A Little Tomiki History

In response to a recent request, here’s a little bit about my primary martial art:

Tomiki Aikido is primarily a teaching method used to teach aikido from a judo perspective.

Aikido, as most martial artists know, was developed mainly from the techniques of Daito-Ryu aiki-jujutsu, in the early years of the 20th century, by Morihei Ueshiba. In the 1920s, Ueshiba was performing a demonstration of his new art, and Jigoro Kano (developer of Judo and founder of the Kodokan) was in attendance. The story goes that Kano was so impressed with Ueshiba’s new martial art that he gave his top student to Ueshiba.

Of course, some sources report this differently. Some say (and it may be entirely correct, I can’t dispute it because I wasn't there) that Kano assigned his top student to train under Ueshiba in order to gain a better understanding of Ueshiba’s art.

Either way, Kenji Tomiki, already a Menkyo Kaiden holder in Kodokan Judo, found himself training as a beginner in Aikido.
Eventually, Tomiki Sensei earned the Menkyo Kaiden in Aikido also. He was the only person ever awarded the highest available rank in both Judo and Aikido, directly from the founders of both arts. When Kano developed the modern belt ranking system, it originally only went up to 8th dan, and as Menkyo Kaiden was assumed to be the penultimate rank, all holders of Menkyo Kaiden were graded to 8th dan. So Tomiki was the first official 8th dan in both Judo and Aikido. *

At its core, his style of Aikido contained the same techniques that Ueshiba had always taught, but Tomiki approached it from a Judo background. This gave him a better understanding of the use of off-balance, body rise and fall, and weight-shifting in both arts. He developed his own unique training methods and began teaching his style of Aikido. He developed a style for use in Judo-like competitions, which is referred to mostly as Shodokan Aikido today. But continued to teach non-competition Aikido as well. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call Tomiki Aikido “competition Aikido,” although there is certainly a prominent competition component taught in many Tomiki Aikido schools. Sometimes you'll see the terms Shodokan Aikido and Tomiki Aikido used as though they refer to two separate arts - this is also incorrect. Basically it's all the same Aikido, but used differently, and thus sometimes taught from different perspectives.

In the 1970s, Tomiki Sensei sent his student Kogure Sensei to Houston, where he stayed for 6 or 7 years, training Karl Geis Sensei in the art. Geis Sensei was already an accomplished Judo player who had trained with many big names in Japan, and he took to the Tomiki style of Aikido well. Geis Sensei went on to develop his own teaching method for Tomiki Aikido, based on the non-competition, self-defense principles of the old Tomiki system. My sensei trained under Geis Sensei for more than 20 years, and in was in Geis Sensei’s Houston dojo that non-competition Tomiki Aikido first took root in the United States.


Tomiki Aikido makes extensive use of the principles of balance and off-balance, body rise and fall, and the ability of one player to shift the weight of the other. This is accomplished through the use of a number of basic physical precepts that should familiar to any Judo player: straight posture, hands in a push position, unbendable arm (not the ki trick but rather an elbow position similar to how you’d hold your arm if you were pushing a car), same hand same foot, move from your center, etc. The Tomiki Aikido stylist avoids the direct attack by stepping off the line of the attack and taking his attacker’s balance, thus creating in the attacker a need to react. He then uses that uncontrolled reaction as an opportunity to throw, pin, or otherwise defeat the attacker.


*8th dan was the highest available rank in either art at the time of Tomiki's promotion. Today, promotion beyond 8th dan is possible in both judo and aikido, but is largely considered an administrative action rather than an actual, tested grading. Tomiki Sensei left the Aikido Hombu dojo at the grade of 8th dan, and personally graded Geis Sensei to 6th dan before he (Tomiki) died in 1979. Geis Sensei was the only non-Japanese martial artist to be graded to 6th dan by Tomiki Sensei. In a world where 8th dan was the highest possible rank, to be a Westerner (a Texan, no less) and graded to 6th dan must have been huge. Many people challenged Geis Sensei in the following years, and many of his students became great martial artists in their own right.

The Myth of the Colored Belt System

I’ve been doing a lot of martial arts reading lately, both from books and in the various MA-related forums online (I do not read any MA-related magazines, except for the Journal of Asian Martial Arts, and that only occasionally – this is because of what I view as questionable verification practices by periodicals such as Black Belt Magazine).

I’m noticing a pattern in what I’m reading, and I’m wondering if it’s something peculiar to the martial arts. I’ve certainly never seen this strange behavior in any other field of endeavor.
Many people who are involved in the martial arts evidently feel a need to be lied to, and further, a strong need to believe those lies, even if they know better. The MA community is awash with examples of this. The persistence of charlatans like “Ashida Kim” (only a complete idiot would ever buy into this crap) is proof enough of this phenomenon. I saw two “Ashida Kim” books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble yesterday, offering to teach the reader the secrets of “Ninja Mind Control” as if there were any such thing. I can’t believe that this lie that’s being perpetrated on the buyers of such books, in the year 2008, in one of the most sophisticated societies in the world, is simply a result of ignorance.

I believe people just want to be fooled by something. The same myths just continually pop up, and the same old people (and some new ones) just keep believing them.

This would explain politics, wouldn’t it? I mean, why else would so many scores of Americans believe the line that gets fed to them during political debates and other speeches? You can’t tell me that we, as a society, aren’t above that, from a purely intellectual perspective. But I digress.

Another example of this is the persistence of the myth of the colored belt system’s origin. We’ve all heard the story. In the old days, practitioners of this or that martial art would wear undyed clothing to the training hall, because it was less expensive than colored clothes. As their clothing became more like a uniform, they often washed their uniforms on a certain day, as specified by their teacher, but they never washed their belts. So, as the years wore on, their belts became more and more dingy, until eventually they were black.

And thus, the coveted black belt.

It’s a fun little story to tell the kiddies (and their mommies, who are shelling out the school's stay-in-business money), except that it’s an unmitigated load of crap.

The colored belt system, including the black belt, was originated solely by one man, Jigoro Kano, the refiner of Judo and founder of the Kodokan. Eventually, Kano's belt system took hold in the universities where judo was taught, and spread to other university-based systems as well (like aikido and karate). Teachers in other martial arts organizations followed suit, and eventually the colored belt system became more or less universally recognized. But it has absolutely nothing to do with dirt, or with unwashed laundry. Before the advent of the colored belt system, what’s currently thought of as a gi was commonly worn as underwear. Undergarments were customarily white, while outer garments were customarily a darker color – blue, brown, black, etc. While the obi (belt) was worn on the outside, there was generally no inner obi. So when the gi came into fashion as an outer garment in the dojo, the obi worn over it was the same one usually worn over the kimono (or hakama, if one was worn there). It is for this reason that the white gi with a darker (often black) obi was first seen in the training environment.

And while probably no one alive today knows for sure what Dr. Kano’s inspiration was for the colored belt system, we can extrapolate from common knowledge (and a little research) that he was using colors that would have been seen in his dojo already.

The reason I think this is such a silly myth is that the colored belt system originated during the early days of the Kodokan (Jigoro Kano’s original judo training hall, which today is the Kodokan International Judo Institute), and the Kodokan was founded in 1882. Now, I understand that Japan wasn’t fully modernized to Western standards in 1882, but neither was it as backward as so many modern Westerners would have us believe. I have a hard time swallowing the image of Dr. Kano’s original students in the 1880’s – university-educated martial artists, every one of them – as people who’d simply never washed their belts.

And beyond that, maybe we’re talking about samurai from 400 years ago. Again, I can’t see the retainers of some daimyo’s house, upon whose actions rest the reputation of generations of warlords, failing to maintain some standard of hygiene, such as it was at the time. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because they didn’t use any kind of colored belt system to denote rank, or to differentiate to most experienced among their number. It just didn’t happen.

Somewhere along the line, we've become enamored with the image of the wisened old master, practicing his kata on a misty mountaintop somewhere in ancient Asia. He's wearing a sparkly-clean white gi, complete with crisply-ironed creases down his sleeves and pant legs, but his belt is worn black from decades of constant use. It's a romantic image, and has become part of the ethos taught to many soccer moms in this country.

To bad it's all false.

Keiko Fukuda - Sticking With It

http://www.judoinfo.com/fukuda.htm

In 1935, things in Germany were heating up, but the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was still considered by most to be nothing more than a blowhard. In Britain, Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald was about to be replaced by Neville Chamberlain. In the United States, FDR was in his third year as President. The price of an average American car was $580, a gallon of gas cost 19 cents, and the average American salary was $1,500 for the year.

The Japanese had secured military control in China’s northeastern provinces, but few Japanese concerned themselves with such things. Although the nation had been embroiled in an all-out modernization for dozens of years, kimono were still more prevalent than Western-style business attire on the streets of Tokyo, and few homes had radios on which to hear the war news.

This was the year that Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, made an exception. As a favor for an old sensei, Hachinosuke Fukuda – under whom Kano had studied Tenshin Shinyo jujutsu, he allowed the first female student to begin her judo training at the Kodokan.

This student was Hachinosuke’s granddaughter, a 21-year-old Keiko Fukuda.

I guess you could say she stuck with it.

Today, 93-year-old Keiko Fukuda is the highest-ranking woman in judo history. She's also the last surviving personal student of Dr. Kano.

In 1973, she wrote and published Born for the Mat, an instruction book intended for female judoka. In 1990, she received the Emperor of Japan’s Distinguished Cultural Award – one of far too many awards to list here.

In 2001, she became the first woman to receive a red belt (signifying 9th dan) from the US Judo Federation, which has awarded only three red belts in its history. She is also the only surviving red belt within the USJF. The Kodokan Judo Institute followed suit, awarding her the 9th dan at its 2006 Kagami Biraki (Japanese New Year) celebration. Fukuda Sensei is the only female 9th dan in Kodokan history.

Today, Keiko Fukuda still teaches twice a week in her dojo in the San Fransisco Bay area.

Folks, I can’t imagine having trained in one martial art for 72 years. When I think of my few years in the martial arts and all I’ve learned during that short time, my imagination can only scratch the surface of what Fukuda Sensei must have learned in her time on the mat. Her students describe her being able to direct them without even speaking, by making short sounds or just by her expression.

It’s clear that someone with Fukuda Sensei’s longevity has a lot to teach the rest of us about the martial arts in general, and about more intangible things like determination and perseverance.

In our aikido dojo, for example, the nanafudake displays about 30 names. This means that, out of the roughly one thousand people who’ve come into the dojo to begin training during its ten-year existence, about 30 have stayed long enough to earn shodan. Of those 30, I would estimate that about 15 are current students, and of those 15, about 8 are regulars. Given those roughly estimated numbers, my school would show something like a 99.2% attrition rate (I’m no mathematician, but you get the point).

Imagine how rare it is, given that environment, for one student to stick with his or her art for, say, 20 years. Many well-respected sensei don’t have that kind of experience. Many students start later, like I did, and others become intermittent students and wander in and out of the dojo for a few years before finally hanging it up.

In this world, there can be much more pressing concerns than our training. Wars, famines, all manner of social ills, financial concerns and family matters can pull us away from the dojo. There have been times in my short training career when it became difficult to continue, just because it was inconvenient or because I just didn’t feel like it.

Without a doubt, Keiko Fukuda Sensei has experienced all of that, and then some. But through everything, she stuck with it. She’s still on the mat today, at 93, teaching and learning. Something to think about next time you want to quit, or don’t feel like making the drive to the dojo.

A Legacy of Outcasts

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Within the martial arts, students of a particular school will sometimes visit other schools, for varying reasons. Sometimes it’s because they’re looking for a change. Sometimes they’re looking to broaden their horizons. And sometimes, they’re just looking.

A student might also visit another dojo just to train. Maybe he’s away from his school on business or whatever, and needs a mat to train on. Maybe an aikido student who holds a shodan in Kodokan judo, for example, might occasionally visit a nearby Kodokan-affiliated dojo, just to keep his skills current. Whatever the reason, visiting another school can be exciting, fun, and complicated. I say complicated because there are rules for doing this. There are well-established protocols to follow.

And there are rifts. As sad as it is, there exists animosity and bad blood between some of the different styles and schools in the world today. This is especially evident if you’re an American student of Tomiki aikido.

I enjoy seeing other arts, other ryu. I consider it a kind of impromptu demo, and it usually makes for a good evening. Some schools welcome people from anywhere, and some even invite visitors onto the mat to train with the class.

But my friend's recent dojo visit wasn’t such a great experience. Aside from the other considerations (not enough room on the mat, too many students and not enough instructors, etc), he couldn’t help but feel a little offended when one of their instructors started bashing his school and sensei. At the time, he figured the best thing to do was just smile and continue watching the class. But on the way home, he couldn’t help but ask himself: Why would a seasoned veteran of the martial arts feel so compelled to insult a visitor’s school? What does a teacher gain by attacking another teacher like that?

I was reminded of the rift that exists between different schools of Tomiki aikido. Our sensei told us a story once about one of the reasons for the hard feelings between American Tomiki schools and Japanese Tomiki schools.

The story goes that once upon a time, in the late seventies or early eighties, when Tomiki aikido was still pretty new, especially here in the US, a bit of a disagreement developed between the Americans and the Japanese. At question was whether or not to continue teaching Tomiki aikido as a competition, as Tomiki Sensei had developed for the university, or to revert to Tomiki Sensei’s earlier, kata-based, non-competitive form of aikido.

A group headed by a prominent teacher in Houston (the prominent teacher within the US Tomiki system at that time) traveled to Japan to train with Tomiki Sensei’s original group. What happened next has been a matter of contention ever since. To hear the American students (and their students, and their students’ students) tell it, the Japanese – who were still practicing the competition-oriented version of Tomiki aikido – tricked the Americans into participating in a competition. During the match, the Japanese students sustained a number of injuries at the hands of the American students. The exact extent of the injuries depends on who’s telling the story, but a preponderance of the evidence suggests that they included several broken noses and at least one broken jaw.

Nowadays, proponents of the competition system claim that the American students failed to control their techniques and resorted to brute force, thus injuring their opponents unnecessarily. Adherents to the non-competition system (including my school) hold that the Americans were attacked by arrogant, Japanese students in an attempt to force a competition, and executed flawless shomen-ate techniques, and such injuries are the natural result of their ukes’ aggression.

The nucleus of story, or some version of it, is true. There was an impromptu competition of some kind, in which members of the Japanese club did sustain injuries at some level. I’ve heard enough versions from enough people to confirm at least this much.

I discussed it online about a year ago, with one of our counterparts on the Japanese side – an American student of people who were involved with the Japanese club in question, but who had no more direct involvement I did. The stories pretty well match, but are obviously propagandized by both sides. The American guys claim they were stud-muffins because they were ‘tricked’ into competition, and then beat up their Japanese aggressors, while their guys say that our guys were reckless and out of control with their techniques. The guy I talked to basically had the same things to say about my sensei (and our style) that my sensei has to say about him. Of course, they’ve never met, let alone trained together.

Being an outcast from the Japanese system doesn’t bother me, because I don’t believe that a competition-based system is any more combat-realistic than the old kata-based system, despite their appearances. As far as I’m concerned, these are little more than different ways to approach the same concepts. Don’t get me wrong – I have my opinions about which style is the more effective – but that’s not the point. It’s not the competition v. non-competition question that’s been bothering me.

What bothers me is the apparent rift that began when American students bloodied up a bunch of Japanese guys, in some kind of sparring event that was evidently born from an entirely wrong idea. Now, if I were to make some attempt at studying Tomiki aikido in Japan (or in some school based on the Japanese competition system), I’d want to keep my non-competition Tomiki background quiet. I might not be welcome if they found out where I came from.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be. We’re not on the mat to prove anything. We’re not training to show people from other schools how superior ours is. This is approaching the martial arts from a completely wrong view.

It seems like any time one school opens up, there’s some other school somewhere who considers them an outcast. Some proponents of the Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu of iaido will say it about those of us who study the Muso Shinden Ryu. And there are no fewer than five different ryu claiming direct lineage (and therefore sole legitimacy) to the Mugai Ryu line. Are all the others, then, outcasts?

Isn’t it enough that we all train in the budo? Why do we all have to train in exactly the same budo, in order to be accepted? If you don’t like someone’s school because of something their teacher did thirty years ago, are you comporting yourself in the spirit of the arts, or are you simply holding a grudge? And if you’re holding a grudge, then who’s the real outcast?

It’s time we stop this nonsense, and begin to accept martial artists for what they are: our fellow deshi – because what we’re doing to ourselves in the name of old grudges isn’t worth the damage it has caused. Who knows how much we could have learned from each other if all these schools had been working and training together all these years?

Pink Faced Warriors

The Legacy of Japan’s Pink- Faced Warriors

Japanese tradition holds that a pale appearance on the battlefield is a mark of fear. For the samurai, of course, the appearance of fear was as formidable an enemy as any rival warrior. A samurai whose face showed fear during a battle could expect to be put to the sword by his own daimyo, even if the battle was won.

At stake was nothing less than clan, family, or individual honor. No daimyo could afford to be embarrassed by fielding timid, frightened fighters, and for this reason, men were hired for private armies, in some cases, based on how well they bragged about their exploits in previous battles.

Of course, we are talking about Japan during the feudal era (sengoku jidai, or Warring States period), where sickness and malnutrition were hardly uncommon. Whether he was afraid or not, a warrior’s face could be greenish or pale on any given day.

So what was a samurai to do?

Well, there was more than one answer. The first – and simplest – solution was to wear make-up. Not a lot, but enough to cover any potential paleness. The samurai smeared a form of pinkish rouge on his cheeks. This practice is similar in nature to that of the geisha, using a white paste to hide any blemishes – or that of the lower-end prostitutes of the Edo period, who used a kind of white-wash to cover up the marks of disease.

On the battlefield, the samurai wore heavy armor, and it was customary then (as is it with soldiers now) to remove the helmet during a lull in the action. The samurai custom was to remove the helmet in a forward motion, and hold it in front of the face until any smudges or blemishes in the make-up could be fixed or removed. A warrior had a duty to his daimyo, after all. One’s face had to be reddish, as if angry or flushed with the action of the battle, and the unprotected face was not shown until it was suitable.

What remains of this custom can still be seen in kendo schools today. Customarily, the men (the kendo helmet) is removed with a forward motion, and held directly in front of the face. Then, with the men still held there, the kendoka removes his tenugui (a towel worn under the men) and wipes the sweat from his brow and from the inside of the men. Only after this action is satisfactorily performed can the men be lowered, to show the face.

Another, more expensive, solution was to purchase armor that had a red-lacquered interior. The highly polished red lacquer shined on the face of the wearer and gave him a rosy appearance. Without the red lacquer, metal armor took on a green patina with time and use, and left a dangerously pale look to the face.

This practice is also still seen in kendo today. The mengane (the metal frame around the face part of the helmet) is customarily painted with a high-gloss red lacquer or enamel.

For me, it’s fascinating to note that such a warlike people as the samurai could be so vain at the same time. But I’ve also come to expect certain things in my pursuit of an understanding of them. Virtually every aspect of Japanese life – not just for the samurai, but for everyone in Japan – was dictated by tradition, propriety, and military courtesy. Nothing was done without its proscribed method, and that method always had a particular purpose. When I came across the tradition of the kendoka removing the men in a certain way and decided to look into it, I knew I would find some centuries-old military tradition behind it.

I just never expected pink-faced, rouge-wearing warriors.

You Can't Help But Love It

I love my training.

I don’t get to class as often as I’d like – generally, twice a week is about all my schedule will allow. But I love showing up on the mat and working with my fellow deshi. I enjoy the classes, and I honestly wish I could have started my training years ago.

A student should love to train.

Sounds obvious, right? But anyone who has ever spent any time in a dojo knows better. Any deshi of just about any school has seen those students who show up just to make an appearance, those who are more interested in joking and playing around, and those who apparently live for the opportunity to throw their ego around the mat like an unwilling uke.

And we all have to put up with them. But watch what happens:

In my school, there might be someone whose personality grates on the nerves of the other students. But if this were true, I wouldn’t want to use that person’s name here (it might be me – who knows?), because I don’t want to offend him or her. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to thing I’m using my essays to bash my fellow students. Of course, the bashed students would be right in taking offense to that. Not everyone who gets on other people’s nerves does so intentionally.

In my school – as in most other schools, I imagine – it would take a pretty serious breach of etiquette for someone to be asked to leave. I’ve seen it once or twice, and it’s not something I’d want to visit upon just anyone. Being kicked out of a dojo is – and should be – a punishment reserved for the most egregious offenders.

Most students fall somewhere in between. They’re not super-devoted, just-wanna-train types, but they’re also not getting kicked out for rudeness on the mat. Most folks in the dojo are just there, for whatever reason.

In my school, we do have some attitudes, but we also have a good number of real, serious students. These are folks who have a good time while training, and genuinely enjoy their time on the mat – but who also take their practice very seriously, and it shows in the quality of their art. These are the students who eventually become the embodiment of their school.

But there are also the students who place belt ranking above technique practice. Being a black belt is more important than becoming truly proficient.

And unfortunately, it is within this framework of psychoanalysis that new students begin their training. There’s so much going on between the different personalities that new students can be turned off in their first year. This person didn’t want to work with me; that person said something rude.

So there's this kind of student, and that kind of student; this kind of attitude and that kind of attitude. I've been guilty of it myself, and it's not good. All of this nonsense can detract from your work on the mat, and can eat into the quality of your art. And none of it is conducive to a positive training experience.

Here’s an exercise. Look up the shodan requirements for your school or art form. You have so many hours on the mat, so many performed kata, maybe even a specified number of competitions or demos. Time in ikkyu is measured as well, as is the required amount of proven knowledge and understanding about your particular ryu or style. There are also some intangibles, like the flow of a particular technique that other can’t seem to get right. But nowhere in the requirements for shodan do you see “worrying about what other people think of you.” In between kata and specific techniques, it does not say “popularity contest.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1886-1969), the founder of aikido, once told his students that they should always practice in a spirit of joy, and use their art to reconcile the divisions in the world. But he also said that we should train just to train, and that our training should be its own reward.

So enjoy your time on the mat. If you’re training with me, I’ll try to ensure that you have a good time. But the training itself is an important part of my life, and I need to be sure that it’s genuine, and not tainted by attitudes or some antisocial nonsense. Just train. If you’re on the mat for the right reason, you can’t help but love it.