Thought stream
My Uncle recently asked me my thoughts on Aikido as a martial art. Given how important both my Uncle and Martial Arts are to me my response was inevitably long winded but I wanted to share it as I’m writing about something I’m very passionate about. I start out in referring to a comment he made about the Aikido demonstrations he’s watched having very compliant aggressors and his concern over that:
First, your assessment that the aggressor appears too cooperative is an extremely poignant and insightful observation which plays to the heart and inherent fallacies of many traditional martial arts. During the 1700s Japanese martial arts, under imperial order, became much more structured and less prone to injury. Kata, that is choreographed routines of martial demonstration, became popular and with it the beginning of the compliant attacker issue. Justification for the lack of hard practice and sport-ish competition was made that the art was too deadly for practice on resisting opponents and the like.
At the furthest extreme of the above described line of thinking you have martial arts like this. For the record, the MMA fighter he fights is a nobody. Additionally, I have no doubt that his students believed it worked, through and through. A sort of group hypnotism, a common psychological phenomenon well understood.
So, the question regarding Aikido and its usefulness: it’s a mixed bag. Of the many martial arts which fall prey to the above described problems my opinion is that Aikido is one of the better ones. Many of its techniques are inherently useful and though not often practiced in a sport environment, some of them are ones which are used in sporting situations. How beneficial it is when it comes to self defense can also be extremely subjective on the quality of the instruction. Dan Zan Ryu Jujitsu, the type of Jujitsu I’m a blackbelt in, suffers from many of the traditional problems. I also know some fellow practitioners who, with the martial revolution which started in 1993, have done a lot to make their DZR substantially more proven and useful. In the end, Aikido: better than a lot, but desperately lacking compared to a few. It can be practiced fairly safely and of course is better than no martial training. Practice would be decent workout though Aikido be hard on the joints if you’re not careful.
While what I’ve written thus far has answered your question my response wouldn’t be genuinely thorough if I didn’t explain a few other things, namely sport, 1993 and the other “few” (martial arts).
Those old styles of Japanese martial arts were thrown on their head by Jigoro Kano. Mr. Kano took a decent number of the techniques from Japanese Jujitsu which he deemed unpractical or inherently unsafe for real sporting practice and created Judo (another art I’m a blackbelt in). He proved his point when his students thoroughly dominated the jujitsu practitioners in a big tournament designed to determine the official martial art of the Tokyo Police Department. You see, nothing is as good as practice with a fully resisting adult. Extremely deadly techniques can’t be practiced by anyone, martial artists or street thugs alike, but learning to apply techniques on another trained individual really develops the skill to use them. Note, that skill will be easy to apply on someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing (i.e., mugger).
In some instances sporting martial arts have gone too far and neglect the threats of knives, bats, guns, two opponents, etc, things you won’t find in a ring but are all very real on the street. Of course, in most of those instances any good martial artist would tell you to run and/or give them what they want. Weapons defense training is great and can be practiced well with chalked rubber knives and the like (honestly, I’m more afraid of a knife than a gun).
1993 marked the first UFC, an event which caused a martial revolution unlike anything the world has ever seen. Martial arts have changed more since then than they have over the last two thousand years. We learned that a lot of those kata-based martial arts were, well, fairly useless and were thoroughly dominated by a handful of sport style martial arts, namely Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and American Wrestling. Later, Thai Kick Boxing came into prevalence as strikers learned to avoid the take down of the grapplers. These days mixed martial arts (MMA) is effectively its own martial art, consisting of the best from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Boxing, Kick Boxing, Wrestling and a few throws from Judo. For one on one fighting, nothing is better than those. Single style vs. single style, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu proved itself to be the best. Those are the “few.”
Posted: January 22nd, 2012 by Clark under Martial Arts.
Comments: 1
