7th dan aikido
The temperature rose rapidly with each passing day as the Al-Sabbiyah continued southward. Soon after we entered the South China Sea, the heat became so intense that the crew was compelled to turn on the air conditioning in the cabin. The view from the deck showed nothing but a vast, boundless ocean below a sky … Continue reading PART II – En Route to England, Volume 2: Training on Board the Al-Sabbiyah
I left the port of Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, on March 28, 1966, on a six-week voyage across the sea to England. I was the sole passenger in the first-class cabin on board the Al-Sabbiyah (“Little Princess” in Arabic) – a 35,751-ton Kuwaiti oil tanker that was leased to a British company based in Newcastle, … Continue reading PART II – En Route to England, Volume 1: Leaving Japan
In early 1957, when I was a Judo student, I got myself involved in a personal duel with a kendo man. He beat me up severely, without my even being able to touch his body. The experience taught me an important lesson as a martial artist: As long as I relied on grabbing an opponent, … Continue reading PART I – The Hombu Dojo Years
T. K. Chiba Shihan passed away on June 5th, 2015, in his house in San Diego, the most southern city of the State of California near the Mexican border, where he had lived since 1981. His demise marked the end of a distinctive idea of Aikido and of the way if not to teach it, … Continue reading A LIFE IN AIKIDO
Presentation Jacques Roubaud is arguably one of today’s most well-known French poets. He is also a member of the Oulipo and a novelist, a mathematician and a theoretician of verse; a great admirer of Japan, he is a recognized scholar in ancient Japanese poetry, which he read and commented at length : the famous poets … Continue reading King Arthur and Aikido
When Robert Savoca Sensei, the chief instructor at Brooklyn Aikikai asked me to pen my thoughts about the term “form”, the first thing that came to my mind was the famous (and surely apocryphal) anecdote that opposed the late 19th/early 20th centuries composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. According to the legend, in answer to … Continue reading On Form and Substance