile to assert a single “universal”

aikido, entailing a denial of the kinds of creolisations and diverse localisations that have
characterised cultural movements in history. Sidney Mintz has been an important thinker on
globalisation and I follow his example in positioning my research project at the intersection
of the local and the global in discerning wider processes of exchange and cultural creativity
(Mintz, 1998). Besides brief visits to practitioner’s houses, the very specific context of the
dojo itself has been the geographical limit of my study and I hope to illustrate that even such
a small and confined space as an Auckland aikido dojo represents a “matrix of intersecting
vectors” (Strauss, 2000:168) that can be extended out to the cultures of England, Japan,
Polynesia and of course Aotearoa/New Zealand.
My project is also further proof that cultural “otherness” in anthropology is by no
means particularly geographical as local contexts reveal great diversities (Gupta &
Ferguson, 1997). The reasons for these diversities are demonstrated in Vincente Rafael’s
work (1993), when he discusses the multiple cultural translations that result from the
localisation of Christian narratives among Tagalog interpreters, for example. In terms of
aikido, conscious efforts have also been made to disseminate the art globally, from within
large centralised organisations. Aikido’s radically “embodied” techniques and their
associated meanings are also subject to translation, however, and their dissemination has
resulted in multifarious kinds of aikido practice.
In 1940, the Kobukai foundation was set up to spread Ueshiba’s aikido but this was
stymied by the great disruptions caused by the war and later by the Allied occupation, under

37
which most martial arts were banned because of their nationalist associations. Morihei
Ueshiba’s son Kisshomaru eventually managed to convince the authorities that aikido was
an essentially non-competitive and non-militaristic art, however, and in 1942 the name
aikido was officially registered with the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Aikikai
Federation was founded in 1948 during the post-war period, when Morihei tended to spend
the vast majority of his time at Iwama, however, he seems to have been “totally indifferent
to the organization” (Ueno, 1995: 87).
The popularised aikido that emerged under Kisshomaru Ueshiba’s guidance has
nonetheless given birth to more than fifty overseas aikido organizations. It has also
generated a regulated syllabus and system of gradings that are more amenable to
administration than Morihei Ueshiba’s highly idiosyncratic methods. This expansion has
made aikido a global culture and Kisshomaru saw it as a new vehicle of his father’s
teachings in modern Japan and indeed a world that he characterised as full of “material
abundance, artificial comforts and the massive bureaucratisation of life”. As he also put it,
there was a growing dissatisfaction and frustration underscoring the malaise that is
spreading throughout the world” (Ueshiba, K., 1984, quoted in Goldsbury, 2001b). “[M]ore
than ever in history” Kisshomaru continued, “we need to recover what it means to be truly
human and to be truly caring”. It is perhaps ironic, then, that aikido’s expansion has come at
the expense of increased bureaucratisation and a new administrative form and that this has
also contributed to the diversification of the art.
Due to disagreements with the central administration, some of Ueshiba’s leading pre-
war students later chose to break away from the central organization, particularly after the
death of the founder. These teachers have been as instrumental as Ueshiba’s son in
disseminating their own interpretations of Ueshiba’s art and in introducing aikido to other
parts of the world. The importance of post-war teachers such as Koichi Tohei, Gozo Shioda
and Morihiro Saito among many others have lead commentators to ask questions about who
the “founders” of modern aikido really are (Pranin, 1996; Gaku, 2001).
There is nonetheless little doubt about the diversity of styles that have now been
disseminated in contemporary New Zealand. I have mentioned Gozo Shioda Sensei who
founded Yoshinkan Aikido and Koichi Tohei Sensei of the ‘Ki Society’ (Ki no Kenkyukai)
because they are also the primary influences of David Lynch Sensei, who with his wife
Hisae was the founder of the first aikido school in New Zealand in 1965. Lynch Sensei
continues to teach in Auckland and the Coromandel. In 1990 there were approximately

38
twenty other aikido schools in New Zealand unconnected to the Lynch dojo, with about five
hundred practitioners (Ueno 1995:91) and now there are many more.
Besides Lynch Dojo, the other principle lineages that are now represented in
Auckland are Tomiki Aikido: the only competitive aikido system; Riai (an eclectic New
Zealand style); The Institute of Aikido and Kyushindo, which was brought to New Zealand
by the Englishman Ron Russell; Koichi Tohei Sensei’s Ki no Kenkyukai and Shinryukan
under Nobuo Takase Shihan - the official New Zealand Aikikai representative. Finally, there
is of course the subject of the present study: Auckland Takemusu Aikido Dojo (now Aikido
of Auckland) under Alan Roberts Sensei, who represents the Aikikai affiliated Iwama-ryu of
Morihiro Saito Sensei. While particular styles or philosophical orientations are very much
dependent on the tastes of various aikido teachers, virtually all of the Auckland dojo that I
have visited observe certain pan-aikido ritual protocols and the same photo-portrait of O
Sensei Morihei Ueshiba is present at the front of the class and at seminars or meetings at
which the various styles come together.
What is more interesting than the survival of an “aikido movement” is that traditions
with such parochial roots can be adopted by others in very different contexts and reproduced
for their own ends and in their own ways. New Zealand aikido represents, in sum, a
modernist appropriation of a practice, the origins of which are found in a millenarian
religion that was itself, influenced by western ideas.7 Any essentialist illusions about a
distinctive East and West or an “authentic” aikido must thus be abandoned, as we discover
that “things are not what they used to be… but they never were” (Mintz, 1998:131).
As we have seen in the conservative or revivalist manifestations of Japanese
“essence” that I have discussed before in this chapter, the Japanese have also been as prone
to national stereotyping of themselves as westerners have of fantasising about Japanese
authenticity and exotic otherness. Although the quest for the “authentic” is doomed to
futility, it is nonetheless interesting to observe cases in which westerners become as
enthusiastic as the Japanese themselves for their own vanishing traditions. Discourses about
cultural essence thus reveal a certain commonality rather than uniqueness. As Marilyn Ivy
(1995:6) has argued, “if Japan is incommensurable, it is incommensurable in ways
commensurate with other modern nation-cultures in the specificity of its modern
entanglements”. These modern entanglements have also necessitated the enthusiasm of
creative groups of individuals for whom new and hybridised cultural propositions are
derived from ancient and often vanishing forms.

39
 (Photo. 3)
An example of a ceremonial portrait of O-Sensei. The writing on the right reads: “Ueshiba Morihei,
Aikido Doshu” (doshu means ‘leader of the way’)
http://www.aikidofaq.com/bilder/osensei/ (August 2001).

40
The Iwama Lineage

Even though our path is completely different from the warrior arts of the past, it is not
necessarily to abandon the old ways. Absorb venerable traditions into this new art by clothing them
with fresh garments, and build on the classic styles to create better forms (Morihei Ueshiba, quoted
in Roberts 2001:1).

Although the Iwama-ryu of aikido is still affiliated with the Aikikai Federation, as a
style, it has a reputation for differentiating itself according to its specific historical and
technical legacy. It was the Iwama retreat, situated not far north of Tokyo, that served as the
countryside dojo where Morihei Ueshiba farmed, trained, built the Aiki Shrine and spent the
last 27 years of his life until he died in 1969. While Doshu Kisshomaru Ueshiba officially
succeeded the founder in Tokyo, the Iwama legacy and guardianship of the Aiki Shrine was
left in the hands of Morihiro Saito Sensei who by the time of O Sensei’s death in 1969, had
spent 23 years living and training with Ueshiba.
Now Saito Sensei holds the rank of ninth dan, while Kisshomaru’s son Moriteru is
the new doshu or official hereditary successor of O Sensei’s legacy. This genealogy is
essential to the practice at Takemusu Aikido Dojo and serves as an important signal of Alan
Roberts Sensei’s legitimacy. The name of his dojo itself is a reference to the mature
teachings of the founder, apparently formulated during his twilight years at Iwama.
Alan Roberts Sensei began to study aikido in Whangarei with Keith Hartley Sensei,
one of the first Iwama-ryu proponents in New Zealand.8 Alan was, he told me, “a fanatic
right from the start” and at 17 he travelled to Iwama and began a four-year apprenticeship
including one year as a full-time ‘live-in student’ (uchi deshi) under Saito Sensei. While in
Japan he pursued other interests in Japanese culture such as the tea ceremony and he also
studied Japanese language, which enabled him to perform translation duties in Iwama.
In 1992, he returned to New Zealand and visited a number of local dojo as a student,
unsure whether he wanted to teach. He soon decided however, that he had skills to offer in
areas of expertise unknown to many local instructors and began to teach a specialist class in
aikido weaponry at a local scout den, to the few students who would put up with the
relatively stern approach that he had learned at Iwama. Later the dojo moved to the Unitec
campus in Mt. Albert before its own autonomous space was discovered on Dominion Road.
There are now about forty students at the dojo and in the nine years since its establishment,
one black belt has been awarded to a student who started from the beginner level, with
many more expected within a year.

41
 (Photo. 4)
Morihiro Saito Sensei and O Sensei at Iwama, circa 1955
http://www.aikidofaq.com/bilder/saitosensei/ (August 2001).

(Photo. 5)
Morihiro Saito Sensei and Alan Roberts Sensei at the Iwama Dojo in 2001.
(Photo. courtesy of Alan Roberts)

42
 The relationship with Iwama remains strong and Alan returns there for additional
training each year in acknowledgement of that lineage and to maintain and improve his
skills. Although he never met Morihei Ueshiba, Roberts Sensei expresses an almost familial
attachment to him through his aikido heritage and the teachings of Saito Sensei. Metaphors
of kinship come out clearly in passages like the following from an interview with Alan:

See it’s funny because for me being in Iwama, let’s say twenty years after O-Sensei
died… a good twenty years break between then, there was a definite whiff like he
wasn’t that long gone… very much a presence in Iwama Dojo… Certainly because
when I was there, there was a lot more stuff that he’d owned that was still there, still
just lying around and not like in a museum. You’d open up a draw in the back room
and there’s the guy’s day-to-day hakama9 and not his dress hakama, it was like his
gardening hakama, you know… Wow he had little legs!! [laughter], so it’s kind of
strange it’s like… gosh I don’t know… like walking around in your grandfather’s
house even though he died before you were born and Dad’s there and he’s telling
you all the stories and you’ve got, like, your older brothers and they’re telling you all
the stories about Grandad, but Grandad is not actually there… because in aikido he’s
my Grandfather, right?

Alan’s teacher Saito Sensei seems to have had a very direct experience of Morihei
Ueshiba the man, rather than the myth of the warrior sage and he has cultivated a very
pragmatic understanding of who he was. For Saito Sensei, Ueshiba was a man of great
genius, who was also rather cantankerous and difficult to be around. While speaking about
Saito Sensei’s characterisations of Ueshiba as a rather eccentric and grumpy old man,
Roberts Sensei nonetheless told me that:

he’s just speaking about O Sensei, but I get to some degree a sense of this man, who
must have been very complex and… you know… vulnerable sort of. That’s the
difficult thing and I think the only… for myself, the only way… aikido has also been
a means for me to try and work out who O Sensei was…

Finding who O Sensei “was” is furthermore an extremely difficult proposition when

all Alan has are conflicting stories, photographs, works of calligraphy and pieces of clothing
found in the backrooms of the Iwama dojo. Besides these fragments, however, there are also
the living manifestations of the master and his heritage in the presences of Saito Sensei and
of Alan Roberts Sensei as they perform their daily interpretations of aikido in Iwama and at
the Auckland dojo. It is also the embodied precision of aikido transmission that I find the
most interesting in the transmission of the art because, as I argue in later chapters, aikido’s
embodied techniques are strongly linked to its philosophical and socio-political ethos.
Through the embodiment of its ideas, I suggest, aikido offers a way of getting at the mind

43
and challenging some of the basic premises of the age, through the moving vehicle of
physicality.
At the Omoto Kyo community in Ayabe, Ueshiba represented the budo arm of the
Omoto Kyo vision and an embodied philosophy that was very much more accessible than the
Omoto brand of esotericism. In what follows, I thus offer a way of seeing aikido as a
creative response to the particular anomie or alienation that Ueshiba may have sensed during
Japan’s rapid modernization and westernisation this century. Such experience would be a
historical footnote if it were unique to Japan, once upon a time, but I argue that it is also
present in late-industrial or post-colonial New Zealand. In other words, I see aikido here and
now as one response to a society still characterisable in terms of alienation.

1
Doshu or ‘leader of the way’ is the title given to the successor of the founder. The present doshu of aikido is
Kisshomaru Sensei’s son Doshu Moriteru Ueshiba.
2
Ueshiba’s jujutsu studies were in the tenjin shinyo-ryu, yagyu-ryu and daito-ryu aiki schools, while in
swordsmanship he is known to have studied the shinkage-ryu and kashima shinto-ryu styles.
3
Sokaku Takeda is mythologised as a gruff and unpleasant man, owing in large part to his love/hate
relationship with Ueshiba. Takeda (1858-1943) was a hardened and feared old school martial artist of the Aizu
clan, whose direct experience of violent confrontation and technical virtuosity had earned him enormous
respect. Ueshiba was among his closest students and it was Takeda who imparted him the principle of aiki,
embedded in the techniques of his daito-ryu aiki jujutsu that was derived from the old Aizu art of oshikiuchi
(Draeger, 1996 [1974]:140).
4
The founder of Omoto Kyo in 1892 was Nao Deguchi, a peasant woman and advocate of those classes that
were alienated by Meiji economic reforms and industrialisation. Nao’s religious inspiration entailed both a
complete rejection of modernity (and money as the medium of exchange) and a utopian vision of equality and
a society with no high or low, radically different from that which was being fashioned by the present emperor
and the Meiji government (Clarke, 2000b:138-139).
5
These comments were made in the context of a discussion of the ‘Aiki Expo’, which is being organised for
Las Vegas in 2002 in which a large number of top practitioners will be teaching and demonstrating.
6
Ronin is the Japanese term for ‘masterless samurai’ and ‘Chushingura’ is perhaps the most famous Japanese
story about such characters. In popular kabuki theatre or in films, the 47 ronin display selfless loyalty to their
master after the government executes him, by carrying out an elaborate act of revenge.
7
The scriptural work of Ueshiba’s master Onisaburo Deguchi named the Reiki Monogatari (Tales from the
Spirit World), for example, was a synthesis of the Christian New Testament with Buddhist and Shinto
teachings and consisted of 81 volumes, which later became plays, operas and films
8
Due to a conflict of interests, it seems that Hartley Sensei has subsequently disavowed his connections to
Saito Sensei and the Iwama style.
9
Hakama is the pleated skirt that was worn by O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba who very rarely wore western
clothes. Although they serve many uses in Japan, hakama have been worn by swordsmen since at least the 8th
century and are still worn in aikido training today.

44
 CHAPTER THREE
THE BODY

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing
(Wittgenstein, quoted in Stoller, 1989:2).

The Body in Anthropology and Aikido

As I have tried to illustrate in preceding chapters, a description or appreciation of

aikido is futile, without reference to a specifically embodied practice. It is this element that
I believe is most interesting about artistic operations like aikido that in their radical
physicality, bring their practitioners into a thoroughly engaged and potentially
transformative relationship with a world of radical sensual experience. Marcel Mauss
(1979[1935]:104) recognised the importance of “the body” in the social sciences when he
called it, “man’s [sic] first and most natural instrument” and his early study is a classic
statement of the social significance of personal bodily habits in relation to environments of
objects and other people.
Another early study of the socio-structural significance of “body techniques” that
are a part of many other world traditions was also made by Robert Hertz (1909 [1960]),
while Robert Lowie also made explorations into the visceral imagery of revelation (Lowie,
1924/52) as the interplay of symbolic and embodied experience. Examples of classic later
studies in this area include Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s photographic essay on
Bali (1942) while Ruth Benedict’s descriptions of Japanese social life (1947) described
aspects of nurturing and daily life.
These studies set precedents for more contemporary descriptions of the kinds of
bodily techniques that regulate bodies within the mundane and quotidian sphere or what
Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) have called the hegemonic “body politic” that regulates
and controls bodies. Such phenomena are often contrasted with more expressive and
liberatory body techniques, characteristic of some artistic and religious practices, which
exist outside these spheres. In his famous essay, Mauss referred specifically to Asian
practices, when he remarked that, “at the bottom of all our mystical states there are body
techniques which we have not studied, but which were studied fully in China and India,
even in very remote periods” (Mauss, 1979:121).

45
 Developments of this theme, taking examples from other parts of the world can also
be seen in Paul Stoller’s (1989, 1995) work on possession in Niger and his general
emphasis on sensation and Michael Jackson’s (1983) work on initiation ritual and bodily
metaphor, with the Kuranko of Sierra Leone. Jackson also refers to Bourdieu’s (1977)
notion of habitus in describing “an environment of ordinary practical activities”
(Jackson:1983:334) although he gives more sway than the early Bourdieu to the role of
transformative “body techniques”. Among Jackson’s theoretical musings for instance, we
find that:

patterns of body use are ingrained through our interactions with objects, such as the
way that working at a desk or with a machine imposes and reinforces postural sets
which we come to regard as belonging to sedentary white collar workers and factory
workers respectively… Nevertheless, the habitual ‘set’ relations between ideas,
experiences and body practices may be broken. Thus altered patterns of body use
may induce new experiences and provoke new ideas, as when a regulation and
steadying of breath induces tranquillity of mind, or a balanced pose bodies forth a
sense of equanimity (ibid.).

Following Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenologists, Jackson’s argument is a

critique of intellectualist, semiotic and structuralist analyses, which privilege either the
observation of behaviour or its hidden psychological causes in their accounts of body
phenomena. The point that he makes with regard to Kuranko dances and initiation rituals is
that bodily action cannot be reduced to either biological facts or semiotic meaning, but also
denotes the intentionality of agents in contexts of social and environmental limitation.1
Farnell (1999) has elaborated on this theme with his own emphasis on active mobility
and a conception of the role of bodily actions as existential rather than merely
representative or biological phenomena. Farnell explores the theoretical relation between
the biological body, cultural meaning and agency in Moving Bodies As Acting Selves in
which he makes the point that the moving body is both discursively arranged and culturally
determined as well as having the potential to act as a strategic vehicle of agency. He
illustrates these thoughts with reference to what he calls, “skilled or choreographed ‘action
sign systems’ such as those found in sacred and secular rituals, ceremonies, sports, military
action, fighting, martial arts and the expressive complexities of myriad danced, theatrical
and other performance traditions” (Farnell, 1999:343).
Jackson and Farnell’s arguments are important in that they demonstrate that
depictions of the “representative” or “symbolic” functions of the body that are
characteristic of observational conceptions of movement must be complimented by an

46
agent-centred perspective, which transcends the kind of dualities (mind:body,
mental:behavioural, inner:outer, non-material:material) that have arisen from the Platonic
or Cartesian concept of personhood (Farnell, 1999:345,358). While this perspective is a
means of re-evaluating the linguistic habits that have perpetuated these dualities, Jackson
(Jackson, 1996:11) also resists notions of a reifying habitus by asserting that, “human life
is seldom a blind recapitulation of givenness, but an active relationship with what has gone
before and what is imagined to lie ahead”.
In what follows, I seek to show the significance to aikido practitioners, of the kinds
of disciplined movement that the art requires and the particularity of the insights and
feelings that it generates, in terms of agency and personal/inter-personal awareness. I will
also suggest that such disciplined movement offers aikido practitioners access to
experiences that challenge the ingrained bodily habits of an alienating contemporary
lebenswelt, by re-aligning the relationship between “mind” and “body” as well as the
relationship of the body to other bodies and to natural phenomena.

The necessity of a disciplined “re-learning” in order to move more “freely” often

seems paradoxical to aikido practitioners, although its results are always tangible. This I
discovered when I asked Takemusu Dojo students about the meaning of takemusu aiki or
the freedom that Morihei Ueshiba idealised and which supposedly resulted from mastery of
aikido’s formal choreographed movements. As one black belt told me:

Techniques tidy the body up… I think they discipline you I guess… yeah to me, tidying
it up it’s like you can free the body and become loose and wobbly and all over the show
but we’re not after that, we’re after the freedom of movement but in a very disciplined
manner. Discipline is not the word, but it’s like a very correct manner maybe… of
forms, formal is the wrong word as well, it’s not a formal manner it’s a correct
manner… you know, there’s a way to have posture and a way not to have posture,
there’s a way to have balance and a way that you can’t have balance. Complete in the
purpose perhaps or a complete way of moving or a complete movement of the body.

More articulate observations of the effect of the alternative body discipline that aikido
represents were also expressed to me on a number of occasions. One brown belt student,
for example, explained to me how:

What feels natural is usually what feels normal to people and these are usually two
different sorts of things. So I think what happens with your aikido training, to begin
with, is that it gets your body to work in a natural manner so that it forces you into this
place and then hopefully it gets so ingrained with all the training you’ve done that it
frees you up to work in this really free manner. You have to unlearn all your bad habits
to start off with, to make yourself free. It’s like being grounded to a space and then

47
 pushed through a hole and then you pop out the other side… that’s what I think is
going to happen (laughter). You know at the moment I’m still getting crammed into a
box… but my body has definitely changed, first of all it was my shoulders. I think I
really consciously tried to relax my shoulders over the years and then I was told by
Alan that I clench my ass and I was never aware of it before, but then when he said it I
was like really conscious of it. He said that all that really does is just restricts your hips
and so now in all of my techniques, I try and move my hips. So I think it’s that you
just have to go through it… it doesn’t happen all at once, you know, you do it bit by
bit.

The importance of the modern martial arts as means of generating agency and self-
understanding, by means of disciplined bodily practice has already been argued by
Boudreau, Folman and Konzak (1992:141), as they make a case for karate as an opération
artistique du subjectivation. This work represents an extension of Michel Foucault’s
important contributions to the concept of body discipline and “technologies of the self”
that came about during his final years, and after many years of pessimism, as he began to
consider the body a source of potential agency in his study of medieval Christian ascetism
(Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988). Talal Asad (1993) has made a similar undertaking with
a consideration of the role of pain in such practices as the vehicle of body discipline and
autonomy.
Although he does not deal directly with pain, writes Asad (1993:110), “Foucault’s
analysis makes it possible to see more clearly how inflicting pain in an ascetic context
becomes part of the discipline for confronting the body’s desires with the desire for truth
on the part of a suspicious will”. Asad takes Foucault to task, however, for concentrating
on the “microcosm of solitude” in his formulation of “technologies of the self”. In his own
contributions to this field, Asad prefers a more inter-personal approach when he explains
that, “these famous ‘steps of humility’ are precisely enmeshed in social relationships,
relationships that are not simply a setting but a means… the technology of the self… is
itself dependent on the institutional resources of organized community life” (Asad,
1993:112).
Following Foucault and Asad, I have come to understand aikido practice as at least
analogous to these older ascetic practices because through a vigorous and sometimes
painful embodiment, the significations and experiences of moving bodies in aikido have
the potential to generate new kinds of experiential articulations. While aikido practice
entails personal revelations, it is also a phenomenon that is essentially social in its
reproduction and in the present section and Chapter Four, I suggest that as well as serving
“martial” functions, aikido techniques are also designed to challenge structural constraints,

48
which alienate bodies from one another, affirm distinctions of class and limit both social
life and the human relationship with sensuous nature.
Besides the performance of aikido techniques, aikido practitioners become
assimilated, from the beginning of their practice, to a kind of social rationality that is
markedly different from that outside the dojo. While an aikido community such as that
represented by Takemusu Aikido Dojo is very much a secondary or optional community,
an aikido practitioner’s understanding cannot progress before they have submitted
themselves to the discipline of a “style”, a “master” or a “teacher”, a communal set of strict
hierarchical relationships and a communicative social ethos. A highly committed student
compared her aikido experience to that of other sports when she said that:

Aikido is definitely different. I think that when I first joined up, I was looking for a
new kind of sport but if you enrol and experience the classes, it’s just so different and
I think the thing that I like is that it extends your mind, it extends your body, it
extends your spirit, it tries everything, your patience, everything. I just find that it
develops not only your intra-personal but inter-personal [sic] relationships. There’s
camaraderie, there’s constant challenge and I think it forces humility as well as
building confidence and I just find that for me especially the more I go along with it,
it just seems to be so much more than a sport, it’s so much more fulfilling. Otherwise
I wouldn’t get up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday and go and throw sticks around.
I’ve played sport my whole life and it never felt so fulfilling so... it’s so much more
than that.

In the context of the performance of technical forms, one experienced black belt
practitioner illustrated the particular social dimension of the practice to me when he
explained that in aikido techniques:

you have uke [‘attacker’] and nage [‘thrower’, performer of the technique] and uke is
coming at you with a force and nage accepts that force and combines and has a force
in compliance and from the combination you have a creation… from this person’s
point of view and that person’s point of view, you have a creation, and that is what
creates the movement. That’s like that person’s movement and that person’s
movement creates a movement that has its own life and its own being… and so it’s
learning how to I guess… learning what uke’s movement or projection of energy is or
being able to put in your own perspective or your own movement to allow this
creation. I guess the creation is mutually beneficial. I can react any way I like but
some reactions won’t be mutually beneficial. With some reactions, I’ll be better off,
with other reactions uke will be better off and with some reactions, we’ll both be
better off. So aikido is like learning how I should react so that both myself and uke
will be better off.

Although Takemusu Aikido Dojo is forced to exist within and to some extent, to
articulate with, an “outside” culture that does not always share its ethos of reciprocity and
“mutual benefit”, it nonetheless presents its practitioners with a space of alterity in which

49
they subject themselves to the kind of challenges that more mainstream and competitive
leisure or social activities do not necessarily offer. As one brown-belt practitioner
acknowledged:

Aikido is kind of different from lots of other martial arts because it brings up a lot of
other issues in your life… you can’t treat it like just going to the gym. Sometimes I
just don’t want to go because it’s such an effort, I mean you can’t just turn up, you
really have to be there completely. When you’re in a mood and you’re angry with
someone, you go to aikido and you really see that state of mind you’re in… but then
you get thrown on your backside a few times and its gone… you can’t be pissed off
at people and that can be frustrating too because sometimes you just want to hold
onto it. So for me aikido is sometimes hard because it brings up a lot of frustrations
and makes me mad.

The active pursuit of “self-care” or the enhancement of personal and inter-personal

understanding that aikido idealises, thus stands in contrast to cosmetic exercise or
consumerist leisure cultures in which one, “not only exercises to look good, but wants to
look good while exercising” (Bordo, 1995:171, 182, quoted in Csordas, 1999:179). The
kinds of leisure that are advertised in American “infomercials” on daytime New Zealand
television, for example, belong to a category of powerful social constructions, which
induce, “individuals everywhere to relate to their bodies aesthetically, so that ideally each
individual is encouraged to become self-conscious about ‘the inalienable right’ to
represent, re-create, and pleasure ‘one’s own’ body” (Asad, 1997:50). Hence inner-body
discipline is merged with outer-body hedonism to service an industry that is founded on a
“culture of narcissism [in which the body/self] has become primarily a performing self of
appearance, display and impression management” (Featherstone et al. 1991:187).
While there is a strong “aesthetics” in aikido, the experiences of body awareness
and significations that the visual experience of aikido engender through particular kinds of
clothing, dojo environments and body movement are nonetheless different from those of
brand name gym fashions or virtuoso displays of martial prowess. As an “in-body”
discipline, the “freedom” that the discovery of takemusu aiki constitutes can thus be
understood in terms of a kind of forging the self through a quasi-religious or ascetic
practice that aims at the generation of insight through the manipulation of the objective
body.
As such, aikido practice corroborates the argument of Merleau-Ponty (1962:170-1)
that, “all that we are, we are on the basis of a de facto situation which we appropriate to
ourselves and which we ceaselessly transform by a sort of escape, which is never an
unconditioned freedom”. The social constructions of a hegemonic “body politic”, which is

50
manifested in a culture of consumerism, are thus challenged by the alternative kind of
personal and social conditioning, which I explore with reference to the aikido of Takemusu
Aikido Dojo in Chapter Four.
The “genius” notwithstanding, for the experienced initiate, as well as the beginning
apprentice, it appears that an understanding of the dialectical ideal of takemusu aiki or the
idealised aesthetic experience of the synthesis of the “mind”, “body”, “other bodies” and ki
(‘natural energy’) is almost never more than partial or fragmentary, however. Like in other
Japanese “ways” of personal cultivation, studying aikido entails serious commitment and
training and the ideals of aikido, which are found in many of the art’s calligraphic or verbal
representations and mythologies, must also be cultivated through constant corporeal effort
and persistence. It is “a path” that may very well not have “an end” and experienced
aikidoka often come to understand their journey in terms of a “process” rather than being
aimed at a set of ultimate goals (see also Kohn, 2000:172). As one practitioner told me, “I
used to think that I’d find enlightenment through aikido but I must have been young and
naïve”. As another student put it:

Aikido takes such a long time to get really good at that I sort of said to myself well
this is what I’ll do until I die so I wasn’t trying to get good something really quick
like I would imagine in karate where you get a black belt in three years. So yeah,
experience is very important, you just have to just keep going along and the more you
go along and the more you get involved, the more the training becomes a part of you.

As I have already argued, the spiritualism and Orientalist fantasy of aikido

practitioners that I interviewed during the course of my fieldwork was also complimented
by a very pragmatic view of the effects of the practice on people’s everyday lives and the
role it plays in revealing themselves to themselves and in discovering different kinds of
relationships with others and with their objective environments. Aikido is interesting in this
respect because while it represents a space of quasi-religious alterity, its practitioners are
also able to justify their interest in terms of what it represents as a “martial art” or “leisure
activity” or “physical education”, without recourse to spiritualism.
Such a phenomenon is fascinating in a modern context in which, as Asad (1993)
suggests, people have become alienated from religion’s “practical forms”. Asad resists the
kind of “othering” of these forms that has resulted from an alienating modernity, when he
argues that, “it does not seem to me to make good sense to say that ritual behaviour stands
universally in opposition to behaviour that is ordinary or pragmatic, any more than religion
stands in contrast to reason or (social) science” (Asad, 1993:167). The kind of aikido that

51
is represented at Auckland Takemusu Dojo is interesting in the way that it generates this
sort of “pragmatism” on the part of its practitioners and reveals the complex role that
aikido plays in terms of the way that they deal with the myriad corporeal interventions that
they encounter in their daily lives.
In seeking an intellectual understanding of Takemusu Dojo aikido, in terms of
pragmatism in the face of the general historical conditions of alienation, we would also do
well, however, to avoid slipping into a functionalistic account of the aikido phenomenon.
This is because there are other reasons why the counter-intuitive revelations of aikido are
so strikingly affective, than a limiting model of the mere transformation of oppressive
bodily habits would imply. Regardless of the “othering” of more spiritualistic forms of
aikido that is apparent among “Iwama” students I also encountered a number of very
numinous descriptions of practitioner’s experiences within the art.
While as a “leisure activity” and a “hobby”, aikido provides a vehicle of personal
autonomy, it also has significant effects on the way its practitioners come to conceive of
the world in terms of “unusual experiences” and possibilities. In Chapter Four, I thus
explore the way in which aikido represents a kind of phenomenological epoché through
which its practitioners are enabled to open up to realms of experience that are perhaps
beyond function but which by default, still serve pragmatic ends.
In pursuing an understanding of these phenomena, the epoché or the “suspension of
certainty” that opens the mind:body to novel experience is also part of my anthropological
method. As I begin to describe some of the specifics of bodily transmission and experience
as one “enters the stream” of the Japanese martial arts in what follows, I attempt to, “return
to the things themselves, to let things speak, to let them show themselves” (Husserl,
1960:12, quoted in Stoller, 1992:210), in all their triumphs and tragedies, rather than rely
solely on abstract explanatory models. This is the way, I suggest, that we might begin to
understand the reasons why the particular corporeal actions of aikido often evoke strong
emotional attachments, memories of personal revelation and sometimes even mystical
connotations among their practitioners.

52
Kata as Memory and Transformation

History gets written with the mind holding the pen. What would it look like, what would it read
like, if it got written with the body holding the pen (Berman, 1989:110).

The kata (forms) of aikido are its pre-eminent practices and this is characteristic of
many areas of traditional Japanese pedagogy in which the visual or the verbal are relatively
unimportant. As Ian Buruma observes:

Conscious thought is considered to be an impediment on the way to perfection. A

Japanese master never explains anything. The question why one does something is
irrelevant. It is the form that counts… One is almost tempted to say that ideally the
form masters the individual instead of the other way round (Buruma, 1984:71).

While many techniques of the body are “mundane”, functional or everyday, they
have also been essential to the artistic and religious operations that manifest the Japanese
“forge of the spirit” in the martial arts (Donohue, 1987). As Pye (1997:251-2) has argued
in the context of Japanese religious heterogeneity in shinto, shingon Buddhism and
shugendo: “the common feature of all these practices is immediacy, physical immediacy,
and this they share with the practice of zazen [‘seated meditation’] in zen Bhuddism, for all
the doctrinal differences”.
In these traditions, “understanding” is more likely to take place in the belly, rather
than the head. If an actor of Japanese kabuki theatre has the right “energy” in his work, it is
said that he has ‘hips’ (koshi) and can thus demonstrate consciousness of his “centre of
gravity” (Barba, 1991:10) in performing the extra-daily techniques that he has acquired in
training. Such an embodiment of knowledge is thus a kind of alchemy by which body
attitudes manifest powerful alignments with natural energies that are often referred to
symbolically as ki. Such transformations are also found in many other, particularly Asian,
artistic and religious contexts that produce extraordinary presences or mind:body states
(Saso, 1997:243, Zarilli, 1990).
Similarly, in aikido practice, the ritual behaviours of kata training that generate ki
or its inter-personal equivalent aiki, are focused upon an anatomical point called the tanden
that is located just below the navel and between the hips. Chinese and Sanskrit have
equivalent terms for this point and in English it is most often referred to as one’s “centre”
in the context of aikido practice.2 Alan Roberts Sensei has often indicated to me that an
explanation of the concept of ki for example, is superfluous or at least beyond “words” or

53
“philosophy”. Most of all, Alan told me, ki has nothing to do with what people normally
call “spiritual” and this view has certainly been dispersed to a greater or lesser degree
among his students. This is also a perspective that is not necessarily new and has also been
voiced in the commentaries of other experienced martial artists in the Japanese tradition,
such as the following:

Ki is a concept that is both natural and simple. Those who would make of it
something mysterious and akin to magical power do a great disservice to what is
essentially a common thing. All human beings possess ki. It is only that one must
learn to release and utilize ki, wherein lies the difficulty of expressing its nature and
functions (Draeger, 1996 [1974]:143).

In many discourses on Japanese disciplined practices for example, certain qualities

such as mind:body unity are often discussed, but when articulated in formal philosophy,
they end up saying more about the “mind”, the “psyche” or the “spirit” than about the body
(Pye, 1997:252). This is also characteristic of some of the Omoto teachings of Morihei
Ueshiba that would send his students to sleep as he pontificated before and after training
sessions (Pranin, 1999). O Sensei evidently had an extraordinary knowledge of embodied
martial principles, but it is often said that because of his introverted nature and interest in
esoteric doctrine, he was not particularly good at transmitting his knowledge verbally. As I
have mentioned before, the tendency to spiritualise principles like ki has also earned for
aikido, the disapproval of some classical budo aficionados (Draeger, 1996 [1974]:137-
162), as well as stimulating the imaginations of idealistic or “spiritually” inclined western
practitioners in aikido.
A fascinating aspect of Ueshiba Sensei’s practice however, is that an effective
knowledge of ki or kokyu (‘breath power’) in resolving personal mind/body conflicts and
the principles of aiki in resolving inter-personal conflict, is gradually revealed by a
consistent embodied performance of the aikido pedagogical legacy. One of the most-
respected disciples of the founder of aikido, Koichi Tohei Sensei once expressed these
sentiments as follows:

He [Ueshiba] had something to say, but could not express it without falling back on
the Omoto religion… Ueshiba Sensei would say things like: ‘there is nothing that I
do not understand; the things I say even scholars and saints are incapable of
understanding, and even I, though I am saying them, do not understand…’ It is
impossible to understand this kind of talk! Even the relaxation Ueshiba Sensei
taught was not explained in words, but rather through something he demonstrated
with his body (Tohei, 1997:8).

54
 Physicality then, in this case is perceived to be an essential complement to
discursive philosophy and it is even acknowledged by Tohei Sensei to be a superior means
of generating an experience of self and of developing the skills that are necessary to blend
with an attacker in order to pacify them. The point of counterpoising physicality to
ideology is also another means of demonstrating the variety of approaches to martial arts
practice within even a single tradition like aikido.
Contrary to the kind of supernatural fantasies about ki that are cultivated by some
practitioners, the creative process in aikido can also be described in relatively mundane
terms as “psycho-physical”, because the concentrated awareness generated by “embodied”
practices entails noticeable effects on “the mind”. In this way, the oral teachings and
symbolisms of aikido pedagogy are no more than the exegetical shorthand of embodied
practice. In Japanese history, the dialectic between the symbol and the body is also
reflected in many cases of religious exegesis of embodied states made by great sword
saints or martial technicians (see in particular Hall, 1997). Although practitioners at
Auckland Takemusu Dojo generally like to distinguish themselves from more
“religiously” inclined aikidos, the exploration of at least one of these very old religious
exegeses is still encouraged.3
The issue of corporeality is also relevant to the controversial status of the “Iwama
style” of aikido practice. This controversy stems largely from Morihiro Saito Sensei’s
insistence on a particular technical right and wrong in the shape of aikido techniques and
what is sometimes termed Iwama’s hard or “resistant” bodily practice that is at odds with
certain other interpretations of O-Sensei’s teachings.
Saito Sensei’s expressions of a strong relationship between being able to flow and
the ability to move in very well defined technical ways have evidently ruffled feathers in
the aikido world at large. The hardness of Iwama technique has also been both exaggerated
and misunderstood in popular aikido mythology, a mythology that is no doubt perpetuated
by a certain machismo and perceived arrogance among certain Iwama teachers. The highly
ranked Saito Sensei’s famously frank exhortations of, ‘wrong!’ (dame!), as a guest at
conspicuous aikido seminars have also done little to calm the insecurities of teachers in
other styles. From his own experience, Alan Roberts Sensei nonetheless describes a
sensation of great relaxation or softness behind the hard exterior of Saito Sensei’s
technique.4
As I have shown, Iwama practitioners sometimes assert that certain kinds of aikido
have become more like dances or religious ideologies than martial arts and students at

55
Takemusu are evidently aware of the difference of those styles. On the other hand, the
Iwama dojo has also been criticized for its neglect of the ‘energy flow’ (ki no nagare)
movements that detractors claim are the essence of aiki or the ‘harmony of energies’. Alan
Roberts Sensei once told us that Saito Sensei’s reaction to such accusations is usually
summed up in sentences like, “some people think there is no ki no nagare in Iwama,
aeeeeeh!” and with a characteristic disregard for things that he disapproves of, that is about
all he says. Although I have certainly experienced less “resistance” from my partners while
practicing other styles of aikido, during my time at Takemusu Dojo, we have nonetheless
practiced ki no nagare at every session5.
Within the Iwama-ryu, a definite complementarity between ‘static’ (kotai)6 forms
and the more “mobile” ‘flow of energy’ (ki no nagare) practice of those forms is asserted.
Like many of the classical Japanese martial arts schools, the Iwama tradition relies heavily
on the assumption that with an over-emphasis on “flow” in aikido training, the static forms
are apt to become ambiguous. Hence the emotional and intellectual (albeit controversial)
importance that is placed by the Iwama lineage, on the kotai forms of its own particular
kata, as its most important historical documents.7
Morihei Ueshiba himself was also critical of an over-concentration on “static”
physical forms, believing that they inhibited the direct transmission of martial principles
“from the gods” (Skoss, 1994). Although the performance of static forms is deemed
essential at Takemusu Dojo, warnings against stiffness and rigidity are also present in the
oral teachings, however, which are transmitted along with the embodied feeling of certain
techniques. In explaining the sequences and mechanics of certain kinds of ‘breath throws’
(kokyu nage), for example, Roberts Sensei uses phrases like: “elbow, shoulder, hips,
feeling, down” or “weight underside, relax”. These ‘oral teachings’ (kuden, lit. ‘secret
teachings’) thus generate the necessary states of being that aikido techniques require for
their effective performance.
The encouragement of “relaxation” and the idea that greater muscular power is
superfluous have also added to the ambiguity in contemporary aikido, about what the art
should be. For reasons discussed in the preceding historical chapter, such disagreements
may also have as much to do with differing ideologies, historical tensions, competitions
with bureaucracy and leadership struggles than with actual discussions of “technique”
(Pranin, 1999; Homma, 2001). Discourses about the “authenticity” of a particular technical
transmission certainly exist at Takemusu Dojo and Alan’s students usually take pleasure
and pride in being able to identify with a specific genealogy, although they often come

56
from a great diversity of backgrounds, styles and influences. While Roberts Sensei freely
admits that Iwama kata cannot be considered perfect reproductions of the teachings of the
founder, he also still takes the accurate transmission of Iwama oral teachings very
seriously.
O-Sensei’s own pedagogical style was also evidently quite different from that of
Alan’s teacher Morihiro Saito Sensei, whose somewhat systematic codification of the
techniques that he learned from O-Sensei, was an attempt to record, as accurately as
possible, all that he could remember from his mornings with the master in the forest at
Iwama. Even O-Sensei’s own “style” is widely acknowledged to have varied at different
periods in his life, however, and this is another factor, which complicates claims about the
“authenticity” of a particular lineage.
Alan Roberts Sensei also admits that he does not always restrict himself to teaching
only the “Iwama” techniques as he is constantly experimenting and re-discovering old
principles in new forms and this is because, as he often asserts, “the form is not the
technique”.8 As one Takemusu practitioner also reminded me, it is often said that in aikido,
“there are a thousand techniques and then there is only one technique” and this aphoristic
style explains some of the ambiguity that surrounds arguments over kata. The concept of
aiki for example, might be considered the key principle in aikido and its kata are thus only
particular forms through which experiment with and generate experiences of an underlying
aiki.9

(Photo. 6)
A young Saito
Sensei training with
Morihei Ueshiba in
the forest in Iwama.

http://www.aikidofaq.com/bilder/saitosensei/ (August 2001).

57
 According to students of Iwama aikido, however, a rigorous corporeality is
cultivated in order for a particular technical legacy of kata to reveal underlying principles
that have the potential to challenge one’s preconceived ways of acting and doing. These
“principles”, which in the world of Japanese martial arts are often also referred to as
‘strategies’ (hyoho or heiho [Friday, 1997:104]) are the real objects of practicing kata10 and
without corporeal rigour, it is said that nothing is risked and pre-existing habits or
idealizations are perpetuated.
Kata are the means of transmitting such important information as the position and
movement of the hands or the feet. They are capable of being described or explained by
means of analysis or argument, but they cannot be acquired in this way (Friday, 1997:105).
The transmission of “principles” or “strategies” through kata are necessarily transmitted
through their direct embodiment because kata are also, “filled, as it were, with physical
koan11, or conundrums, situations that evoke technical crises” (Draeger, 1973:52) and in
order to solve these puzzles, a process of learning-through-action must occur (Skoss,
1994). In this way, clues to the discovery of the free-form nature of takemusu aiki are
paradoxically embedded in the systematic formal movements of the art.
A certain martial technique such as kokyu nage (see Photo. 16) implies all manner
of formal information from the distance between practitioners to angles of approach,
timing and the more subtle aspects of breathing, the generation, application (or relaxed
non-application) of muscular power, which are also intrinsic to the proper mental posture
that is to be exercised. In learning kokyu nage, there is a certain amount of watching and a
degree of verbal description but this is perhaps ultimately less important than an
experience of the technique as uke (receiver) to an advanced practitioner or
experimentation with the forces at work, by taking turns with a training partner.
Given the importance of kata and the kind of precision that is encouraged, it would
thus be possible to say that the transmission of “technique” or a certain “feeling” is an
embodied historical process in aikido. Alongside the verbal or symbolic formulations of
Ueshiba’s philosophy through ‘oral teachings’ (kuden), it also makes sense to talk about
the way in which “memorisation” of aikido techniques is achieved by a kind psycho-
physical, albeit partial and constantly transforming re-embodiment of previous masters.
This form of memory is both discursively arranged and radically embodied at one
and the same time. Such an idea is extremely interesting for an ethnographic
historiography that is beginning to understand the ethnocentrism of assuming the pre-
eminence of written texts over oral or “embodied” traditions in historical discourses

58
(Berman, 1989; Stoller, 1995). In the Chapter that follows, I will thus attempt to illustrate
the relevance of aikido practices with regard to the body as both a system of
representations and a locus of radically embodied experience, as well as providing further
examples of aikido practice as counter-hegemonic action.

(Photo. 7)
Alan Roberts Sensei demonstrates a technique and gives oral teachings as students observe and
listen (the writer is pictured centre right).

(Photo. 8)
When the demonstration is over, students find partners and experiment with the feeling of the
techniques, as sensei circulates, giving advice and making corrections.

59
1
In this sense, the early notations of bodily action into “proprioceptive” (inner) perception such as that
represented by “kinaesthesia” (Birdwhistell, 1970) or the brain’s awareness of the position and movement of
the body and limbs by means of sensory nerves in the muscles and joints are found wanting. There are
likewise also problems with the behaviouristic science of “proxemics” or the kind of silent communication
that results from variations in body proximity and gesture (Hall, 1959, 1966).
2
A conspicuous “centre” is also apparently a traditional mark of Japanese athleticism and a protruding
tanden can be seen on many examples of ancient warrior statuary. Tamara Kohn has also mentioned in an
English aikido context that shaping the body’s exterior is not of central interest and indeed, a copious middle-
section appears to be most advantageous to aikido practice (Kohn, 2001:175).
3
One of the most famous examples of the interaction of zen and swordsmanship is a letter from the master
Takuan Soho to the swordsman Yagyu Tajima no kami Munenori, on “The Mystery of Prajna Immovable”
(Suzuki, 1970:95-113). Takuan’s treatise is also on a list of recommended reading in the Auckland Takemusu
Dojo Introductory Manual that is given to new practitioners (Roberts, 2001:19-20).
4
As one favourite oral teaching of Saito Sensei (through Alan Roberts Sensei) illustrates, ‘kindness to your
partner, rigour to the technique’ (uke ni yasashiku, waza ni kibishiku).
5
When I talk about “resistance” in this context, I am referring to the ability of a training partner to stop me
from being able to throw them or performing a particular technique. The feeling is often of a stronger grip or
a sense of immovable solidity. While it is often perceived to be the result of greater muscle power or
increased tension, I have come to realise that it is in fact achieved through a higher degree of relaxation or a
shift in tension to other parts of the body in conjunction with more effective postures or connections with the
ground and one’s partner.
6
The term “static” may be misleading here because the ‘static’ (kotai) forms are by no means motionless,
although they begin from standstill. “Static” techniques are nonetheless broken down into smaller units of
balance, tension and movement between the bodies that are practising them and they are performed “on the
spot”. ‘Flowing techniques’ (ki no nagare) on the other hand, involve more dynamic movements where the
attacker is already moving toward the defender when the technique is applied.
7
I use the word “document” with trepidation here, however, because one of the main points that I want to
make in this section is about the non-textual aspects of kata.
8
This phrase is reflected in a Japanese saying associated with martial arts: ‘not the shape, but the feeling
behind it’ (katachi dewa naku, kimochi).
9
Alan once explained to me that we train in glimpses and that the kata or ‘forms’ are just a way of
understanding the idea of aiki in bite-sized chunks. If it were otherwise it might be too much to handle, “like
suddenly finding yourself inside Steven Hawkings’ brain, whoaaaa…. scary!”. This is evidence of the
pedagogical legacy of esoteric shingon Bhuddism in the Japanese martial arts. While shingon is associated
with tantrism or the “esoteric”, it is not so much that its teachings are secret, but that their more general
meanings are only gradually understood through the very specific forms disbursed by the teacher (Pye,
1997:252). Hence “principles” are like general mathematical formulae, while the kata are the ‘forms’ or
manifestations of these formulae in equations involving specific values.
10
Given the great diversity in martial arts practice, I can only gloss these terms quite broadly. It is interesting
to note here however, that heiho has been interpreted as both ‘strategy’ and ‘principle’, implying a relation
between an understanding of “reality” and the ability to apply that understanding instrumentally.
11
Koan are the riddles or paradoxes used by some sects of Japanese zen Buddhism and which systematically
generate non-systematic mental states that are supposed to transcend the habitual dualities of verbal
expression.

60
 CHAPTER FOUR
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF AIKI

Aikido is the principle of non-resistance. Because it is non-resistant, it is victorious from the

beginning. Those with evil intentions or contentious thoughts are instantly vanquished.
Aikido is invincible because it contends with nothing (Morihei Ueshiba, from a public leaflet
of Takemusu Aikido Dojo, 2001).

When I started my fieldwork at Takemusu Dojo, I was reading works in the

anthropology of theatre and began to perceive some of the performative aspects of
aikido practice, not only in the performance of techniques, but in the whole ritual
environment that the dojo represented. It struck me that there were many aesthetic
elements in martial arts practice that were analogous to the kind of “pre-expressivity”
that is cultivated by actors in their attempts to move beyond the everyday, and to
generate the kind of convincing experiences that are at the heart of their creativity
(Barba, 1991:197-201).
The great dramaturge Konstantin Stanislawsky described the vitalised
condition or heightened state of awareness that accompanied ritualised practice in the
training of actors and which contributed to the generation of extraordinary psycho-
physical states (Barba, 1991, 150-157). In aikido techniques, such states are generated
through the performance of what Donohue has called “mortality rituals” (Donohue,
1987:183) in which students are encouraged to practice at their personal limits. While
in modern aikido, under conditions of ritual rigour, the risk of injury is quite minimal,
students must remain constantly aware of the dangerous potential of their techniques,
particularly in the weapons training where there is a real possibility of getting hurt by
a flying piece of wood.
With the samurai, such rituals were related to the avoidance of the “battle shock”
that is recorded in the annals of personal combat, “that could be so violent that some men
died before the fighting began” (Hall 1995:95). This is an area in which the functionality
of budo has perhaps changed in a modern context. I would suggest that in modern urban
contexts, where the likelihood of being attacked by someone wielding a sword is virtually
nil, such vitalizing ritual recreations, when performed with the proper technique and
spirit, have more to do with a kind of resacralisation of experience. Within the
abbreviated, distracted and accelerated realms of experience in contemporary urban

61
environments, the aikido dojo is a space where action is dilated and sustained into
concentrated mind:body events. As one Takemusu dojo regular put it:

I just like it because it’s getting away from the mundane and forgetting about your
money worries and your work problems and all that other stuff… you go there and it
switches your mind on… so at the end of the day, what we’re doing is quite
dangerous and if someone’s mind isn’t on it…thinking about their shopping and
groceries when they’re wrenching your elbow… that can be pretty dangerous…

The weapons practice of aikido, in which Alan Roberts Sensei has a special
interest, also reveals a subtle aesthetics. The ideal movement of the body and the ‘four
foot staff’ (jo) for example, is a smooth transition from one position to another, in a
manner that does not miss out all the important intermediate stages and respects the
body’s anatomy or the principles of what the theatrical pioneer Vsevolod Meyerhold
once called “biomechanics” (Barba, 1991:156-157). These “transitions” are
dramatically accentuated with controlled bursts of vocal energy (kiai) and variations
in rhythm, which lend them the affective qualities that reveal particular psycho-
physical states on the part of their performers. As one student described the
experience of aikido aesthetics in Alan Roberts’ performances of technique:

What intrigues me about Alan’s teaching is his emphasis on efficiency… an

economy of movement… but occasionally when you see Alan do it, well it’s
strikingly beautiful… some of the moves and way of moving is sometimes just, it
strikes you… it’s just so efficient, there’s an aesthetic beauty to it and I guess you
notice that and then you notice all the things that you’re doing wrong, you know,
you notice where you bump or you wobble or the way you’re not balanced or
where you’ve got to shuffle round and it’s interesting…

Combined with the principle of maximum economy, the organicity of aikido

movements thus generates an aesthetic that one would also expect to find in certain
kinds of formal Japanese theatre and dance. As Roberts Sensei is careful to point out,
the essence of aikido movement is not to perform flashy techniques such as one would
expect to see in a B grade kung fu movie or the glamorisations of contemporary video
games. While Alan “performs” for his students, the sometimes very dramatic but
economical displays of the school’s syllabus indeed reveal the superficiality of these
other flashy displays.
The achievement of psycho-physical unity is also an ideal that is cultivated in
Japanese martial arts literature and it manifests itself symbolically in expressions such
as shin-ki-tai-issho (‘mind/heart-energy-body as one’) (Hamada, 2000:13 reference)

62
and the heroic Japanese virtue of makoto or an absolute sincerity and certainty
(Buruma, 1984:158). While these goals seem to imply a very personal kind of
achievement, they also entail important inter-personal ends in aikido practice as
people begin to refigure the way that they perceive themselves and their experiences
of other people and things.
The ritual etiquette of aikido is an important vehicle of these ends and it is
often “performed”, dilated and exaggerated to make it noticeable and able to be
absorbed in the midst of desensitising or alienating modern urban environments. One
interesting example of this is the ritual use of the term onegaishimasu at the beginning
of every training partnership and interaction between teacher and pupil at the dojo.
The phrase is commonly translated as ‘please’ in English but it actually connotes a
feeling of promising a favour or reciprocity. As Alan explained the use of the word:

So why do we say onegaishimasu? What is it that people have to understand in

saying onegaishimasu? Not that they know what onegaishimasu ‘means’, but that
they really know what onegaishimasu means and they really know what saying
thank you to somebody means and I think that etiquette for example… I think
that etiquette is kind of like the aikido practice itself, that etiquette is exaggerated
so that you appreciate that you’re actually engaged in thanking somebody, or
what have you… so you kind of exaggerate it so people can spot it and that’s
kind of more or less the same thing in [the martial] techniques.

Besides these ritual actions, the entire dojo environment indeed creates an
atmosphere of alterity from the perspective of the senses. Contrivances of colour, the
use of incense and the deliberate spartan appearance of the dojo environment stand in
contrast to the fragmented experience of an “outside” urban world of hyper-
stimulation and commercial simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981). As the student passes
through the threshold of the doorway into the large, austerely decorated inner training
hall, there is also a sense of transition from one state to another (Van Gennep, 1960)
signified by the taking off of shoes. While this transition may not carry quite the same
connotations for Takemusu Dojo practitioners of entry to a “purer” space, as it does
for the sacred spheres of the domestic and the religious in Japan (Bouma, Smith &
Vasi, 2000:86-87), it nonetheless embodies a transition from a significant “outside” to
another specialised experiential sphere.

63
 When the student goes onto the training mat, another transition occurs, one that
is marked by the individual act of bowing in a seated position to a ceremonial alcove
at the front of the class (shomen). When the class starts, students line up as a group in
hierarchical order and follow the sensei in “clapping in”.

(Photo. 9)
Takemusu aikido students “clap in” at the dojo ‘opening day ceremony’ (kagami biraki).

When earlier practitioners “clapped in” while training with O Sensei in Japan,
they were ostensibly acknowledging and invoking the 47 guardian deities of the Aiki
Shrine that Ueshiba erected in Iwama, as a tribute to the Omoto Kyo religion and the
foundation of aikido. Today the Aiki Shrine houses such relics as locks of O Sensei’s
hair and serves a similar memorial purpose as the central shrines of other martial arts
in Japan such as the great Kashima Shrine of the Kashima Shinryu swordschool,
which houses takemikazuchi-no mikoto the founding deity of that school and the
primary deity of many other Japanese martial arts lineages.

64
 Alan Roberts however, like many modern teachers, particularly in the post-
war period of global dissemination, has chosen to keep some of the ceremonial forms
without the elaborate connotations given to them by O Sensei. Some of Morihei
Ueshiba’s more culturally specific performances have also been completely
discontinued at Takemusu Dojo. ‘The purification ceremony of the wooden staff’
(misogi no jo), for example, was a purification rite involving an elaborate series of
movements with a pole-like weapon (jo), which was sometimes performed by
Ueshiba at the beginning of classes and on special occasions. This practice has only
ever been mentioned briefly in class at Takemusu Dojo, however.1

(Photo. 10)
Morihei Ueshiba performs misogi no jo during his visit to Hawai’i.
http://www.aikidofaq.com/bilder/osensei/ (August 2001).

65
 With his simplified practice, Alan Roberts indeed follows the example of his
teacher, Morihiro Saito Sensei who is careful to observe certain “correct” ceremonial
forms according to the aikido ritual calendar, without explicit instruction in the
metaphysical beliefs of O Sensei that once accompanied them.2 When someone at
Takemusu asks Alan about the meaning of “clapping in” at Takemusu Dojo for
example, he generally leaves it unexplained, so that the person can assert their own
meanings as they nonetheless follow the prescribed collective form.
Although such rituality is derived from a culture that is symbolically “foreign”
in both time and space, through embodied repetition it is nonetheless rapidly
internalised by its practitioners as something of their own. As one female student
expressed it:

If someone’s just started, it’s okay; but if someone’s been there a while and they
neglect the etiquette, it really grinds on me now… I can’t believe this is coming
from me… but things like… if they forget to bow to Alan, I’ll shout it and then
they forget to bow to me and it annoys me and I think, “shit! What’s going on
with me?” It’s weird isn’t it? Because it does become important to you doesn’t it?

Through the exaggerated embodiment of aikido rituals that is characteristic of

ritual activities at Takemusu Dojo, the feelings and social rationality that aikido is
designed to cultivate is directly transmitted. Anthropologists have already explored
the ways in which economy, organicity and ritualised bodily movement are the poetic
means of transmitting traditions of mind:body development and even social ideas in
Asian disciplines (Mead & Bateson, 1942; Barba, 1991; Zarilli, 1990; Bethe &
Brazell, 1990).
In the West, it is interesting to note that these traditions have also been emulated
in the cultural experimentations of artists outside the field of the martial arts. In the
context of his study of the relations between the Indian dance form of kathakali and
the martial art of kalarippayattu for example, Phillip Zarilli (1990:146) notes that:

It is this fundamental psychophysical unity in the act of doing that many

contemporary practitioners of theatre have tried to find – Grotowski, and even
Stanislawski. Eugenio Barba’s recent research in “theatre anthropology”
exemplifies this search for the fundamental principles of performance (1982)…
There is in all this work a striving toward that sense of ineffable presence, which
the accomplished Asian actor embodies when he “becomes the character.” There,
at that moment, through the interior psychophysical process, he is that character.

This “characterisation” is achieved through a number of embodied ritual acts

that precede and follow the performance of the martial techniques of aikido and which

66
set up the conditions for their effective practice. Transitions toward altered states of
consciousness are also exemplified by such acts as the donning of the ritual clothes of
aikido in the dressing room before practice, not dissimilar to the way the Japanese noh
actor prepares himself with the mask before a performance. While other items of
clothing such as different coloured belts and the black pleated skirt (hakama)
differentiate positions in a hierarchy that is essential to aikido pedagogy, the white
training uniform (dogi) has a special significance.
The meaning of wearing a dogi is reflected in the attitudes that are expected of
students when they are training or when receiving instruction from the teacher. At
these moments, students are discouraged from standing with hands on their hips or in
an overly expressive manner. The training uniform is thus a device of adornment that
acts as a kind of “neutral mask” much-like that found in some forms of western
theatrical training that are inspired by Asian examples. The neutral mask, for
example:

…when placed on the face, should enable one to experience the state of neutrality
prior to action… When the actor has experienced this neutral starting point his body
will be freed, like a blank page on which drama can be inscribed… Essentially, the
neutral mask opens up the actor to the space around him. It puts him in a state of
discovery, of openness, of freedom to receive. It allows him to watch, to hear, to feel,
to touch elementary things with the freshness of beginnings… here there is no
character, only a neutral generic being (Lecoq, 2000:37-38).

As well as serving a pedagogical function, “neutrality” opens up aikido

practitioners to the kinds of new and novel experiences of selfhood that we have
already seen in statements by Takemusu Dojo practitioners about “humility” and
“inter-personal awareness”. Although one should be wary of exaggeration, it is worth
asking whether or not these kinds of cultural practices represent an attempt by New
Zealand aikido practitioners, to challenge what Geertz has called the, “bounded,
unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe” of the
individualised western self (cited in Zarilli 1990:144), a state that is indeed quite
unusual among the world’s other cultures.
It would be problematic to assert that New Zealand aikido practitioners come to
experience a “Japanese” concept of selfhood by donning these ritual clothes (see also
Kohn, 2001:174). As the example of the use of the “neutral mask” in theatre suggests,
however, “levelling devices” may still exist that if not universal, are at least
universalisable within artistic operations that perform analogous functions.

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 It is to the phenomenal world of inter-personal experience that I now turn in
considering other kinds of performances in aikido practice and the kinds of alterity
that they offer.

(Photo. 11)
A line of students waits for instructions from their seniors at the kagami biraki opening day
celebrations in 2001.

The Feeling of Social Techniques

While in aikido there are certain practices that can be done alone, the majority
of aikido techniques require the presence of other people. The perpetuation of the
kinds of groups that are necessary for aikido practice is furthermore dependent, not
merely on the coherence or the unified “truth” of aikido teachings and a ritual
environment, but upon relationships of camaraderie and trust that are continuously
renewed and corroborated by experiences of psycho-physical pleasure and pain.
The social dimension of pain at Takemusu Dojo was made clear to me during
one week in which the oral teachings were focused on the meaning of pain. In aikido
practice, there is a particular technique called the ‘second teaching’ (nikyo), which
when applied with just enough pressure not to cause injury, nonetheless produces an
acute pain in the joint of the wrist.

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 In one training session, early in the year of my fieldwork, I was on the
receiving end of this technique (as uke) and doing my best to resist its application,
fearing injury if my nage put it on too hard (much to the consternation of my more
experienced nage). When it was my turn to apply the technique I did it half-heartedly,
not wishing to hurt or injure my partner. When Roberts Sensei saw this he corrected
me severely, explained that in Iwama this kind of apologetic attitude would be
insulting, particularly towards someone of higher grade. “The technique must hurt” he
said, “because in this way we learn the something in the most direct way”.
I was puzzled at first and asked others about what I should have done and the
typical responses were: “oh, you’ll figure it out” or “maybe you were being a bad
partner”. As my training progressed, I gradually came to know the accepted limits and
the way in which the receiver of the pain is not supposed to resist too much, while the
pain giver must also refrain from injuring their partner in the interest of striking an
effective balance between merely “training” and an approximation of “reality”. If this
balance is not struck, the more experienced practitioner will generally apply more
pain than usual until the balance is achieved.
While this kind of action can be shocking to beginning practitioners, to the
uninitiated it might also appear sadistic, aggressive or stubborn. Alan Roberts told me
that westerners who travel to train at Iwama in particular, are often confronted by
such feelings although in reality, at Iwama there are very few injuries that result from
the over-zealous application of techniques, because of an ethos of ritual rigour. As
Roberts Sensei said in his teachings on pain, “if you train somewhere and someone is
obviously inflicting pain because they enjoy it, then just get up and leave the dojo.
Someone with such an attitude doesn’t know what it’s all about”.
The cultivation of balance indeed develops a kind of mutual trust among
practitioners in the effective, yet safe application of a painful technique, which invites
the receiver not to resist, but to calmly acknowledge the pain and explore its
revelations. This, I discovered, is because experiences of pain have much to teach us
about our psycho-physical identities as we literally experience physical shock or
emotional distress. As one student told me:

I think our minds and our bodies want to do two different things in situations
where the pain is involved, so I think you have to really discipline yourself
initially because you always want to do something else, because of the fear of
thinking about the pain, you want to run away from the situation or stand there

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 and do nothing, so you have to discipline yourself to move and in aikido you
discipline your mind and your body to move in a certain way. Then once you can
do that, you can actually become free… that’s how I see it… it frees you from
fear.

Experiences of pain, for example, are in aikido a very vivid illustration of the
mind:body’s “being-in-the-world”, which includes both an experience of “self” and
the direct relationship of that self to other selves. When pain is applied with restraint,
(and without injury), by another person, it also has the power to produce mutual trust
and to solidify inter-personal relations.
In another artistic (but somewhat less painful) context, Shawn Lindsay has
written a stimulating essay on the practical embodiment of knowledge in the tradition
of “hand-drumming” as he describes the results of his apprenticeship to a Puerto
Rican percussion specialist in the art of the African djembe drum. Lindsay describes
his apprenticeship as the process of acquiring certain technical capacities in the body,
which also have interesting inter-personal implications (Lindsay, 1996). Lindsay
evokes the way in which, under the guidance of his teacher, he acquired behaviours
that gave him the ability to effectively participate in the informal community of
drummers as well as experience the revelatory level of communication that comes
from the immediate experience of drumming with his fellows.
Lindsay described this as a “flow experience”3 when playing bata rhythms
with his partners on the djembe drum for example. It was for him, a moment of
“transparency”, when he, “could feel the pull of the rhythm so strongly that [he] could
swear it was tangible” (Lindsay, 1996:204). In Lindsay’s case he claimed that he saw
a kind of a triangle that “spun around from drum to drum, following the main beat of
each part” (Lindsay, 1996:203). Certain practitioners at Takemusu Aikido Dojo also
expressed such feelings in articulate and numinous terms.
Despite Alan Roberts Sensei’s cultivation of a deliberately non-spiritualistic
ethos, it has been interesting to find that initial encounters with the principle of aiki
are often so surprising or counter-intuitive and that they provoke a certain reverence
in hushed tones and pauses in speech. As one high-graded practitioner described such
an experience:

One time that I felt aiki was when a technique was done on me and there was a
bit in the middle of the technique where everything went blank and it was almost
as if you blacked out and fainted but there was like this emptiness in the middle,
like there was just nothing there… almost like you were knocked out but you

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 didn’t get hit or touched or anything like that. It was this feeling that suddenly
time and space stopped… it was like something stopped and you’ve lost it, all
your intention had just dissipated and so you’re on your back. It was like a
blankness…

(Was it something projected from the person or something they did? I asked him).

It was a combination of what I was doing and what the guy doing the technique
was doing, it was like the two of us coming together and what he was doing… a
combination really… it was like I was coming that way and he was coming that
way and the smack in the middle, or the combination in the middle created this
blankness… it was like boboof! Then there was nothing but I was there on my
back and it was like… that to me… when you talk about O Sensei feeling like a
cloud has just washed over you or something, you know… that’s the sort of stuff
that I could imagine, could be real.

Besides the inter-personal aspects of such experience, feelings of surprise or

awakening to different ways of relating are even extended to the realm of inanimate
objects among aikido practitioners. People that I spoke to commonly referred to a
perceived difference in the way they operated machines or even opened the garage
door after they had been training in aikido for some time. Most often this inferred an
awareness of ways in which the body could move more completely and “from the
hips” in order to better articulate with these objects and to achieve tasks more easily.
Such extraordinary states of being are generated through repetitive practice in the
dojo, where, for example, practitioners are encouraged to approach their weapons in a
mindful way that respects and articulates their bodies with the particular qualities of the
weapon. This kind of awareness may be not be typical of relatively distracted everyday
experiences with objects at home or at work and may even be analogous to the
revelations that Lindsay experienced in fusing his body with his drum (1996:210-11).
Alan Roberts also talks in quite numinous terms about his weapons, particularly his four-
foot wooden staff (jo). With reference to the jo Roberts Sensei teaches, for example, the
necessity of respecting the weight and shape of the jo or in other words, respecting its
“joness” so that you can get it to do what you want it to, without forcing it.
It is interesting to note that in the Japanese martial arts, observations of the
natural environment and metaphorical human articulations with natural forces, often
form the basis of martial principles that are passed through generations of masters and
students. Meik Skoss (1997:126) describes an oral teaching of the shinyo-ryu of
jujustu, for example, in which students are encouraged to emulate the way that a
willow tree sheds the piled up snow from its branches by “bending without breaking”
(the shin-yo ryu is a style that Morihei Ueshiba and Jigoro Kano, the founders of

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aikido and judo both studied). In the context of certain body techniques, I have often
heard Alan Roberts encourage his students to emulate the actions of a breaking wave
or a mountain echo in performing their movements effectively and these teachings are
built into the way the art has been transmitted to him.
While spending many days in the mountains and the woods, Morihei Ueshiba
also appears to have actively cultivated new and exaggerated relationships with
foreign objects and natural phenomena as part of his training. As well as many
instances of training with human partners, O Sensei is also pictured in a number of
amusing instances of “body-tree” experience, suggesting an interesting dimension to
the idea of human sociality with “the natural”.

(Photo. 12)
O Sensei moving toward a tree in the forest at Iwama.
http://www.aikidofaq.com/bilder/osensei/ (August 2001).

Experiences and interpretations of aikido practice and the phenomenon of aiki

itself are of course very diverse among different practitioners at different levels of
practice and are subject to change as students progress. Alan Roberts Sensei has
observed that at about the level of brown-belt or after about two years of aikido
practice, changes often occur in spite of initial motivations, as students begin to

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realise what it is they are doing and why they are doing it. One female brown belt
explained what aikido had become for her as follows:

Initially it was about learning self-defence, I wanted to be able to look after

myself, but the longer I did aikido, the more I realised that that wasn’t really an
aim that you can have from an early stage, that’s an aim that you’re going to have
like ten or twelve years down the track for it to be really that useful, then it
turned into like the combination of fitness and self defence and then sort after
nearly four years now that sort of emphasis has totally changed. I went through a
period a couple of months back where I was actually thinking of giving up and
didn’t come for about two months and I went through this period of not wanting
to do it anymore and I sort of stayed away from it for a while and then realised
that I couldn’t stay away… it suddenly hit me that this is part of my life and it’s
something that I’ve got to do and it’s a journey that I’ve got to take and it’s a
frustrating journey that’s going to take ten, fifteen, twenty years to get there but I
realised that I want to get there and it just seems like something that I’ve got to
do and I’ve got to be able to do it properly.

Although they often seem unattainable, aspects of aikido principles are

experienced right from the outset of training, however, and progress in understanding
them depends on the personal application of the individual. One of the most “basic”
but fundamental and interesting techniques performed at the end of almost every
session is the ‘breath exercise’ (kokyu ho) (See Photo. 13).
In the ‘breath exercise’, the “attacker” (uke, lit. ‘receiver’) holds the arms of
the “defender” or “doer” of the technique (nage, lit. ‘thrower’) in a kneeling position
(seiza) and extends them up and out of their seated position with virtually no muscular
effort (ideally) and lays them on their side. Without practice, the exercise requires
excessive effort and can cause great frustration for the nage, particularly at the hands
of an experienced and resistant uke. But it is said that if nage develops a shape and
sensitivity that “completely includes” uke and blends with uke’s attempts to restrict
nage’s movements, then the performance of the technique becomes effortless.

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 (Photo. 13 [series])
Performance of the ‘breath exercise’ (kokyu ho).

A. uke holds nage at the wrists in an effort to restrict his movements

B. Nage uses a kokyu movement, which raises uke’s elbows and generates an advantageous
connection to the ground through nage’s legs.

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 C. As a result, uke loses balance and nage steers him away to the side.

D. From a restricted position, nage is now in a position of safety and autonomy.

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 For my own part, I had difficulty with the ‘breath exercise’, particularly in the
beginning when I seemed to be thwarted by experienced practitioners, as I pushed
with my arms without “connecting” with my partner or “dispersing” their attempts to
suppress me. I had a revelation about aiki and how to do kokyu ho, however, when
Roberts Sensei showed me something that his teacher Saito Sensei used to do in order
to demonstrate the key principle.
As I held his arms firmly when we were both seated on our knees, he began to
make a specific shape with his own arms as he moved extremely slowly. At first there
was some slight resistance and then it seemed that at a very specific point,4 there was
“nothing”, a place where the reciprocity of gestures and intentions became
transparent (Lindsay 1997:202) and a point at which one could sense no resistance at
all. It was at that point that I fell, with the very minimum of effort on the part of
sensei. I later realized that this was the “softness”, which lay at the heart of the “hard”
technical shape of the manoeuvre.
Some of the people that I interviewed expressed this feeling in terms like, “it
seems to happen by itself” or “like it was already there”. Morihei Ueshiba has perhaps
been so greatly mythologised because he often explained the feeling of what most
Takemusu practitioners describe as technical correctness, as acts of possession by
shinto deities in the performance of “divine techniques”. These experiences are also I
suspect, at the root of his formulation of aiki, Ueshiba’s most important metaphysical
principle of interconnectedness and the kind of inter-personal relatedness that became
the “cosmic love” element in his philosophy. Alan Roberts, however, usually chooses
to express aiki as something very concrete like gravity, with which “we can choose to
align ourselves or not”, in our efforts to “make things work”.
Without direct reference to shinto and the mysteries of Omoto Kyo, Roberts
Sensei nonetheless delves periodically into some of Morihei Ueshiba’s more abstract
philosophical concepts. In a seminar late in the year for example, Alan explained O
Sensei’s conception of aiki and “the principle of non-resistance” as the moment when
“the opponent comes with aggressive force, unbalances the universe and then falls
over”. The performance of the technique thus becomes a mere expression the will of
the universe or an alignment with some extraordinary other harmonious reality. The
kinds of articulation that occur between this mythology and the immediate reality,
however, are evidenced in these comments by one practitioner I interviewed:

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 When I do kokyu ho [‘breath exercise’] or tai no henko [‘body turn exercise’],
it’s sometimes very hard to separate the feeling of “thank God it’s worked” or
“thank God it hasn’t gone wrong” from “what am I supposed to be feeling
here?” If I do know what is happening, it’s very hard to articulate… and I
suspect that I don’t know. But it’s… when you get it, you get it…

The “meanings” of martial kata and performances at Takemusu Dojo thus

entail both vivid personal and inter-personal experiences, which can happen through a
multitude of different bodily forms. Achieving them, however, requires an awareness
of effective bodily shapes, an acute sensitivity to the “connection” between one’s
partner’s “centre” and one’s own, as well as a very high degree of synchronicity and
inter-personal “feeling”.
Some techniques like the ‘breath exercise’ are very tactile and sensations of
pulling and pushing as well as the interesting transparency that I have described above
are perceptible. In other movements, particularly in the ‘blending’ (awase) forms of
paired weapons practice, there is no direct bodily contact, besides momentary clashes
of weapons and vision becomes more important. In ‘blending’ with weapons, the
proximity of bodies and the way that they respond to each other is explored and a
complete synchronicity is sought.
The confrontations that we observe in aikido practice thus appear to be
“fights” and in a sense they are ritually simulated battle situations through which
‘forms’ (kata) reveal very effective martial techniques and principles. As ritualised
forms of sociality they are also more than this however. In awase practice for
example, (see Photo. 14 over the page) one partner initiates an attacking movement by
raising the sword and initiating a strike and the “opponent” must ideally match these
movements in their counter-attack, such that it should be impossible to perceive at
that moment, who is the attacker and who is the defender. Too much eagerness or a
lack of composure is quickly revealed at such moments as students stumble in their
attempt to “win” over their attackers and actually end up “losing” by giving
themselves away and opening themselves up to a counter.

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 (Photo. 14)
Two advanced aikidoka practice a blending movement with their wooden swords during a test
for a third degree black belt.

Related to seemingly paradoxical teachings about relaxation and softness in

the techniques of bodily contact that are by no means merely “passive”, one quickly
becomes aware of alternative notions of time and space (particularly in the weapons
practice). As a quite large-bodied student told me: “you don’t necessarily need to be
harder, stronger or faster… you just need to develop a more subtle sense of the
relationship between yourself and your partner and all the possibilities of bodily
movement”.
Alan Roberts often expresses this idea when he explains that “speed” or trying
to be faster than your partner is unnecessary in ‘blending’ practice because a sense of
simultaneity is all that is required. There is thus no need to push oneself for superior
speed or power in order to deal with an attack because “as soon as you try to hit
something harder or to do it faster, you just end up losing your connection with the
ground. When you think you are hitting something hard it’s an illusion because you’re
not. All you are really doing is hitting yourself”. These sentiments are also reproduced
in the words of his students:

Alan’s approach is to say… well particularly to people who try and do things harder
and faster. Particularly in weapons training… is that … you know “you don’t get

78
 faster by doing it faster, you get faster by stopping doing all the things that are
slowing you down. It’s like you’re chucking off all the excess baggage that you don’t
need, rather than just… rather than trying to train yourself to be bigger stronger,
faster and carrying all the baggage, you get rid of all the stuff you don’t need and
that’s a very intriguing way of looking at it. Because again, it’s trimming it down to
the barest bones of what you need to do to be somewhere in relation to another
person and the relation side is something else as well… though that’s something that
I’m not particularly good at, I’d have to say. I mean in terms of physically relating in
awase practice… that’s quite difficult…

Despite expressions of inter-personal ideals, the acquisition of skills in a

martial art like aikido might nonetheless still be applied in their purely instrumental
sense, as a means of domination or control. Besides the ritual environment of
reciprocity, however, there are other interesting ways in which an understanding of
aiki is experienced as a form of communicative rather than purely instrumental
knowledge.5 Alan Roberts Sensei is fond of saying, for example, that an
understanding of aiki and being able to use it effectively actually involves a radical
kind of surrender to the forces of gravity and “the principle of non-resistance” in
terms of non-contentious human relations and not an attempt to dominate or compete.
Hence aiki cannot be “owned” if it is really understood, as he explained to me:

I’ve never pretended to do my own aikido, like its “mine” that I… you see it’s
stupid, you can’t have your own aikido. Whatever the aikido is, whatever this
principle is, exists and you either align with it or you don’t and it can’t be yours
you can’t own that. It’s silly, you know, it’s so un-aikido. It has to be there,
expressed in the situation. You don’t have a choice about how that gets
expressed and I think people think that they do… that they’re going to find a
technique that allows them to express themselves, and it doesn’t. No, you get to
learn how to express aiki and you can either feel that that’s an effective way to
be and that’s the best thing to align with, or you can try and do whatever it is
that you like for yourself. So, you know, you can’t own the technique.

Such an attitude is interesting in the context of a culture in which private property is

such a key legal institution, one that has led to claims of ownership and the
commodification of virtually everything from genetic material to ideas.
Alan thus also extends Tamara Kohn’s (2000:171-172) thoughts about the way
in which we might begin to see the nature of aikido philosophy and practice as an
interesting counter-hegemonic alterity in the lifeworlds of most contemporary
advanced capitalist societies. Kohn gives the example that unlike many contemporary
“courses” and relatively linear forms of education and modern learning, aikido
involves a constant “spiralling” of knowledge between seniors and juniors in

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otherwise hierarchical relationships. Despite obvious advances in grade within the
hierarchy of aikido practitioners, it is often said that the aikido path of learning has no
end, except for the continual pursuit of, as one practitioner put it, “the holy grail of
aikido”, which is an understanding of the phenomenon of aiki.
Hence the most interesting paradoxes of aikido practice emerge when we
begin to realise that from a cursory, visual perspective, the art is not all that it seems
to be. It appears confrontational and competitive but it also involves a kind of
synchronicity, relaxation and “blending”. There is also a hierarchy of grades but the
practice is commonly conceived as “a path without end”. These paradoxes, when
combined with the peculiarity of Morihei Ueshiba’s visual legacy of photographs and
film clips and the kinds of mystique and oral histories that the unusual events of his
life have produced, also have the potential to cause problems, however. Towards the
end of his life when he was in his eighties at Iwama, images remain, for example, of
the frail old man throwing his partners without even any bodily contact.
One source of the kind of politics that has resulted between different aikido
styles, for example, is the conjecture that an attempt to recreate the conditions of a
harmonious ideology of “blending” has encouraged a degree of co-operation between
partners in aikido practice that renders the practice of “technique” an absurdity.
Examples of this are situations in which the “receiver” (uke) of the technique will fall
down before they are actually thrown. Such events are rare at Takemusu Aikido Dojo
with its more “resistant” or “static” Iwama-ryu emphasis. From the anthropological
perspective of cultural relativity, it would also be wrong to judge as “flawed” the
“softer” styles of aikido by Iwama criteria because they have their own internal
integrity and coherence.
While the attitude of Alan Roberts Sensei towards these styles can be quite
dismissive, he does nonetheless acknowledge their practice as “doing something else”
and that teachers of those styles may express other kinds of interesting talents or other
kinds of more “symbolic” alterity. As I discussed in the introductory chapter,
however, there may be valid philosophical grounds upon which we might classify the
“softer” styles of aikido as performing a more idealistic function as reifications of a
particular kind of metaphysics of “universal love” or “harmony”. This might also be
distinguished from a more rigorously “embodied” set of ritual circumstances that
generate real conflicts and force an articulation among material conditions or between
different historical selves.

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 It is an aspiration to perform the latter kind of aikido practice that I most
commonly observed at Takemusu Dojo, even if it was not always achieved in every
partnership that I encountered. It is in these circumstances of ritualised conflict, where
the dialectical generation of “meaning” relies on negative, critical or “resistant” tactile
experiences that the peculiarity of Morihei Ueshiba’s body of techniques becomes most
apparent. This is because the kind of response to aggressive acts that they embody is an
ingeniously indirect means of resolving oppression, rather than a kind of co-operative
dance or “exercise”. As one black belt put it to me:

You have to be very honest about whether you’re actually doing a technique or
doing an exercise, I mean doing an exercise or performing a martial technique. If
you are performing a technique that is meant to lay the guy out, then you should
understand whether its going to lay the guy out or not. Where the holes are in
your technique and I think it’s very important that people block you every now
and again and be hard on you and hit you now and again. I think there’s got to be
some reality and I think it’s good to take a blow every now and again. I think it’s
one of the places that aikido is very soft and wimpy if you like. We don’t want to
break bones or whatever but a thump in the jaw or a hand in the face might be a
good thing now and again.

This kind of practice may seem contrary to the ideology of the “art of peace” or
the Mo-ist conception of “universal love” that classical martial arts practitioners have
criticized in aikido (Draeger, 1996:146). I have often been told during my training at
Takemusu Dojo, however, that it is important to be “honest” in my attacks in order for
something “to happen” in the training. Perhaps this is because, in a Marxian sense, it is
the specific materiality of the circumstances that are set up in prescribed aikido rituals,
which helps us to move beyond hegemonic aspects of social consciousness and in
particular, to challenge our physical conditioning with creative cultural propositions.
In this sense, the system of alterity in aikido practice that is embodied in
techniques can be generalised into at least two hypothetical categories. In the first
instance the function of the embodiment of “soft” aikido may be the reification of a
socially constructed ideology of mystical harmony. In the second, it may be understood
in terms of the generation of experiences that illuminate social conflicts, conflicts
between the self and objective natural phenomena as well as the peculiar or counter-
intuitive technical means by which these are mediated and “balance” is restored. Having
made this very Marxian point about the primacy of the material conditions in determining
truth, I now return to the way in which “symbolic” and “embodied” forms of
understanding interact in expressions of aiki in Takemusu Dojo aikido practices.

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When The Words Say What The Body Means

In Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Victor Turner (1974:48) makes some

interesting observations about the way in which concepts that he calls “root
metaphors” often represent a kind of shorthand for aspects of the local moral worlds
and views of social reality that are found among many of the world’s cultures. He
writes that:

These notions are not always put forward with direct or obvious reference to
social relations – often they are metaphorical or allegorical – sometimes they
appear in the guise of philosophical concepts or principles, but I see them as
arising in the human experience of coactivity, including the deepest of such
experiences (Turner 1974:46).

Root metaphors, according to Turner, have “a ‘thusness’ or ‘thereness’ from

which many subsequent structures can be “unpacked” by what Turner refers to as
vijñāna consciousness6 or l’esprit de géometrie” (Turner, 1974:50-51). It is the
“thereness” of inherited metaphors of interpersonal reliance that inspires further
ethical performances in specific situations among the not yet initiated. At Takemusu
Aikido Dojo, I would suggest, such a root metaphor might also be found in the notion
of aiki.
In addition to Turner’s kind of symbolic analysis, however, it has also been
my intention to illustrate throughout this work, some of the ways in which we might
also consider the sense in which the meaning of aiki is articulated through affective
“feelings” in aikido where “meaning” does not necessarily imply a linguistic referent
or a position in a network of symbols, but an immanent relationship between bodies.
While there are metaphorical and metaphysical concepts in aikido, which
abbreviate or idealise this feeling, an experience of “the thing itself” is essential to
aikido “meaning”. For as one teacher has defined it, aiki is “the bio-mechanical
physics of energy flowing in angles - direction, releasing, pressuring, absorbing,
redirecting, dissipating, redistributing, separating, circumventing and freeing the
configuration of energies you may encounter” (Hamada, 2000:133).
Much like the inability to find the ‘balance breaking point’ (kime) in the
‘breath exercise’, for example, if there is the slightest instant of hesitation or
distraction in the awase weapons practice then the “blend” or the psycho-physical
“meaning” of the technique is lost. This is what O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba may have

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referred to figuratively as the concept of the ‘tying together of energies’ (ki no
musubi) or as Alan Roberts Sensei puts it: “think of it for example, as if we were in a
room full of ping-pong balls and every movement you made had an effect on me”.
While aiki is thus a formidable principle of self-defence, in the worldview of Morihei
Ueshiba it was also both a metaphor for and an embodiment of the restoration of
harmonious personal relations.
In the section of the previous chapter entitled Kata as Memory, I alluded to the
way in which ‘oral teachings’ (kuden) and embodied ‘forms’ (kata) converge in the
transmission of aikido martial principles at Takemusu Dojo. In that chapter, we also
began to see some of the peculiarities of aikido in relation to other more consumerist
leisure activities, because it aims at the generation of “insight” as opposed to a purely
hegemonic ideal of cosmetic beauty. During my training I have also observed,
however, an interesting confluence of technical advice and social “root metaphor” that
reflects a communicative rationality and Morihei Ueshiba’s unique vision of social
reform.
While insight may be transmitted by representational or performative means,
it is also true that a radically tactile and interactive sense of bodily “feeling” is an
important medium of meaning in aikido. It is when this “feeling” and its symbolic
representation in “oral teachings” and other signifiers such as the calligraphy that
hangs in the dojo come together in an aesthetic synthesis, that the teachings become
most affective. Michael Jackson also makes this point with regard to what he calls the
literal nature of “body metaphors” such as “uprightness”, which denotes both a
biological condition of human physicality and a value judgement about a person’s
moral “standing” for example. When body metaphors are interpreted non-dualistically
writes Jackson:

…so that the idea or sensation and its bodily correlatives are not seen as an arbitrary
or rhetorical synthesis of two terms – subject and object, tenor and vehicle – which
can be defined more realistically apart from each other, then the meaning of metaphor
lies in its disclosure of the interdependency of body and mind, self and world.
Metaphors reveal or realise unities; they are not figurative means of denying dualities
(Jackson, 1996:9).

In aikido it is possible to see the way in which the conceptual nature of aiki
can be seen as a figurative means of negating the dualities between body and mind
and self and other, while it’s embodied practice reveals their literal inter-dependency.

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In this sense, the relationship between signified and signifier is not entirely arbitrary
but neither is it pre-existent because it must be realised through bodily experiences. In
this way, the embodied experience that generates its symbolic expression is
prioritised. As Csordas (1994a:20) has argued, “rather than asking how metaphors
instantiate image schemas it is more apt to begin with the lived experience from
which we derive image schemas as abstract products of analytical reflection”. In
aikido, this confluence of conceptual metaphors about inter-personal relations and
particular bodily experiences can be illustrated with reference to the performance of
particular techniques.
In what is known as the ‘first teaching’ (ikkyo), for example (see Photo. 15),
practitioners actually experience the counter-intuitive notion that once attacked, one
must indeed move closer to the partner, in order to “enter” and to utilize the closer
leverage of the hips and to align and harmonise with their movement. The aggressor’s
attack is thus neutralised and the experience of the performer of the technique is that
by the act of attempting to restrict your movements or hit you, the attacker actually
pushes him or herself away from you (with their resistant force) and causes their own
downfall.
(Photo. 15 [series])
Performance of the ‘first teaching’ (ikkyo).

A. The “attacker” (uke: all in white) strikes and the defender (nage: black and white), moves
in toward the attack. By pushing down on nage, uke actually pops up and off balance.

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B. As uke pushes on the defender or continues to resist the neutralisation of their force, they
fall deeper into the hole that nage (through the technique) creates for them.

C. Eventually uke is brought to their knees while nage remains unviolated. In aikido terms,
“harmony” is restored.

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 In the more explicit case of a ‘breath throw from double handed grip’ (morote
dori kokyu nage) (see Photo. 16) Roberts Sensei teaches that in order to push someone
away effectively, the defender’s body must not push the attacker away, but indeed get
closer to the attacker and compress downwards in order to mobilize the force of
“gravity” and the “ground”. With this technique he cites the ‘oral teaching’ (kuden) of
the founder ‘look in the same direction as your partner’ (aite onaji to miru) and hence
he also invokes a biomechanical necessity. In other words, if the performance of the
throw is to be successful, an attitude of unity or alignment with the attacker must be
achieved, both metaphorically and literally.
It has been said that work or need is the origin of poetry and this would seem
to ring especially true in the development of aikido teachings. Not only is alignment
with an attacker effective in the material sense but a resolution to the conflict is also
given in symbolic or poetic terms of allusion and metaphor.

(Photo. 16 [series])
Performance of the ‘breath throw from double handed grip’ (morote dori kokyu nage).

A. Uke seizes the arm of nage.

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 B. Nage sinks downwards and turns their body to ‘look in the same direction’ and to unify
with uke.

C. With weight in the front foot and a turn of the hips, a connection between the ground, nage
and uke is made in such a way that uke loses balance and falls.

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 In this sense, rhetorical statements about “the principle of non-resistance” are
powerfully corroborated by (or perhaps originate from) the performance of body
techniques, while the “deep” metaphysical locutions of Morihei Ueshiba about the
nature of aiki are given life by their “surface” manifestations. As I have tried to point
out previously, however, the extent to which the technique “works” among the
performances of practitioners everyday at the dojo is extremely variable according to
experience and ability. Although it is relatively rare, even Roberts Sensei has also
been known to stumble in his pursuit of the ideal, lending support to the notion that
despite its idealisations, the pursuit of aiki is indeed a lifelong practice without a
perceivable “end”.
As well as being a powerful martial principle, the “principle of non-
resistance” is also interesting in its capacity as a means of indirect communication. In
a chapter on aikido in a book entitled The Anthropology of Indirect Communication,
Tamara Kohn questions the possibility that either “verbal” or “body” communication
might be more “direct” than each other (Kohn, 2000:164). Kohn’s question has also
been the main theoretical emphasis of the present work and I am bound to agree with
her that for aikido practitioners, the “verbal” is the more indirect form. This is
because while aikido pedagogy is an interpenetrating system of mind:body
transmission, it is the experience of an embodied materiality that discloses the
objective “truth” or “falsity” of value-laden/ideological expressions of the particular
ideals that aikido generates.
There is an added sense of “indirectness” in aikido philosophy, however, in
the peculiar means by which the techniques of aikido are designed to deal with
oppressive forces, “redirect” attacks and thus enable the oppressed to retain autonomy
by utilising what Morihei Ueshiba called “the principle of non-resistance”. In
performances of aikido techniques, there is a sense in which the aggression of an
attacker is reflected on themselves as in a mirror and a sense in which they are
indirectly made aware of the futility of their aggression as it is mocked by an
ingenious response.
Some of the most amusing stories about O Sensei, for example, are those in
which he reputedly threw much larger opponents and challengers without injuring
them. One story tells of an instance where a notorious young judo man, repeatedly
attacked Ueshiba to no avail and became exhausted by the experience. As Ueshiba
threw him by absorbing his attacks he smiled at his would-be opponent, who

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bewilderedly proclaimed, “can there really be a martial art in which one downs his
attacker with a laugh?” (Stevens, 1997:48).
This would be a fruitful area of research in aikido, and it could extend the
anthropological literature on the role of mimesis and creative and “indirect” responses
to unequal power relations that are employed in ritualised and artistic manners in
many cultures. Unfortunately, this fascinating area would also be the subject of
another study.

1
Misogi no jo was a performance that recalled the mythology of Japan’s founding deities inazumi and
izanagi (parents of takemikazuchi-no mikoto) on the “floating bridge” as well as it affirmed Ueshiba’s
own connection to the gods. I have only seen this rite performed once in New Zealand by a student of
John Stevens Sensei, a visiting aikido teacher from Japan. This was part of a seminar series given by
Stevens Sensei about the aikido techniques that he learned from his teacher Rinjiro Shirata Sensei.
Stevens Sensei also spoke at length on aspects of Morihei Ueshiba’s more esoteric practices that have
been discontinued at Takemusu Aikido Dojo, such as the ‘sound spirit science’ (kotodama) that I
mention in my introductory chapter.
2
This tendency is not unique to Saito Sensei, however. At hombu dojo in Tokyo, for example, there
was once also a shrine to takemikazuchi-no mikoto that was taken away as more foreign students
arrived there to study (Goldsbury, 2001).
3
This “flow” sounds very similar to way the social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the
term as a “holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975,
quoted in Turner, 1992:61). See also the use of Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “flow” in David Hall’s
analysis of the stressful conditions of combat (Hall, 1997:108).
4
I now know this point in Japanese martial arts terminology as the kime point (from kimeru ‘to
decide’) or the point at which ‘balance is broken’. It is what we might call a point of leverage, at which
gravity works in one’s favour, such that virtually no muscular power is needed to move a large mass.
This is well illustrated by the analogy of moving a refrigerator. If the refrigerator is stable on all of its
four corners, it takes a lot of effort to move it. If you get it up on one corner however, you can spin it
around easily on its axis and with not much effort you can send it tumbling end over end.
5
I draw this distinction from Robert Ulin’s definitions of “communicative” and “instrumental”
rationalities. By “communicative” I mean a rationality that is founded on the “social norms of mutual
expectation” and a consideration of ethics, as opposed to a purely objective and “instrumental” truth
that subjugates ethics to the pursuit of control (Ulin, 1984:xvi-xvii). This distinction is of course
blurred by the example that I give from Alan Robert’s teachings, where he seems to imply that a direct
experience of the objective world might also leads to “communicative” understanding. This is also
what makes his statement so interesting.
6
Turner borrows the concept of vijnana consciousness from D. T. Suzuki’s work on zen in Japanese
culture and he differentiates it from prajna consciousness. By vijnana he means something like
intellectualisation and by prajna he means something akin to intuition (Suzuki, 1967).

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 GRAPPLING WITH THE GRAIN

“No Holy Grail, no final satori [‘enlightenment’], no final solution. Just conflict”
(William S. Burroughs, 2000:253)

The main theoretical point that this work has addressed has been the relation between
embodied experience and experiences that result from the mediating representations of
symbolic communication. It has thus been interesting to compare the kinds of
universalising rhetoric and sublime paradoxes that are often to be found in aikido side by
side with the contradictory manifestations of its historical and embodied partialities. As a
result of my observation of and participation in the life of Takemusu Aikido Dojo, I feel
that I am now also able to make assertions about the ways in which representational modes
of understanding in aikido relate to its embodied techniques. There are also important
political implications of these relations in terms of the history of aikido and its
contemporary practice, in sociological contexts far from those of its origins.
In keeping with my early critical assertions about “facts” and “values”, it is evident
that some representations of Morihei Ueshiba’s creation in terms of an integrated aesthetic
and ethical ideal are found wanting when we consider the conflicts that arise in practice.
Ideas about the “universality” or “perfection” of aikido practice, found in positivistic
statements about “the sword of aiki”, for example, which “empowers one to cut through
and destroy all evil, and to pacify the world” (Ueshiba, 1991:24) are found to be
problematic when we consider the phenomenal nature of the modern aikido experience.
My emphasis on the phenomenon of embodiment has nonetheless also revealed that
as “communicative” ritual/social strategies and constructions, the sensually generated
experiences of aikido are real enough to produce the psycho-physical and emotional pain of
conflict as well as feelings of pleasure when that conflict is resolved through the application
of aikido techniques and a gradual understanding of the principle of aiki. In this way, as
Stoller has put it, with reference to extremely engaging sensual experiences, a vigorous
embodiment and extreme sensuality has the potential to move those who engage with it,
“beyond the anaesthetizing influence of language to an uncompromising confrontation with
the culturally repressed dimensions of their being” (Stoller, 1995:6). Such experiences are
reminiscent of Foucault’s philosophy of the body and in particular, his thoughts about
ascetism and aestheticism (1988) as “technologies of the self”. As I have pointed out,

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however, Foucault’s concentration on “the microcosm of solitude” (Asad, 1993:112) must
be tempered by observations of aikido in which the paths of individuals are socially
generated and sustained by the formation of communities.
As an intrinsically social practice, the communicative rationality of the dojo also
represents an interesting space of alterity within the socio-structural determinations of
social life outside the dojo. This alterity is expressed through embodied disciplines of
practice, which free the body and create the conditions for action, intentionality, agency
and social fluidity. It soon becomes clear to regular practitioners that people whose bodies
have been socialised and limited by everyday “body techniques”, regardless of whether
they are those of bourgeois etiquette or mechanical labour, will not progress in the art until
those techniques are suspended in favour of an aikido kind of movement.
The ritual creation of a space at the dojo that is “outside the everyday” also gives
modern practitioners of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, the excuse to experiment
with things that are habitually repressed and to dabble in alternatives or domains of
experience in which things are stranger than they usually seem. Through the ritualised
actions of the body, aikido thus represents an “indirect” means of disclosing the hegemony
of social values. It is also “indirect” because as a martial art it can be conceived in terms of
contemporary categories of “leisure”, “hobby”, “exercise” and even “sport” and thus
transcends privileged or stigmatised discourses about “spirituality”.
As a ‘place of learning’ the dojo provides a ritual space, in which people can
relatively safely confront the demons of emotional imbalance, neurosis or frustration, social
alienation and particularly mind:body un-coordination. As an alternative performative
space, the dojo is also a levelling institution where divisions of class and ethnicity are
dissolved and cultural creativity is enacted or prevailing paradigms about the relation
between the self and others are inverted or suspended. Victor Turner noticed the
importance of such institutions when he wrote that they:

…constitute metalanguages (including nonverbal ones) devised for the purpose of

talking about the various languages of the everyday, and in which mundane axioms
become problematic, where the cherished symbols of the forum, agora, and stoa are
reflected upon, rotated, and given new and unexpected valences. I see the germ of
such metalanguages and reflexivity in certain phenomena of tribal liminality - where
we observe parodies of the sacred, and even playful mockery of the gods, as well as
that of chiefs, priests and patriarchs (Turner 1992:57).

This institutional role, combined with that of a vigorous corporeality in aikido has
lead me to agree with Kohn (2000:165) in disputing Bourdieu’s assertions about the

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“privileged relation” between the ‘soft’ art of aikido and the new petty bourgeoisie as
opposed to what he considers to be the rugged physicality of the “working class” sport of
wrestling for example (Bourdieu 1990:157). Bourdieu nonetheless makes a valid and point
when he speaks of the bourgeois proclivity towards aesthetic form in art, as opposed to the
manual worker’s preference for content, however (Lechte, 1994:47). Although an answer
to this problem has only been hinted at in the present study, without becoming its specific
focus, Bourdieu’s comments may indeed be relevant to particular kinds of aikido practices
and as Kohn (2000:165) has pointed out, the specific social milieu in which they are
practised.
Despite its role as a ritual leveller and the relative diversity of ethnic and socio-
economic statuses at Takemusu Aikido Dojo that I have observed only cursorily, I have
also heard practitioners talk about how aikido tends to attract a certain kind of person;
someone who may not necessarily be fascinated by a perceived “oriental” spiritualism, but
someone who is nonetheless attracted to the kind of alternative social values and “thinking
person’s martial art” that aikido often represents. A study of the socio-economic profiles of
aikido practitioners in relation to other kinds of leisure activities may thus be an interesting
area for future research as it has been neglected in the present work, which is perhaps as
philosophical as it is sociological
I have admitted that from the beginning of the project I was absorbed in aikido
texts and history and was enchanted by everything that the “way of the samurai”
represented and that I may have spent too much time delving into the mystical symbolism
of aikido and the Japanese martial tradition in general. “The nature of the godhead is pure
paradox”, wrote Kierkegaard and I was fascinated by this early existential philosopher’s
influence upon Victor Turner when in a work called Chihamba The White Spirit (1962),
Turner interpreted the unnamed Ndembu demigod as an appearance of the “divine
unknowable” (Turner, E. 1992:xii). Such mysticisms are extremely seductive and by
stopping at their symbolic manifestations, I found that we risk entering a blissful hall of
mirrors and infinite regression and a retreat from the continuous conflicts of “the world
experienced”.
It was phenomenology and radical empiricism, the critical materialism of Karl
Marx and a more subtle understanding of Ueshiba’s anti-modern millenarian stance that
steered me away from mysticism, toward embodiment, the Marxist literature on alienation
and a more critical awareness of my own enchantment. I began to consider the sorts of
historical problems that Omoto Kyo and Morihei Ueshiba confronted, as characterisable in

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terms of an alienation that was associated with the onset of modernity and westernisation.
As my training progressed and my observations in the dojo became subtler, I also began to
see the ways in which modern experiences were also relevant to the case of aikido
practitioners in a particular New Zealand urban environment.
An alienating modernity became a figment of contemporary experience both ‘East’
and ‘West’ and this alienation was apt to describe the themes that the art of aikido was
designed to address. With this came realisations about important contradictions in the
history of aikido and in the attitudes of its contemporary practitioners as they were forced
to articulate the utopian ideals of their art with the realities of the contemporary
environment. Aikido’s idealised abstractions, it seemed, had often been complicated by a
degree of ambivalence in the art’s articulation with broader socio-historical conditions. In
the context of imposing social, economic and political processes, I also found that like
other disciplines of knowledge or spiritual technologies, contemporary aikido had been
colonised and compromised by powerful, chimeras, idealisms and structural forces.
Sometimes this colonisation is obvious and even to be expected among martial arts
philosophies and ways, given their almost Nietzshean ethical ambiguity. The conversion of
Miyamoto Musashi’s martial arts classic, The Book of Five Rings into a corporate manual is
just one good example of the way in which the strategic insights and psycho-physical skills
of the martial arts have been appropriated for particular modern ends. The “new” and
explicitly communicative budo that Morihei Ueshiba claims to have invented has also been
affected, however, and I have sought to demonstrate aspects of the relatively ineffectual
reifications and subtler colonisation of aikido as a consumable idea.
On a more explicit level, aikido related commodities proliferate on the Internet and
texts that have appropriated aikido ideas as instruments commercial competition are also in
circulation. In May this year, there is even a much-publicised “Aiki Expo” taking place in
Las Vegas as a kind of celebration of the art cum trade expo where, for example, vendors
sell videos on topics such as improving one’s golf scores by utilising aikido principles.
Hence one more set of contradictions emerge in a contemporary aikido in which thousands
of aikido practitioners practice “the way of harmony” a few hours a week and then return to
their lives outside the dojo, continuing to exploit the Third World by investing in major
banks and by buying commodities from multi-national companies. One would thus be
justified in asking questions about whether or not aikido practices, which Ueshiba idealised
as an alternative to modernity in fact only reproduce the same historical conditions that they
were designed to confront.

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 For most practitioners aikido is also a very part-time activity, which might indeed
represent a sort of refreshing catharsis or a space in which they are temporarily “revived”
and enabled to carry on with their lives as useful contributors to late industrial capitalism.
Hence these modern aikidoka in Auckland might be characterized as “weeknight warriors”
who in their spare time acquire valuable new psycho-physical skills with which to please
their employers with renewed efficiency.
It would also be wrong to assert that aikido practitioners inevitably become
perfectly “selfless” or infallibly “ethical” as a result of their practice. Some practitioners at
Takemusu Dojo, often influenced by the climate of positivistic personal development that
surrounds the martial arts, indeed think of aiki in terms of a set of techniques that they can
appropriate for themselves or a force that will enable them to “assume control” or to
become powerful. Once they get a feeling for the principle of aiki and can embody it, they
are also able appropriate it as “their own” and to apply it instrumentally or
communicatively, as best they see fit.
Some freely admit that they do it for egotistical reasons and “to be better than other
people…” because “aikido is not really going to save the world”. Alan Roberts the purist,
sees such attitudes as ultimately futile and he prefers to conceive of aiki as if it were a
phenomenon like gravity, with which “you can either align yourself or not as you begin to
discover it”. For him, aligning with the “natural” is not a value-neutral phenomenon, but
entails, as he says, a kind of radical surrender to the forces of nature as a way of
discovering a means of dealing with unequal power relations or oppression.
Having spent four years with his teacher Saito Sensei in Iwama, Alan is also
exceptional in his dedication and understanding of how to achieve this alignment and as
one more human cultural product his expertise is also a very saleable item and apt to
commodification. Although he makes an important part of his living from aikido, it should
also be noted, however, that his dojo is not prohibitively expensive or elitist and if he is to
be believed, Alan sees the role of the practice as something with wider implications of
social reform. “Aligning” with aiki entails a particular moral or philosophical position,
however, that despite the strong ritual recreations of the dojo is not always explicit among
Roberts Sensei’s students, even at relatively advanced levels of practice.
The task Alan has set himself of “educating people” in a very alienated context is
thus not an easy one to achieve and involves a constant dialectic between intention and
possibility. Although the beneficial results of training are often very real and heartfelt, there

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is often also a sense of aikido’s limitations and disappointment about certain personalities
and the effects of the practice at large. As one interviewee expressed it:

The aikido world is too small and I think a lot of people aren’t disciplined enough to
pursue something like aikido long enough to be changed by it. To me in aikido you
need to have at least two years before you start to get an understanding of what it’s
about. I said to my partner that I couldn’t explain to her why I do aikido, like I doubt
that I’ve really explained to you why I do aikido, I don’t think I’ve really gotten into
it. I’ve probably given you a general overview… I can’t explain that, firstly because
I’m not a poet and I’m not a descriptive storyteller anyway and secondly because it’s
a very deep personal thing that’s very hard to describe. But I think you’ve got to be a
certain type of person to do it. I think that most people who do martial arts are a bit
weird. It’s not competitive and you can’t be competitive to do aikido but there are a
lot of black belts who are still competitive when they do aikido and they miss out.

Virtually all of the practitioners that I spoke to from the dojo, also told me that
“social reform” or “changing the world” was not the reason why they started doing aikido,
yet I still observed changes, even within my relatively short period of participation, in the
way people perceived themselves and related to others, particularly others within the group
itself. During my aikido training I have also perceived these changes occurring in myself
and I have begun to feel the way that it has affected my body in terms of relaxation, an
awareness of corporeal states and their emotional relatives, awareness about the way I use
objects “outside” of myself and the ability to deal indirectly, with confrontation.
As a result of these kinds of experience, many Takemusu practitioners have also
made very strong commitments to their practice, with some even travelling to Japan to
further their study. The kinds of personal revelation that aikido generates and the levels of
intensity with which the implications of training are discussed among aikido practitioners
have also impressed me. These are phenomena that I have seldom experienced in other
“sport” orientated clubs that I have participated in.
There is thus also something very admirable about the way that people continue to
train and to seek alternative meanings through their practice. Alan Roberts Sensei often
stresses in his talks at the end of class that the dojo and the “outside world” are by no
means discreet and that the teachings that he gives are meant to be relevant to everyday life
situations. People also seem to discover this relevance in experiences of themselves and the
way that they relate to others. As one black belt practitioner illustrated for me:

There are so many situations at work and in my relationship with my partner where I
have… well I talked about this overview perspective before, where I can take a step
outside the conversation or the confrontation or the discussion and re-look at what’s
going on and say, hey! He’s actually coming at this with a different point of view to

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 what mine is… we can actually both win out of this situation, we can actually both
come to a mutual agreement out of this and its amazing how many situations you can
apply it to and the really frustrating thing for me is that I can see it clear as day but
being able to show other parties, not only the second party but the third party that is
also observing or participating that we are actually able to come up with a mutually
acceptable answer.

In another instance, soon after the World Trade Centre bombing that apparently
stirred some of the old millenarian fervour at Iwama, another Takemusu practitioner told
Alan that the bombing had given him a sudden realisation about the meaning of his
training. While the events on television represented a conflict between two abstract
ideologies, battling it out in a confusing world, he felt that his aikido practice was
something very immediate and tangible that uplifted him and gave him reasons to
persevere in his personal life and his relationships at work.
While the explicit millenarian idealism of an historical aikido has been largely
discarded at Takemusu Aikido Dojo, the practice nonetheless still retains a particular
momentum and orientation. While responses to alienation are not often conscious in
aikido, they are revealed through the irrepressible human impulse to seek cultural
alternatives and personal development through dedication to a specific artistic operation.
As Alan Roberts Sensei told me, in a world of dishonesty, “being honest starts with
cultivating the self” and as I have been careful to emphasise, the kinds of personal and
social transformation that is achieved at Takemusu Aikido Dojo are the result of an
inherently communal activity. In other words, the general conditions of agency and cultural
creativity that are apparent at the dojo are socially reproduced and they thus enact specific
social ends.
There are certainly many other ways in which the phenomenon of aikido could be
considered and my study has been ambitious in provoking questions but modest in
providing answers. In writing such a work, I can do little more than to suggest the
importance and the potential of practices like aikido and other disciplines that are both
expressive, communicative and oriented toward the elusive goal of sincerity in increasingly
virtual environments that are ever less conducive to a grip on the real. For there are almost
certainly cross-cultural elements of ritual and artistic practices that as communally
generated alterities, must be practised and embodied if they are to survive, not merely as
stultifying ideologies or mysticisms, but as creative practical engagements with the
historical field of symbolic and material conflict.

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 EPILOGUE
It seems that this thesis has now truly assumed the status of an historical document.
From the end of 2001, Takemusu Aikido Dojo has ceased to exist and a beautiful new dojo
has been established on the corner of Sandringham and St. Lukes Roads, a few blocks from
the old building. A change in name to “Aikido of Auckland” also reflects a change in
branding and at its official opening, the new building was blessed in the Maori style of a
tohi ('blessing') by an aikido practitioner who spoke of the need to transform the hall from
its former role as a commercial space into a place that people come to learn aikido or ‘the
way of the discovery of aiki’. As he led the honoured guests inside as he wielded his taiaha
('spear') and performed a purifying haka ('dance').
In his opening day speech Alan Roberts gave thanks to his family and his students
and revealed the meaning of a new piece of calligraphy that was hung high at the end of
the dojo. It is a piece by Alan’s teacher Saito Sensei consisting of three Japanese kanji
characters: sei shin kan (‘the place of the pure heart’) and it represents the new name of the
training hall. It is now April, numbers at the dojo are growing and there were five black
belts awarded at the last grading.
This week Alan has returned to Japan to visit his teacher Saito Sensei because he
has cancer and information about his health is uncertain. No one can be sure of what
direction the lineage might take when Saito Sensei is gone but at the seishinkan, people
continue to take time out to turn up and train.

98
 (Photo. 17)
Alan Roberts (left) and Jeremy, one of his first black belt students, demonstrate at the old
Takemusu Dojo.

99
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FILMOGRAPHY
Jarmusch, J., 1999. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. 116 mins. Colour. Artisan
Home Entertainment.
Kurosawa, A., 1954. Shichi Nin No Samurai (Seven Samurai) 207 mins. Black &
White. TOHO.
Lee, A., 2000. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 120 mins. Colour. Sony Pictures
Classics.

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