Counter-Judo roots of Tomiki Aikido, and the Problem of Realistic Fluidity

I study two martial arts that you could say are derivative arts of Judo, Tomiki Aikido and Brazilian Jiujitsu.  Or you could say that they are both parts taken of a Judo whole.    BJJ is judo starting on the  ground, the newaza, and Tomiki Aikido is judo displayed in Goshin jutsu kata, the self defense ideas of Judo.

 BJJ has a deep emphasis on transition, positioning, and counter attacking. Some folks call it fluidity.  It has a ton of ways to keep the faucet turned on and flowing. The thing about BJJ is that there are no kata to tell you what the movements are, and as a result they don't try to see problems in linear-scenario based fashion.  They have mounts, and guards, and transitions between this and that, and of course they have the submissions which really are the end of the rope of movements.

  I can't say that I am good at either Tomiki Aikido or BJJ. In fact, I can definitely say that I suck at BJJ.  One thing I can tell you that I figured out is that within failure principle can be found. There is a lot of talk about principle in my branch of Tomiki Aikido, which is a slowed down version of Tomiki Aikido.  But since randori in Aikido is artificial at any speed, in that the movement is not fluid, and that natural options are limited by supposed principle behind the technique and safety,  it only becomes fluid when you coach folks to slow down to speeds that don't represent reality.  There is not enough failure in the  aikido randori to really reveal principle.  The  spoken principles in Aikido  are really starting points for discussion, and don't reveal themselves in resistant randori.

The common thread between Tomiki Aikido and BJJ is that they both seem to work ideas from states of  perceptual inferiority. BJJ is known for working from the ground and on the back.  And Tomiki Aikido works from states of inferior timing, or states of pre-control, and control.

Martial arts are based on mechanical repetition, and cognitive-kinetic recogniton.  Or how the body bends and doesn't bend, and how people react in an choice A or B fashion to pressure: pulling, pushing, leverage, and weight.  The common thread being is that techniques have to be repeatable.  And variations of techniques apply to specific instances.  A big guy presents this, or a small woman is presented with this.

There are things in martial arts that don't lend themselves to being repeatable.  Like punching someone in the face.  You can punch 7 guys in the face, and get 7 different results.  Kiai shouting may shock someone or not.  Pain compliance is another thing.  One guy may tap after a half inch of a crank, another guy will just lay there.  On the other side of this coin, are  scenario based defenses such as defending against a punch or a knife.  punches are hit and miss and the timing and targets, and contexts are random.  Any body who teaches how to defend against a punch or a knife is full of shit.  You either know its coming and fend it off or you don't.  They don't lend themselves to cognitive kinetic recogniton.

  Aikido has a problem as a martial art, even the sporting kind.  It seems that it wants to defy the laws of reality, and common sense.  You can see this in both the sporting kind, and the kind that is totally fake.

This is aikido randori in which the environment is so limiting in both the rules, and how things work that virtually nothing happens.  Except the NASCAR occasions when there is a wreck and someone gets hurt.    

Aikido suffers from the notion that everyone can be like Michael Jordan.  That if you tap into the right technique, you can stop anything.  And if you can't there must be some other worldly power or spiritual reference point that explains how things work.

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, may have been like a Michael Jordan. Everyone else is like Jimmy at the courts at the park.  My two cents on the greatness of Ueshiba is that he could improvise very well.  That he could perform well in a cognitive-kinetic environment using idiosyncratic techniques, and then live in the spaces between them. He taught fundamentals, The same way Jordan could show you some basketball fundamentals, and then turn around and win by doing things he wasn't teaching and couldn't explain. It was like going to learn from Jordan, playing 1 on 1 with him for five minutes, and when asked how he was doing it, he tries to explain it with stories of golf, gambling, and making underwear commercials.

I think that Shishida-Sensei's article is a good one to google. Its called,  " Counter techniques against Judo: the process of forming Aikido in 1930s Fumiaki Shishida."  It differentiates from Ueshiba's real game, his real ability, and what he liked to teach and drill.  Ueshiba did something entirely different than what he taught.  And impressed folks with things that he didn't explicitly transmit.  The main idea of the article is that a lot of Ueshiba's Aikido was based on  preventing judo grips from happening in the first place. That it wasn't a good thing to be gripped at all.

The idea wasn't transmitted well.  Here is some dude in a skirt vs a judo player.  You notice that the judo player defends against grips, and when he does he tries to counter grip up to improve his situation, either to deny the aikido guy freedom to move, or to break his posture.  The aikido guy just tries to fight grips, and doesnt seek a counter control, or atemi. He just allows the judo guy to grip up and waits to feel the Ki or something.

Here is some pretty simple advice from a female BJJ teacher, Emily Kwock.  Eventually, she will talk about hand circling or wax on wax off.  

It's my point to say that this grip denial, or working from an state of inferiority, either pre-control or control.  When the grip is on the way, or is just being made is the point of aikido, especially Tomiki Aikido.  It's been been obscured, by time and wishful thinking, and randori models that in no way reflect any fundamentals.

If you look at the earliest Tomiki Film, the big foot video.  You will see the grip fighting fundamentals there in plain sight.  First off is the often debated Tomiki Stiff Arm, where Ohba Shuffles in with finger tips extended.  That represents a gripping attempt pre-control, or incoming.  And you can clearly see Tomiki hand circling into offbalance and a technique.  And late in the video there is a section where Tomiki and Ohba go full speed, and preventing control and breaking balance at the same time is exactly what is taking place.  Almost as if this is the living proof of Shishida's article on counter judo.

The problem with Aikido is the understanding of fluid motion.  It seemed that Tomiki broke fluid motion into parts, and drilled the parts.  However, these parts never came together in fluid randori practice.  Because Aikido is essentially understanding the boundaries of Judo, the good manners of judo practice, and cheating and being a horrible judo partner.  Basically, someone who is asked not to come back.


The Tomiki Aikido basics:

The tegatana kata:  these are hand movement that represent off balancing, following movements, hand circles, and transitions  and maintaining the freedom of the hips. The lesson here is breaking balance while breaking a grip and either applying atemi, or getting a counter grip at the wrist. The first position that you do in BJJ is the closed guard, you have a guy that has clamped his legs around your hips and you can't use them until you escape by using leverage.  So hip movement, freeing your hips,  in conjuction to the handblade movements and foot work is the key lesson.  The katana work obscures the nature of the exercise.

Kihon:  striking(atemi) into a throw, leading/following(elbow) into a throw, twisting(wrist) into a throw, transitioning into a throw(floating).  These are taught out of relation to the basic  hand  and feet movements, out of the break a grip, and/or atemi/ get a grip function.  The lesson being is an extended arm leads to an offbalanced structure, and that circling an incoming grip into an offbalance, or counter-gripping is required to make these techniques work.

Nage no kata omote/ura or (what I call the kuzushi releases)   It is never a good thing to allow your self to be grabbed. The impression it leaves in kata form is that letting a guy hang on is a good thing.  And folks that wear hakamas like to talk about connection and stickyness and all sorts.  It confuses the issue, and leads to issues that are in the judo vs aikido video.  The lesson is when you break a grip you must insure that the balance is broken, other wise the attacker can follow up with an attack.  On the other side when you counter grip you should break balance to the point to where the attempt to break the counter grip leads into a technique.  The Ura sections suggest the real starting points for Tomiki Aikido once the grip has been broken and a counter grip insuring an offbalance is applied.  

In Competitive Aikido, There are virutally none of these ideas at work.  Its because one person can not grip at all, and therefore the entering with intent to control is removed. That's when all Aikido ideas collapse.

Aikido is not an ancient martial art.  One can argue that it isnt a martial art at all, with out being informed by what a Judo player will do.  What it becomes away from its counter Judo roots is just a martial form of dance.  If you study the history of judo, you will see that Kano altered the rules because too many times a person could just sit out of a throw, or pull guard.  There was a period of time where newaza, or ground work dominated.  To make the sport more crowd friendly, and hopefully make it an Olympic Sport, he made it where you couldn't just sit down out of things, and get to the nitty gritty on the ground, the way BJJ does.  He felt, like many folks nowadays, that submission wrestling wasnt all that interesting to watch.( look at how the UFC changed the rules to eliminate the possibilty of paying good money to watch fifty minutes of two intertwined humans barely moving.) Tomiki had the problem of developing a randori with a group of folks that already knew how to take folks down with Judo, which to be honest has more solutions than Aikido.   So he found ways to remove the judo from the randori, but in the process obscured Aikido's counter judo roots.