Aikido’s Strange History

Part of Aikido’s weirdness comes from its strange history. Aikido is a modern martial art that evolved out of Daito-Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu, a deadly, no-holds-barred fighting form taught secretly to the Japanese samurai. The principal aim of the art was to teach samurai how to quickly kill opponents on the battlefield if they lost their weapons. Like other types of jujitsu, it involved joint locks, throws and “pain compliance” techniques.

The last master of Daito-Ryu, Sokaku Takeda, was a mean, nasty SOB who allegedly killed dozens of men in unarmed “duels.” In the early 20th century, he taught his samurai jujitsu to a strange Shinto mystic and dreamer named Morihei Ueshiba, who had founded a rural commune in northern Japan and then spent his entire inheritance on private lessons from Takeda. Ueshiba eventually learned enough from Takeda to receive a “license” to teach Daito-Ryu but, instead, used what he learned as the base to create a new martial art which we now call Aikido – which means the Way (Do) of Harmonious (Ai) Energy (Ki).

Just as the founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano, modified the throws of classical jujitsu to create the modern sport of judo, so, too, Ueshiba took the brutal, bone-snapping techniques of Daito-Ryu and created a martial art that, he believed, promoted peace rather than mayhem. Ueshiba also added a whole new approach to doing the techniques of Daito-Ryu that involved circular movements that, his followers believe, made them far more effective and powerful – but which his detractors believe actually weakened the techniques and made them less effective.

In any event, Aikido evolved as a martial art that seeks to use circular movements and precise timing in order to “neutralize” any attack and use an opponent’s strength against him. In practical terms, it involves learning a variety of throws and joint locks that take literally years to learn well but which, if done by an expert, are actually quite effective. Many of the coolest moves you see in spy movies – like in the Jason Bourne films — are actually Aikido techniques. Modified versions of the techniques are also used a lot by police, especially the joint locks.

Does it work? I am asked that all the time.

The easy answer would be, well, that depends. The more honest answer is: In a street fight against a hardened criminal, probably not.

But then again, karate or tae kwon do or any other after-school pansy martial art wouldn’t work, either. Any bouncer will tell you that real fights are brutal and quick – and no place for anything fancy, whether spinning wheel kicks or Aikido throws. Real rights are where the toughest, most ruthless, usually most experienced bastard wins.

If you want to train for that type of fight, the best training is probably a good Brazilian Ju-Jitsu (BJJ) or Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) dojo that tries to be as realistic as possible and where people regularly get their ribs and noses broken – and even that probably wouldn’t really prepare you to face the average, run-of-the-mill convict.

But the reality is, most people don’t square off in the street against Jean Claude van Damme. What the average person encounters, and which Aikido is actually quite useful for, is the drunk in the local pub… or the too-friendly groomsman (for women) at a wedding. Some oaf grabs your lapel… or tries to push you. For these types of real-life encounters, the joint locks and simple throws of Aikido can actually be quite effective.

For most people, though, Aikido training really isn’t about fighting. It’s about not-fighting, about winning through non-resistance, about redirecting aggression so it doesn’t hurt you. The esoteric side of Aikido is that the techniques are most effective when you don’t try to use muscle at all but timing, gently knocking someone off balance enough so, with hardly any effort, you can guide him or her face down on the mat. That is why Aikido people whirl their opponents around in a characteristic circular motion that takes away their balance.

My First Decade of Aikido

My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was a former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan.  He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of my old sensei’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

The Real Reason Why Health Care is So Expensive

In the early evening of the Fourth of July, my wife was cutting cilantro for a salad we were bringing to a friend’s party. Distracted by yelling children, she accidentally cut her left index finger with the knife. Yikes!

It was a fairly deep cut across a nail, bleeding profusely, and we all agreed she should have it checked out.

Naturally, it being after 5:00 p.m., our regular family doctor’s office was closed tighter than a drum.

We decided that, rather than go to the Emergency Room – where it would cost us an arm and a leg – we would try to go to the “Urgent Care” clinic instead. As a result, we dropped out kids off at the party and drove the five miles to the “Urgent Care” clinic. But it, too, was closed tight with an office sign that proclaimed their office hours from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

At this point, we had no choice: So we drove over to our local community hospital emergency room… where, I must say, we received wonderful care.

First, the admitting staff did their efficient admission procedure on us. Then, a triage nurse of some kind examined my wife’s wound and agreed that, yes, it would be a good idea to have a doctor check it out.

Another nurse took us back into a cubicle where she was propped up on a hospital bed. Her blood pressure and temperature were taken… and some routine medical history questions were asked by a third nurse.

We sat there for about 45 minutes until a young lady doctor strolled in. She was a marvelous doctor, warm, personable, seemingly very competent. She and my wife chatted about their gardens, growing tomatoes and what-not. The doctor decreed that the cut didn’t need and couldn’t accommodate a stitch, with the nail and all. As a result, she briefly cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide and then applied some “dermabond,” a SuperGlue-like substance to seal the wound. She also recommended that my wife get a tetanus booster. Yet another nurse came in to wrap the cut finger in a bandage.

We were in the hospital for nearly two hours but the actual treatment took literally five minutes (clean the wound, applying “Dermabond”).

When it was all done, a “billing agent” appeared and demanded further identification for billing (social security number, name of employer, etc.)… which we provided.

Two weeks later, the bill arrived: The hospital billed Anthem Blue Cross $1,659.74. Blue Cross disallowed $906.75 of that, leaving us to pay (because of our high deductible) $753. That works out to about $150 per minute of actual treatment.

And that’s not counting the doctor. She’s an independent contractor and her costs are extra. Her bill was for $342 — $226 for “surgery” and $116 for “emergency service.” Anthem Blue Cross said we had to pay $235.92 and they disallowed $106.08.

Thus, the total cost for fixing a cut finger was $988.92.

This is why medicine is bankrupting America. This was just the cost of fixing a cut finger. Imagine the bloat and built-in waste of, say, a heart bypass operation.

We didn’t need six different nurses… a hospital bed… an admissions staff… a complete medical history… a billing agent… and all the other rigmarole of an emergency room to treat my wife’s cut finger. Any decently trained nurse could have done exactly what the doctor did.

The padding was obvious:  The hospital charged us $374 from “central supply” (that must have been the band-aid they put on my wife’s finger), $117 for “pharmacy injectables” (okay, I guess that sounds reasonable for a tetanus shot) and $1,168 for the emergency room itself.

Yet, doctors now routinely refer patients to emergency rooms because they no longer want to be bothered with such nuisances as cut fingers, especially on weekends. They are clueless about what the costs of such visits actually are. The very poor, naturally, don’t pay anything when they go… they are covered by Medicaid. But it is people like us, who have health insurance, who pay the $150 a minute for routine care.

What is needed is not so much Obama’s socialized medicine – turning the entire country into a gigantic HMO with six-month waiting lists, crowded hospitals and over-worked doctors and nurses – but simply intermediate facilities between a doctor’s office and a critical care emergency room.

Such clinics could provide levels of care from an ordinary nurse to a nurse practitioner to, in worst case situations, a full-fledged M.D. It would save ordinary people a ton of money… and might help solve the health care crisis.

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