Aesthetics & Aikido's "De-Martialization" (A Reply to ‪@MixedMartialAcademic‬ )

So I was cooking dinner earlier in the week, and as is ritual, I like to fire up a YouTube video to listen to in the background. Lo and behold, Mixed Martial Academic has just pushed out a three-hour video, and that is, like, several stir-fry sessions across several days. Great. Perfect. Now, this is an iceberg of real and fake martial arts, and to be honest, I usually brace myself for the worst with this kind of content. I like to have a finger on the pulse of discussion and how it reflects the stuff I'm into, though, so I watch a lot of this sort of stuff. More often than not, the sub-niche of, I guess I'll call it, Aikido review content feels more and more like a views-grab gimmick. Most videos I've seen out there do indeed just follow suit with the crowd and really don't offer any kind of new insights. The whole video comes across as, look, I believe the same thing you do about this crappy martial art, let's laugh at it together, also please like and subscribe. I'm happy to report this video wasn't like that at all. Fortunately, I've been seeing a growing trend in the YouTube space where martial arts in general at least get dissected with sincerity. In terms of Aikido, there have been recent Jesse Enkamp and Sensei Seth videos, for example, that may not have been the most informed, but they aren't out just to make fun of something for cheap views, either. I found Mixed Martial Academics' video to be in the same spirit. Aikido was approached with sincerity, and frankly, I think his criticisms of the art were pretty valid. On the other hand, I still see a certain Aikido crowd get super butthurt over this kind of stuff. I don't really understand why I think this dialogue is what we need to have, but I won't really talk about that much here. My point is that from an outsider perspective, I think Mixed Martial Academics represents what a lot of people think about Aikido, and he manages to present that in a way that doesn't feel like it's beating the dead horse for the sake of internet points. Anyway, I was cooking away listening to this video, and the Mixed Martial Academic says this. And I thought I am the right flavor of autistic to not comment but make a whole video about this because this is a legitimately good question that I see many people actively practicing Aikido even get wrong themselves. How the hell did we end up here? The short answer is a confluence of philosophy, economics, and hierarchy. The long answer is, well, I'll break down what I mean in a second. I mentioned that a lot of people get this wrong, even in Aikido, and I want to tackle the popular myths first. The first one of these ideas, and this exists even outside of Aikido, is that Bujutsu was about practical technique and Budo is about self-development. The transition from Bujutsu to Budo, therefore, reflected a general degradation of practicality. So, this way of thinking about the transition from Bujutsu to Budo seems to have begun with the famous Don Draeger in the 1970s, and man has it stuck. Making matters worse, it is a narrative that meshes very well with a common Japanese trope, that the past was home to some kind of golden age. Japanese culture is very conservative and very traditional. You can find this reverence for what came before as an ideal in almost every historical time period on the islands. There are a few exceptions, but again, I'm going to shelve that and talk about it in a bit. The fact of the matter is that this whole concept has more or less been debunked. I cite him a lot on the channel, but Dr. Carl Friday points out that actually, Bujutsu was also primarily about personal development. Budo is just a further refinement of that. I'm not going to reiterate all of his arguments here, but as always, his works off the Warpath and Legacies of the Sword are great reads for this. He was also pretty active on forums for a while there, and you can find some of his posts to be useful supplements to his published works. Now, I'm not sure if I've read this somewhere or if it's something I've just come to believe on my own, but the transition from Bujutsu to Budo really didn't have anything to do with technique, but with social class. In fact, if you read enough old manuals, it is pretty difficult to find techniques that are all that vastly different from what you would find in Budo. Budo, in many respects, might also have better training methods, at least in terms of the presence of sparring. Instead, Bujutsu was designed as being an activity for the samurai as a class, which slowly began to transition into Edo period to being for everyone. Remember how I said there were some exceptions to the rule that the Japanese looked upon the past fondly? Well, the Meiji Restoration was one such exception. In that time, the Bujutsu were seen as a kind of brutish pastime, and Budo was the answer to that problem. In other words, Budo is just a repackaging of old ideas, but primarily marketed to the everyday civilian, at least the everyday civilian in Meiji era Japan. Actually, it was necessarily marketed to civilians because by the Meiji era, the samurai as a form of class had ceased to exist. In short, the Bujutsu to Budo transition was far more about changing social dynamics and market trends than a lapse in technical practicality. Therefore, Aikido, being a Budo, was not necessarily subjected to this. What I will say is that other things did come packaged with Budo that might have affected technical proficiency, specifically a heavy emphasis on standardized curriculums and being designed around teaching people in mass groups. Originally, martial arts education was heavily personalized, and I do believe that this is still the best way to get any good. There is a reason why the best fighters today have personal coaches. Additionally, the shift to Budo did see a shift towards sportification, and therefore a lot of techniques were more or less tossed out. I hate to keep saying this, but I'll circle back around to that a bit later. It's a complex topic, sue me. The second myth is something that Mixed Martial Academic actually says himself. But later in life, his life philosophy changed, and he instead looked to bring around a time of non-violence and peace, and felt that martial arts could lead a vanguard in this new way of thinking. This is one of Aikido's favorite pieces of mythology, and it doesn't surprise me at all that Mixed Martial Academic founded during his research. It's a very cute origin story, but it's just wrong. In fact, a sizable body of research has been built on the premise of debunking this. First, there is at least one book and several webpages devoted to side-by-side comparisons of the founder during his pre-war days and post-war days. Very consistently, the consensus is that there is zero noticeable change in his technique between these two eras. This is further supported by many of his own direct students saying the same thing. More importantly, though, Ueshiba's philosophy never changed. I have both read and heard an anecdote now from several different places that at one point the founder's son was asked when his father became a pacifist, and his son, in response, laughed and remarked that his father was never a pacifist. Indeed, much research has been done to support this. Ueshiba's philosophy was ultra-nationalist, pan-Asianist, and colonial in nature. I won't waste your time when you could just read Sangenkai's blog or his many Reddit posts on this topic. It seems like this is one of his major interests. But the point is that Ueshiba's love and peace were firmly cemented in a cosmology at which the Japanese emperor was the center. Aikido, then, might be considered a tool for ordering the world according to that cosmology. In my personal view, Aikido was, at least in part, devised as a kind of colonial device, too, and I struggle to find the right vocabulary for this. Help, I guess? The conquered peoples realized their standing in the Japanese world order. Basically, Aikido is all love and peace, so long as it's in an imperial Japanese world. The founder never deviated from this ideology, even after Japan's devastating loss in World War II. Despite the vast amount of effort that has gone into researching this, it has mostly been scrubbed from the official Aikido canon. I think in Aikido's case, it was about right place and right time. If it just sanitized the imperial Japanese angle from Ueshiba's philosophy, it becomes about love and peace more generally. This is just my own speculation, but I think the world was primed for this kind of thing after the trauma of two world wars and the birth of the hippie movement. It has never been much of a mystery to me how a martial art preaching love and peace picked up traction at the same time when a lot of young people were saying the exact same thing in the West. Alright, that was kind of a long tangent, but I felt I needed to address these myths because of just how prominent they are. To recap, it was not the shift from Bujutsu to Budo nor some ideological change in the founder that pushed Aikido to become what it is today. So, now I finally get to address the original question. How did we get here? What I'm about to say is likely to be controversial among the Aikido crowd, but I really do believe the seeds for Aikido as it currently exists were planted right at the beginning. First and foremost, the major techniques in Aikido were all banned in almost every live sparring format. Now, I am not in the camp that believes this is necessarily because they are too dangerous. I actually think we should probably re-evaluate that assessment, but a lot of the early Budo guys absolutely did believe they were too dangerous. Judo's Kano and Karate's Funakoshi both pretty deliberately pruned their styles of joint locks and locks in the standing position more generally. I'm not sure if it was a deliberate thing or a coincidence, but Aikido saw this as free real estate and the whole style was constructed around these locks. This much, I do think, was purposeful. While the locking techniques of Aikido's predecessor art, Daito-ryu, are its most iconic feature, Daito-ryu also has things like knee taps, Tomoe-nage, and Ippon-sioi-type techniques that really never made it into Aikido proper. Unfortunately, this means that even if Aikido wanted to go spar, it has never really had a outlet for it. Today, BJJ and MMA exist, of course, but BJJ is about 90% on the ground and I feel Aikido people are far too behind to just hop into the ring with even amateur MMA people. Additionally, market forces were at play. Although the Aikikai, the mainline Aikido style, is the most famous nowadays, it wasn't always like this. Immediately after the war, it was the Yoshinkan style of Aikido that was the powerhouse. Even the headquarters dojo was in shambles after the bombings of Tokyo in Aikikai's case. To turn this around, the founder's son leaned heavily into branding. Again, much of this has been covered by the Sangenkai blog and various posts, but I'll do my best to summarize here. What happened was that the notion of non-competition was heavily leaned into. Keep in mind that the founder actually said very little about opposing competition, and what he did say wasn't even all that radical for his time. It was pretty much in line with what Judo's Kano and Karate's Funakoshi were saying. Budo not being about competition was a very mainstream consensus idea at the time, but none of them went so far as to essentially ban it and claim it as heresy the same way Aikido did. And I want to stress, this was mostly about branding, about differentiating Aikido from other arts on the market and other Aikido styles on the market. The next step was a near-deifying of the founder. If you are a careful reader, you'll notice that other styles of Aikido really don't revere Ueshiba in the same way Aikikai does. Yes, he gets mentioned in their books and texts, but generally he only gets mentioned. Yet in the Aikikai, he is presented as this almost superhuman, flawless paragon of martial power whose word is law and beyond debate. Once again, this is branding at play. I've read Sangenkai call this the Cult of O-Sensei, and I think that encapsulates it best. It is a heavily curated version of the man, used to give the style a flavor that others apparently lacked. All this was done as a reaction to Yoshinkan's success in the early days, and as evidenced by current circumstances, it worked very well. But now we have an interesting set of parameters. A style built around techniques that are banned from competitions, even external to said style, and an internal ideology that is ostensibly pacifist and very anti-competition. On top of all that, the most prominent event for Aikido would eventually become the annual national demonstrations, eventually held at the Budokan in Tokyo, and still continuing to this day. I'll leave my viewers to parse this out. If you cannot train for competitive success, and a demonstration is the most prestigious event in your system, what do you think you're going to spend your time training for? Is it going to be breaking limbs, or looking good in front of a crowd? In LSM Der's book, Dueling with O-Sensei, the author's teacher, Kuroiwa, notes about another teacher, Yamaguchi Seigo, that he is his friend, but he's done irreparable damage to Aikido. While I'm not trying to lay the trend of aesthetics first at Yamaguchi's feet, the book notes that he was one of the first few instructors that increasingly expected his partners to move and act in a certain way in response to techniques. I want to stress that be it Yamaguchi or someone else, I believe this was probably inevitable. Remember, these guys were barred from live training more or less and incentivized to put on a good demonstration. Training for aesthetics was an inevitable outcome. Of course, similar things were happening in other Aikido styles too. They were all faced with similar restrictions and a system that frowned upon live sparring. Some turned to aesthetics, others to rigid tradition, and some to weird Jedi LARPing bullshit, and yes, some got heretical, but I'll talk about them in a bit. It's clear that the aesthetics-first school of thought eventually won out, though. Eventually, I believe this approach to Aikido just accelerated, and now we have people like Shirakawa Yuji, a somewhat famous YouTube Aikidoka, doing some of the most highly aestheticized Aikido to date. It is at this point that I want to mount a minor defense for the aesthetics-based Aikido. Keep in mind, it is not my favorite expression of the art. I fall much more into the heretical, transformative camp that values martial practicality. However, I've long stated on the channel that fighting is not the sole legitimate reason to train a martial art. In fact, to the aesthetic Aikido's great credit, it is actually a pretty athletic skill. This is something I rarely see brought up online, especially by detractors. We can make fun of it all we like, but if you actually look at what people like Shirakawa Yuji and his partners are doing, well, I'm just willing to bet that most of Aikido's critics would not be able to replicate it anytime soon. While training that way isn't my personal preference, I do actually enjoy that kind of training, too. It is a genuine cardiovascular challenge, especially when you gamify it to try and wear out the thrower by getting back up to attacking him as quickly as possible. Or if you take falls in huge numerical sets. Is it martial? No, not really, but I do think the people who criticize it would probably be shocked to learn about the athletic requirements to be actually any good at it. Okay, I've brought up heretics a few times at this point. Something we always have to keep in mind is that no martial art is a monolith. There are always people with alternative ways of viewing things, and this is true in Aikido, too. The aforementioned Kuroiwa was a western-style boxer and notable street brawler before he was in Aikidoka, for example. Mochizuki Minoru was a prodigious cross trainer who was not only skilled in judo, but also once leg-kicked a student saying that there is more to Aikido than playing with wrists. Chiba once rejected doing clerical work at the headquarters dojo because, in his own words, he was a martial artist, not a secretary. Tamiki, of course, did believe in competition and pursued that himself in his own style. The trend with these individuals, however, is that they were seemingly always at the fringes of the art, or even forced to break away and begin their own style. At the end of the day, this is what happens when a core tenet of your style completely disallows you from pursuing a martial expression of the art. Combine that with an incentive to be very good at demonstration and compound it by about 100 years, and is it any wonder how we ended up here? Not to mention, the process of branding is an ever-ongoing process. This is anecdotal on my part, but when I first started Aikido, there were quite a few techniques with a leg-grab component. Now, I'm being told by teachers in Japan proper that one is to never touch legs in Aikido. I'm not sure where this change is coming from or if it's truly widespread, but I know for a fact the same style of Aikido was perfectly fine with it just 20-ish years ago. Surprisingly, I have even been told that Aikido isn't wrestling or judo, and that was given as the reason for why we don't touch legs, and I think that reveals much about the motivation behind all this. It's still just petty differentiation for the sake of marketing, which I'll be completely frank, I just find kind of gross. To wrap this up, you might wonder why people don't just course correct. Why don't they just break away and do their own thing? There seems to be this body of people who want Aikido to be martial, why not just do that? Well, keep in mind that old habits die hard, and Aikido itself seems to be dying hard, too. The overwhelming majority of people in the art today are old and high rank. While I'm certainly painting with a broad brush here, do you really think that most 60-year-old senseis with a vested interest in the status quo, as reflected in their high ranking status, really want to see a reversal of trends? Typically not. And just to interject, I hope it's not lost on you that these 60-year-old senseis are that same hippie generation I mentioned earlier. Worse yet, Aikido utterly fails at pulling in younger people who might shake things up, although even if the art could achieve that, it isn't like those new young people necessarily would have the power to affect change. Even in an art like Judo, the old guard have their rigid ideas about how Judo quote-unquote should be. But at the end of the day, if young people are winning competitions with something in a certain way, the old folks can't really complain about it, they just have to bite their tongues. However, there is no such outlet in Aikido. What Aikido is, is what your teacher says it is, and there is no more discussion beyond that. Traditional hierarchy is fine when it actually facilitates learning, but here it just calcifies a status quo that ultimately restricts creative expression. One final point that I want to make is to briefly touch on what I consider to be the real tragedy at play. The thing is that Aikido is in a very rare position to have its cake and eat it too. I personally have zero problems with the demonstration-focused aesthetic training. I'm even on record as having said that were I to run a hypothetical dojo, I'd probably have a demonstration Aikido class right after the martial Aikido class. I think that options are good, people should be able to choose what they're passionate about and which expression they want to chase. This is not a zero-sum game we are playing, these things can coexist. That's the first part of this sad story. The second part is that Aikido, through the teachers I noted before and many beyond them, actually has a pretty rich martial heritage to pull from if it wanted to construct a more functional expression of itself. From Nishio strikes to Kuroiwa's unique hip toss to Chiba's head throw, I mean here is a photo of the founder himself doing a single leg takedown. And the punchline to all of this is that this stuff is traditional Aikido. It isn't breaking the code or anything of that nature. This is Aikido, you're seeing media of it, it's demonstrable, there are sources. Yet modern Aikido repeatedly chooses this farcical marketing pageantry instead of embracing where it comes from in the name of where it could go. Personally, I don't think even this traditional stuff would be enough, however. I think we'd need to expand the curriculum a bit, and even if we were to be all on the same page, it would still take several years, maybe even a generation of practitioners, to put together a martial expression. Mixed martial academic uses the word utility to describe Aikido, and I think that's pretty fair. It is in many ways a utility art that thrives when surrounded by a broader system. If you look at old school jiu-jitsu manuals, that is actually where all these techniques natively appear, and that isn't some mistake. To end this video then, I'd say this. Yes, Aikido has plenty of potential to turn it around, but none of the desire nor the resources. The art isn't pulling the younger generation in, and it needs those people to sustain itself. The whole love and peace narrative is not reaching new students, probably because such an ideology doesn't speak to them in the same way that it spoke to people around in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And even then, that philosophy is mostly a fake one, cleverly repurposed from another philosophy that is truly outdated. There are those of us who would love to see Aikido expressed in a martial way, and for us, we mostly just end up experimenting with friends or in small clubs or on the sidelines of much larger, different martial classes that are a lot more successful. We aren't really organized. Organizing is tough when your number is so small, the space in between you is so great, and the financial power of your idea is basically non-existent. So, for now, Aikido will continue on modifying and polishing itself into this thing that it never was in the name of, hopefully, carving out a market niche in a cultural climate that increasingly seems to reject what it has on offer. The tragedy is that the art has every opportunity to pivot or expand, but I just don't think people at the top want to admit that what they are doing is not sustainable. That their method might have worked 50 years ago, but times have changed. Just like how Bujutsu evolved into Budo to meet people on their own terms in a new era, maybe it's time for Aikido to do the same. But yeah, anyway, I've got leftovers in the fridge, so hopefully that answers the question of how we ended up here and why it's not changing anytime soon. I wish you all the best and a big thanks for listening. I will catch you all in the next one. Oh, also, Aikido has like the worst ambassadors ever, I don't claim Seagal.