Aikido: Dreams of Empire [Part 2/3]

In the previous part of this series, we've discussed the historical background of the Meiji Restoration, and how Judo and Karate very much matched the tone and cultural narrative of that period, which finally, FINALLY, brings us to Aikido. I know it's been a long way to get here, but now that all that groundwork has been laid, we get to actually discuss the main topic. Aikido is different from Judo and Karate in the sense that, rather than being a product of the era, it is almost a critique of the Meiji Restoration in the form of a martial art. Aikido is, in a sense, a retro-throwback even as it is founded in the 1920s, and actually predicts an interesting cultural trend before it really takes full effect, because everything that happens in the lead-up to World War II in Japan is, essentially, a conservative throwback in reaction to the unbridled changes of the Meiji era. So, I want to unpack what I mean by a cultural throwback. You will note that Aikido is primarily made up of techniques that Judo and Karate both largely discarded. I'm not arguing that this was by design, but I am suggesting it feels almost like a fated coincidence. We could look at this in market terms and explain it as the art capitalizing on an underexplored niche. I think that's valid, but I primarily want to look at it from a cultural angle for the purposes of this video series. Takeda Soukaku, Ueshiba's teacher, is a man I would characterize as a samurai born just slightly too late to be a samurai. I don't want to completely rehash Ellis Amdur's work on Takeda from his book Hidden in Plain Sight here, as I'd strongly recommend that you read that for more detail. However, to summarize the main thrust of that section of the book, it is that Takeda was imbued with the values of an era that was already gone by the time he was a fully grown man. And this is a really interesting feature of culture, I think. Forgive me, my non-American friends, for my excessive American analogies in this series. It's just what I know. But I want to segue into the American Wild West here just for a split second. I think this is a natural comparison to make, as the Wild West and Tokugawa era samurai stories have been riffing on each other for a pretty long time now. Look no further than Kurosawa Akira's The Seven Samurai and John Sturge's The Magnificent Seven films, which are literally the same story. The point I want to make here by bringing up the Wild West is how a cultural moment tends to reverberate for much longer than it tangibly exists. A fantastic example of this is the future movie star, so famed for his Wild West roles, John Wayne, meeting an elderly Wyatt Earp and drawing inspiration from him. Wyatt Earp, of course, being a famous Old West lawman who, like so many of his era, was only dubiously a hero figure. By the time Wayne met Wyatt Earp in 1928, the Wild West had firmly calcified into the Old West. Perhaps Earp could have told Wayne about what it really meant to be a man in his era or how to gunsling, but these were sentiments from a place that only physically still existed. It was culturally already deceased. Wyatt Earp was a man from a ghost time, from which only tales and memory remained. Yet, while one could no longer visit the Wild West, it would, through people like John Wayne, go on to become an immutable piece of American mythology and self-image. Even so, the transition from Wild West to Old West wasn't exactly announced or anything. It isn't like the American government one day announced that the frontier is quote-unquote over. I suppose we could loosely attach a date to some legal declaration or policy, but I find that reductive. The Wild West wasn't purely the result of government policy or a lack thereof. It was also about the people who went there and the lives they led, sometimes in spite of the government. Due to this ambiguous transition period in which the Wild West becomes the Old West, we have to imagine that, at some point, young men all hyped up on stories of wealth and adventure rode west in search of these promises, only to find that the West they had heard about just didn't exist anymore. They had the souls of cowboys in an era that had obsoleted the condition of cowboys. My reading of Takeda Soukaku is the same. He was a samurai too late, wandering in a world that had outgrown him. Or had it? You see, Japan in the mid to late 1920s, and certainly the 1930s, was about to experience a slide into militarism and ultra-conservatism. Keep in mind that we in the West often characterize this authoritarian slide as a departure from the Meiji norm, but I would suggest that it was a reaction to the Meiji Restoration and something akin to a throwback to the shogun's military government that preceded it. The emperor gets a lot of press in the WWII period as being the guy at the levers of power, but this is actually pretty disputed in scholarly circles. If you read the minutes of his war councils, it was essentially a handful of the most powerful generals in the country, with the full sway of the military at their backs, making decisions, and then turning to Right, sir? Now, I'm not trying to give Emperor Hirohito here a pass, either. From a moral standpoint, maybe he could have just put his foot down and accepted that he'd likely be replaced, but perhaps he thought he had to remain there as the last holdout of human sanity for the sake of the Japanese people. I feel that his actions immediately after the war, in which he willingly submitted himself personally to MacArthur, carrying only the request that, in return for his submission, the occupiers not go too hard on the Japanese people, I find that this could very well be a window into the heart of his true intentions in terms of staying on as emperor and not putting his foot down, but maybe I'm giving him too much credit. Regardless, scholars still debate the emperor's guilt in orchestrating and perpetuating the war. Personally, I feel he was definitely a flawed man who made grave mistakes, but I have the aching suspicion he knew things were over long before his generals did, and likely genuinely cared about the welfare of Japanese citizens. That is beyond the point, though. What I want to direct your attention towards is that it wasn't the emperor unilaterally calling the shots. It was the military simply using the emperor as a kind of skin suit to present their own plans to the Japanese public. World War II Japan was an authoritarian military government. It was a throwback to the authoritarian military government of the Tokugawa shogunate in all but superficial aesthetics. In other words, the Meiji Restoration was a mere interlude, and the emerging militarism was a conservative return to form. I don't think it is a mistake that this is the era in which the Hagakure is tapped to help define an ahistorical mythologizing of the so-called Warrior's Code, or Bushido as it is known. Keep in mind that the Hagakure was written by a samurai who never actually saw combat, and was kind of regarded as a madman in his own lifetime. Historically, there really was no creed like that of Bushido, and it is much easier to find historical examples of samurai defying its supposed tenets than embodying them. This, however, did not matter in the end. Much like we Americans romanticize the anti-heroes of the Wild West, narrative mythology was more powerful than historical fact in regard to Bushido. It was made much more accessible and more official, too. The term became propagandized by the ultra-right-wing government, and the story it told was weaponized to immense and tragic effect. So powerful is the Bushido mythos that it inspired young men to fly their planes into warships, and today, it captures the imagination of would-be martial arts practitioners. Never mind that Bushido is an ahistorical, fabricated tradition devised by an imperial power that would ultimately lean on it to justify heinous crimes. In many ways, this is the movement that Daito-ryu and Aikido grew out of, though. These were conservative arts that concerned themselves heavily with the characteristics and techniques that the more liberal arts of Judo and Karate had discarded. Meaningfully, Aikido really concerned itself with the katana as well, which Judo and Karate broadly did not. It should go without saying that the sword was the very symbol of the samurai. The messaging here is clear in this context. We reject the Meiji era thesis, and we are going back to the Japan promised in the Edo period. Now, this is not to say that Judo and Karate were necessarily progressive elements in all this, to be perfectly clear. They would eventually be subsumed by the Budokukai, a deeply nationalist organization, and plenty of ultra-nationalist sentiments would flow through those arts and organizations too. Please do not get it twisted, this is not a case of good guys versus bad guys here. This is more like ultra-conservative and pretty conservative. Nor was it like Aikido people and Judo people were in the streets counter-protesting one another either. The point I'm making here isn't to illustrate some kind of internal disagreement in the Japanese martial arts, but to demonstrate that Aikido was very much a conservative reaction. While Judo and Karate were more of a progressive product, even if a lot of their members had very ultra-right-wing sympathies. Again, don't get it wrong, the martial arts space in general in any country, but especially East Asia, tends to be pretty conservative. This, of course, is especially visible in Aikido's many, many ultra-nationalist and militarist sponsors. It is also reflected in Aikido's founder himself, Ueshiba, just casually letting young radicals plan coups in his property, among other very extreme right-wing activities. Nothing says love and peace like being silently and knowingly complicit in political violence. Am I right? But stick a pin in that, I'm gonna come back around to it. We also need to point out here Ueshiba's religious path with the Omoto-kyo organization. Whole books could very well be written on this topic, but I want to distill it down to its bones for the sake of digestibility here. Omoto-kyo had plenty of ultra-right-wing links and was primarily a kind of modern fan-fiction continuation of the narrative thrust found in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. For those who have no idea what those are, they are basically the master texts of Japanese native religion. Now, we have to be very, very careful here. Note that I did not call Japan's native religion Shinto. The reason for this is that state Shinto is an invention by the government in the lead-up to World War II in an attempt to quote-unquote purify religion from foreign influences, including things like Buddhism. The issue with this is, of course, it's impossible. Whatever traditions were originally practiced on the Japanese archipelago had long been syncretized on an atomic level with Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and all flavors of regional shamanism for well over a millennium and a half. There really isn't any telling where one religion ends and another begins. Sure, there are old texts, but there is no guarantee those hadn't been influenced by the mainland as well. They could also have just been one-offs, not really representing a widespread practice. Basically, only the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were definitely considered to be uncontestably quote-unquote pure, but everything that came out of those and supporting documentation were a reconstruction at best, not a magical resurrection of a supposedly uninfluenced pure Japanese spiritualism as practiced by the Yamato people some 1,500 years ago. By the way, this state-sponsored creation is the Shinto that still exists today. In fact, if you know where to look, this movement of purification of foreign influences can be found kind of all over the place in Japan, even in everyday vocabulary. For example, baseballu, obviously an imported word for baseball, was changed to yakyuu, which is deemed ostensibly more Japanese because it uses Japanese characters, I guess. The shallowness of this rhetoric is, of course, clearly on display, as it isn't like baseball itself was ever abolished or changed fundamentally to be more Japanese. It was just the name. It was a coat of paint. Long story short, though, Ueshiba's faith was essentially built on this parallel state-Shinto premise. Although the Omoto-kyo would come into conflict with the government, I again don't want you to confuse this for one being quote-unquote good and the other bad. Both were essentially ultra-nationalist conservative throwbacks, ostensibly to a pure Japanese age. I want to wrap back around to the concept of throwbacks in a moment, but first, I feel like this is the logical place to discuss the point of Aikido. In an effort of full transparency, what I'm about to describe to you is very much my reading of Ueshiba's intentions for the art. You can find the bulk of his beliefs in the book Takemusu Aiki, which is untranslated and, in my opinion, a very difficult read in Japanese, even. I recently ran across Byung-Chul Han's book, and please, absolutely point out my pronunciation errors on this man's name. But anyway, his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, A Topology of the Though, and while this book has absolutely nothing at all to do with Aikido, I found his definition of ritual to be useful in understanding Aikido's role in Ueshiba's overarching philosophy. It seems to me that Aikido was designed to be a ritual before it was considered a martial art. The idea was to create a communal activity of shared experience. To give an example, people around the world tend to understand the concept of a birthday and why it's important, so in a sense, it creates a community that transcends borders, culture, politics, ethnicity, and whatever other categories might divide us. Aikido, then, was a technology attached to an imperial philosophy designed to be exported. This is to say, Aikido was meant for people around the to move in the same way and, through this shared experience, come to understand the same values. In this case, an imperial Japanese worldview with the emperor and Japanese pantheon at its core. Make no mistake, I very much read Aikido's initial purpose as being a colonial tool. This, to me, always explained why such a deeply conservative man as Ueshiba would openly accept foreigners as students while those around him clearly disliked the idea, even after the war, sometimes. That is because, in a way, Aikido was for the foreigners. It was a ritual vocabulary to help them understand and value the imperial Japanese worldview, or perhaps the Omoto-kyo worldview, or just Ueshiba's worldview, but at any rate, it was ritual. To Ueshiba, these were probably all close to the same thing, anyhow. None of this is to say that Aikido wasn't designed for Japanese people in mind, too, however. Most Japanese people in Ueshiba's era didn't really understand the Kojiki or anything like that. In that sense, it was a tool for domestic education and a way to bring out practitioners' so-called Japanese-ness. Now, I do believe it overall failed in this, partially because Ueshiba was a horrible verbal communicator, and honestly, he really didn't write that much either, but this does appear to have been the idea. It's why he even spent so much time lecturing before practice. This appears to be Aikido's first and foremost role. Yes, it was absolutely a martial art, too, so don't go thinking that I'm not saying it is. And it's clear Ueshiba thought as a martial art as well. To him, though, ritual and martial practice were basically synonyms. While his students might have gritted their teeth and struggled through Ueshiba's sermons on the Kojiki so they could finally practice techniques, to Ueshiba himself, the techniques were the sermon, and vice versa. In short, the purpose of Aikido was essentially imperial and colonial in nature. If Judo was the avatar of the Meiji period and karate the avatar of early Japanese expansionism, then Aikido was the avatar of imperial Japan, the colonial empire. Let's refocus on the concept of throwbacks, though, which aren't at all random, necessarily, at least. They tend to show up when things are going bad for a society, or when the change is happening just too quickly for the people's tolerance threshold. What I am suggesting here is that these kinds of cultural throwbacks are probably predictable and have predictable features. I am not at all a social scientist or economist, but I'd at least make an educated guess that when the middle class gets below a certain income growth level relative to inflation and GDP growth, plus their happiness drops, plus they feel that social changes have begun to depart too severely from traditional values, that is a cocktail for these kinds of cultural throwbacks. I believe this also explains why change in a country like modern Japan tends to happen on a more gradualist model. Big changes will freak people out and trigger a slide towards conservatism, and this is oftentimes associated with a call to pursue an idealized, though often fictionalized, past. When change is introduced at an incrementalist trickle and living standards remain stable, however, people don't really seem to mind much about small social changes that are gradually introduced. Meanwhile, a more openly progressive culture, and I don't necessarily mean progressive here as a synonym for positive, such as the U.S., can tolerate almost a century of massive social reform and change without really being all that bothered, although there does still seem to be a threshold. And this applies outside of America and Japan too, of course. Despite the West's current popular views on China, theirs is a system that has elevated massive amounts of people out of abject poverty and made their nation into an indisputable global power, despite demonstrable faults. The point is that when a nation is making its population wealthy and the people feel like their country is on the rise, a country can get away with a lot of sweeping change, such as that which we saw in the Meiji era. But once wealth starts to only pool in elite hands, and there are a broader mix of anxieties about the nation falling behind, one of the first arrays of questions that seems to emerge is, do you remember when we didn't do things like this? Do you remember when things used to be better? Maybe we should get back to that. All of this is to say that Aikido was a throwback martial art when it was founded and was part and parcel to a larger, growing sentiment at the time. Of course, there is the problem that you fundamentally cannot actually go back in time. We don't operate on science fiction logic. Something that is interesting to me is that even internally, prominent Aikido people have said Aikido weapons work is basically trash, and this is a view I've grown to agree with. I have friends and martial peers who do swordsmanship both in the Koryu and in more competitive environments such as Hima, and these guys pretty much universally agree that the sword work in Aikido is terrible. Frankly, I think with the context we've just explored, it should not come as a surprise, really. Wyatt Earp could have taught John Wayne how to quick draw, but in a world where the quick draw was an obsolete technology, Wayne would have likely only ever picked up the aesthetic shell of the form as opposed to its legitimate and lethal essence. Sure, he probably could have pulled it off on a firing range, but a duel is a different beast. Aikido, in this sense, wants to be everything that the Meiji values weren't. Aikido wants to be an Edo-era martial art, not a Meiji one. Even today, I feel more people come to Aikido wanting to delve into samurai-inspired aesthetics and esotericism as opposed to something like Judo, but the truth is that neither Takeda nor Ueshiba were samurai. No one in Aikido has ever been a samurai. In Aikido's effort to be an Edo-period martial art, it has only managed to become an imperial Japanese martial art. And this feels like the logical place to take a break. In the next part, we will be looking a little more at Imperial Japan and especially at Aikido's transformation after the war. I want to thank everyone for watching. As always, I really do appreciate it, and I'll see you in the next part. Peace.