вторник, 23 декабря 2008 г.

“Traditional” aikido

Как кукушкино яйцо!..

Всё в мире относительно, что можно поднять руками. Все остальное - отвозительно.

One of the generally accepted wrong recognitions of aikido in my country is connected with its name, i.e. the adding of the adjective "traditional". When I tell someone that I am practicing aikido, almost without exceptions I get the question "traditional or real?" Eh, that's when the explaining begins.

In one of my previous texts I have written where the usage of the adjective traditional comes from, and that it appeared in our country with a sole purpose – to qualify the aikido as something old and maybe out rivaled and that the "real" aikido is not aikido at all.

But let us first see what does exactly "traditional" i.e. "tradition" means. Maybe we have never thought of it, but the word tradition comes from the Latin word "traditio" which means "to hand down" or "to hand over", in our case – to hand over something trough a period of time.

Tradition is something that is handed over from generation to generation through a longer period of time. And let me emphasize it that I don't have anything against the tradition at all. On the contrary, I think that it is exceptionally useful. I am only against the labeling of the aikido with a purpose of diminishing its value, when used with this intention.

For the sake of the truth, the aikido can not be called traditional because it has appeared in the twenties of the 20th century, but on the other hand it has so many traditions, as from the martial arts and from the philosophical thought of the far east, implemented in it. Let’s see , in short, where aikido comes from.
In the middle ages, in Japan, there were feudal lords who fought against each other. Samurai, for whom fighting meant sense of existence, took part in these battles. There were numerous samurai clans and in each of them fighting of any kind was taught: with bare hands, with weapons, with the use of horses etc.

It is important to stress that there weren't different martial arts but only different schools in which fighting and warfare were thought thoroughly. The art of warfare had a clear aim - to destroy the opponent, and there wasn't any room for "rules" or "styles". Everything was allowed!

With the social changes came the end of the feudal era and with that the existence of the professional soldiers - samurai and the schools that created them became senseless. At that time the martial arts which are know to us: karate, judo, kendo, kyudo etc., were created.

Aikido was created among the last ones or precisely in 1942(3) when it was and officially recognized by the Japanese official organs. The name of the man who created it is Morihei Ueshiba (?? ??).

Through out his life he studied different schools of martial art, and the biggest impression on him made the martial art taught by Sokaku Takeda (?? ??), genuine samurai, who taught the art at the school of his clan, called "Daito ryu aiki jujutsu". Morihei Ueshiba synthesized all his knowledge of martial arts that he possessed and under the influence of his ideological-religious points of view he created a new martial art which was at first called Aiki-Budo, and than Aikido.

From this, it is clear that aikido has tradition in it, but this doesn't make it traditional!

In order to make things more clear I will have to dedicate another text to the explanation of the terms that one can come across in the names of the Japanese martial art. The main reason being that I still encounter people who think that jujutsu is called "jiu jitsa" and that it is a different martial art! In Japanese, jujutsu simply means "fighting with bare hands (without weapons)".




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