Sara Kingdom's Head Above (and/or Like) Water Challenge

[sarakingdom]

You know, I can't remember what Mistr does for her style.  But I will laugh a lot if the three of us cover the major different styles of aikido.  And yet, we still can understand one another quite well.

 

(And I'm Aikikai, following Kanai sensei's style/lineage.)

 

Gosh, are there only three major styles of aikido?   Actually, maybe that's true; Aikikai, Ki Society, and Yoshinkan/aikijutsu.  I don't know how to classify a lot of the Ki Society spinoff styles.  Some of them officially realigned with Aikikai, some didn't, some had politely unspoken disagreements with the Ki Society organization and just went solo...  So maybe The Official Style (Aikikai and its sub-styles), The Daito-Ryu-based (Yoshinkan and the early stuff), and The Great Splintering.

[RisenPhoenix]

Gosh, are there only three major styles of aikido?   Actually, maybe that's true; Aikikai, Ki Society, and Yoshinkan/aikijutsu.  I don't know how to classify a lot of the Ki Society spinoff styles.  Some of them officially realigned with Aikikai, some didn't, some had politely unspoken disagreements with the Ki Society organization and just went solo...  So maybe The Official Style (Aikikai and its sub-styles), The Daito-Ryu-based (Yoshinkan and the early stuff), and The Great Splintering.

 

Eh, at least I was taught there are three major styles.  No doubt there is an infinite number of substyles.  Hell, I have 12 instructors at my dojo and all of them have very, very different styles.  But that's what makes it fun, right?  Find a technique in a style you like and add it to your own arsenal.

[Mistr]

I've always been pretty high stress, and it seems like I've spent years not eating quite enough to fully recovery properly physically - that's some of the symptoms I've been seeing intermittently correct themselves now that I'm eating more, so I think that's a process I'm not done with - and I've spent many years at about 60% of the sleep I need, so I entirely expect lingering issues with stress and recovery.  I think it's just going to be a process of making sure I put in the rest time and try to manage those things over the long term.

 

But at the same time, my body and my brain both like hard workouts quite a bit, and there's progress I need to make.  So I think it's going to be a matter of finding the right balance.  And an interesting time management challenge, to work hard, exercise hard, and sleep hard all in the same week.

 

Yep, that balance is tricky. It sounds like you are on a long road to taking better care of yourself. 

 

You know, I can't remember what Mistr does for her style.  But I will laugh a lot if the three of us cover the major different styles of aikido.  And yet, we still can understand one another quite well.

 

(And I'm Aikikai, following Kanai sensei's style/lineage.)

 

My current dojo is under Saotome sensei, who started Aikido Schools of Ueshiba. It is affiliated with Hombu dojo in Japan, the main Aikikai lineage. My first dojo was under Aikira Tohei, head of the Midwest region of the UAF (Aikikai). So far as I know, Aikira Tohei was not related to Koichi Tohei who founded the Ki society. They trained together, as did all the uchi deshi back then.

 

This is the first I've heard of Kokikai Aikido. Looking at the list of dojos that makes sense. There aren't any located in the Midwest.

 

I have to wonder if there was a tradition in Japan of senior students going off and starting their own styles. That would explain why so many different affiliations sprung up after O-Sensei's death. It has always seemed ironic to me that the most senior instructors in the Art of Harmony could not get along with each other.

[sarakingdom]

I have to wonder if there was a tradition in Japan of senior students going off and starting their own styles. That would explain why so many different affiliations sprung up after O-Sensei's death. It has always seemed ironic to me that the most senior instructors in the Art of Harmony could not get along with each other.

 

The impression I've been getting from reading about some sword schools is that, pre-1900-ish, the name of the style was synonymous with the name of the physical school where it was taught, and these multi-school affiliations are a relatively new thing.  I don't know if that's true, but that might imply that the senior students who go teaching on their own effectively do create their own niche style.  (Which is largely what Ueshiba did, after starting out as an aiki-jujutsu teacher in Takeda's style.)   Maybe there's not a whole lot of precedent for how it's done now, with large international affiliations.  Kano's judo was probably the very first national style, and that might well be the influence of western sporting and education ideas.  So that may be true, that there's more precedent for senior martial artists to have their own style, versus being governed from a central dojo.

 

I always got the impression that there was something irregular about the Ki Society split with Hombu that no one really talks about out of respect for Koichi Tohei sensei - that it wasn't entirely proper for Tohei to break away and it put many of the younger uchi-deshi in a difficult position, choosing between a duty to Hombu and a duty to Tohei, who'd taught them.  Of the students who followed him, a great many of them broke away from him for one reason or another.  Some of them re-associated with Hombu, some just went out on their own, and no one spoke about it openly, but there were a lot of whispers about problems with Tohei sensei, either problems with how he was running the organization or him throwing people out.  It's left me with the vague sensation that Tohei sensei was one big walking personality conflict, but no one wanted to air problems with their teacher in public.  That's what I always attributed the proliferation of styles to - he seemed like the epicenter of it all.

 

That said, I think there are big differences between the aikido Ueshiba was teaching in the 1930s and the aikido he was teaching in the 1950s.  The senior students who started schools at the two extremes might not have enough in common for the same affiliation to be useful, in terms of classification, and IIRC some of those early divergent schools were formed before Hombu was really Hombu.  IIRC, his very earliest uchi-deshi were awarded ranks as aiki-jujutsu dans rather than aikido dans, so they may call themselves aikido, but most of it, certainly the modern concept of aikido and the modern internationalization of the style, postdated them forming their own schools.  They are aikido, but I think calling them a different style of aikido makes sense.

[Mistr]

Yes, that matches with things I've heard and read. Aikira Tohei was one of the students of Koichi Tohei. He stayed with Hombu after Koichi Tohei split off and apparently got a lot of personal credit for doing so.

 

Aikido Sangenkai blog has some interesting articles on the connection between the third- and fourth-generation students and the organizations that their senior teachers founded.