Ellis Amdur

Location: Seattle Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 920 Offline

Re: Aikido: Confronting a Crisis Aikido children's classes are actually pretty popular, but there's a huge dropoff at adolescence. First of all is the panoply of recreational options for a teenager. Second, there are few tangible rewards (aka competition, something particularly important to boys) in aikido practice. Third, adolescents transition into adult classes. Here you are, a fourteen or fifteen year old kid and you are suddenly hugely out of your comfort zone, required to make physical contact with forty year old matrons and balding guys with gray ponytails.



Next is the problem that the bloom is off the rose, so to speak. Aikido, at one time, was unspeakably exotic, the only traditional appearing Japanese martial art available. It contrasted with the more mundane judo and karate, much less the star-spangled-banner-Liberace pseudo arts. Now it's just one of many arts. One can join a genuine koryu school - - but one can also join anything from capoeira to Indonesian silat. The next exciting trend is going to be traditional martial arts from Africa - legitimate arts and organizations are starting to arrive in Europe and America. There is a huge menu of choices - at one time, aikido dominated a certain segment of the 'market' - there's no segment any more that it is exclusive - from internal strength training (or ideology), to reconciliation of aggression to strong martial virtue to traditional culture.



Then, as has already been noted - MMA. When I first joined aikido, there was a blatant assertion of it's almighty potential. This can be tested - and despite all the ways one can argue with the testing agency (sportive competition with rules, etc), the 'too deadly for the ring,' claim really doesn't resonate with most young people, who are quite legitimately concerned about whether aikido will teach them self-defense. I recently read a statement from the current Doshu where he denied the importance of aikido as a fighting system, anyway.



The avenue of internal strength training has been rediscovered, but it will always be the interest of a very few, and even less will put in the grueling hours to actually achieve benefit from such training. And repetitive solo training (funa kogu and ikkyo undo for an hour a day, for example) is going to appeal to very few people in their teens and twenties.



Aikido is, among martial arts, one among many. But can - or should it - emulate yoga? That's been tried - Shin Taido, it's called. It had a brief tiny boom and now its a superficial, not very popular activity (not to mention its founder was a Japanese Harvey Weinstein, and that really damaged the organization).



When you suspend any concern for martial virtue, you will lose the appeal for those who do care about aikido as a martial art - it will become contact improv and why, at that point, concern yourself with a keikko gi, with a dojo or Japanese culture at all?



Perhaps quality rather than quantity should be the issue - perhaps one should NOT be concerned about the diminishing numbers, because if the question is mostly how large numbers of people can support themselves, we are talking about aiki-business, not aiki-do. Perhaps a scaling down, and a more severe evaluation of teachers, so that only excellent people are teaching dedicated people. Enrollment less, dojos closing - but something improving, rather than continuing a continuous watering down from the first generation to now. Imagine, therefore, a future with one tenth or one-50th the numbers, but these dojos worthy of respect on their own terms, something continuously developed and honed like the fine steel from iron that Ueshiba Morihei claimed was the purpose of budo training.



Ellis Amdur