tai chi shoving matches vs tomiki shoving matches

A few weeks back,  I did some hand randori with guy who had a tai chi background.  He was fun to work with and made me want to learn some tai chi moves.  So I bought a tai chi dvd and started doing some homemade tai chi in the kitchen along with the walking kata moves.  After watching  an excellent dvd by Yang Jwing Ming, I came to the non scientific conclusion that Tai Chi and Tomiki Aikido are basically the same damn thing.  Especially when you look at Hand Randori/push hands concept. Also, all the techniques are the same, both try to maintain a "bubble" in front of them.  The difference i think is how they choose to maintain the bubble. 

First of all, hand randori is called toshu randori and tai chi push hands is called tui shou.  I'm not an Oxford educated lingowist, but those two words look pretty much the same. 

Heres Yang jwing Ming the tai chi man ive been watching .   Just You tube search the guy.  He's a Tomiki gold mine of ideas.  


where have I seen this before ?: 

  

Here's a chinese Tomiki school.  some judo moves, working on # 6 from the 17, and a little slow randori looking for kuzushi.( the music is stupid, though.)  

 

A lot of times I get tripped up worrying about maintaining tanto/knife maai, and stepping off line.  You can get an off balance apparently by establishing a flow and standing your ground.  

 

 when tai chi and tomiki gets competitive it looks pretty much the same.  Shoving match randori. I dont have a problem with shoving match randori, its the same as judo randori without the chicken legging.

  

Push hands competition( looks the same)

 

and judo looks the same except they are allowed to chicken leg each other and do the old playground "fall and pull" trick

   

This mini hand sumo match looks interesting, these situations happen sometimes in Toshu randori.

Koryu kata, the drunk uncle of texas flavored tomiki

            
                                               UNCLE ICHI WHERE ART THOU

 Most wisdom is hidden in the form of drunk uncles that we only see occasionally.   We have 6 drunk uncles in texas flavored Tommy Key aikido.  The ones that come around the most are old uncle san, and old uncle yon.  Ichi, Ni, Go, and roku must have died in the war or something.   

My aikido wet dream is that I can go into class and do the releases three times through and the 17 three times( or maybe the big ten) through and then do koryu kata for the rest of the class as a cool down. It may take a year to get in shape enough to do the entire 17, 3 times, but I think thats the point.  Martial arts is physical, and you dont get efficient until your ass is wore out and you drop your illusions about things.   

 Texas flavored Tommy key aikido only does San Kata/ Yon Kata.  I've been told that old Judo guys with bad knees have trouble doing the rest so they didnt learn it or teach it.  I can also say that Ive noticed that most Tommy key aikido guys that I know either do judo concurrently with aikido or start doing judo around the time that Koryu kata become interesting. Or, they may start picking up a sword or stick around about this time.  It boils down to not enough time during the week to do everything.

 

Uncle NI died in the War

   

Uncle GO

 

That RAT bastard ROKU, grandma dont talk about him no more.