Aikido is a modern martial art inspired by Japan’s old martial traditions: bare hands fighting and traditional weapons fighting. During the first half of the twentieth century, Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, devised a martial discipline, at first exclusive to a few, then developed and spread to the rest of the world by Morihei’s son, Kisshomaru. Starting from the 1950’s, several students of the founder and his son moved overseas and started to teach Aikido. Hawaii was the first destination at the beginning of the 1950’s, followed by the rest of the United States and Europe in the 1960’s. Today, Aikido is represented by some two hundred federations and other organizations in more than seventy countries around the world.
Aikido was introduced to France in the early 1950’s and was first taught by Minoru Mochizuki, Tadashi Abe, Mitsuro Nakazono and Masamichi Noro. The work of André Nocquet, the first French aikido student to sojourn in Japan to practice Morihei Ueshiba’s art, then of Hiro Mochizuki and of Nobuyoshi Tamura resulted in a quick development of Aikido which, by the end of the 1960’s had more than tens of thousands of practitioners. Christian Tissier, back from a sojourn of several years in Japan, started to teach in Paris from 1976 and quickly set a new trend which, today, constitutes the most popular form of Aikido in France.
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, known as Taiso in Japan and as Ō-Sensei elsewhere, was born on December 14th 1883 in the city of Tanabe, Wakayama prefecture, one of Japan most famous historical sites and one of its most sacred.
His life up to the start of the Second World War is poorly documented and accounts vary from one biographer to the other. An eager reader since an early age, Morihei Ueshiba did not however make long studies and was rather trained in accounting. After a failed attempt at business in Tōkyō in 1901, he enrolled in the army and was involved in the Russo-Japanese war. Discharged from the army in 1907, he returned to Tanabe. In 1912, one year after the birth of his daughter Matsuko, Morihei Ueshiba and his family settled in the Hokkaido village of Shirataki, taking advantage of the country’s program of colonization of the northern island. During his youth, Morihei Ueshiba had studied various martial arts, including Jūjitsu and weaponry of the Shinkage-ryū school, but it was the encounter, in 1915, with Sokaku Takeda, head of Daitō-ryū, that eventually turned him into a martial artist and led to the foundation of Aikido.
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| Ueshiba Morihei (Fonder) |
Another major influence over the development of Aikido was the encounter with Onisaburo Deguchi, the spiritual leader of the Shinto sect Ōmoto-kyō, in 1919, one year after the birth of his first son, Takemori. That same year, Morihei Ueshiba moved to Ayabe, near Kyotō, where the sect had its headquarters, and opened a school called sometimes “Ueshiba Juku”, sometimes “Daitō-ryū Aikijutsu”, depending on the time documents and photographs. The word “Aiki” having entered into use later, around 1922. Kisshomaru Ueshiba, the second son of Morihei Ueshiba, born in 1922, was named by Onisaburo Deguchi. Widely known, the sect reached a following of almost two million at its peak, Ōmoto-kyō teaching and pacifism was not to the liking of the country military government which, in 1935, incarcerated its leaders on charges of lèse-majesté.
At that time, Morihei Ueshiba had already left Ayabe since several years to settle in Tōkyō, where he opened several dojos before finally moving to the Wakamatsu-chō neighborhood where, in 1931, he established the Kodokan, aslo known as the jigoku-dōjō (the ‘hell dojo’) associated with the upper crust of the political world and higher officers of the navy and marines.
After the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States at the end of 1941, Morihei Ueshiba left Tōkyō in 1942 for Iwama, a village in the Ibaraki prefecture where he owned a small house and a few acres of farming land. Ō-Sensei took Iwama as his primary residence until his death, on April 26th 1969. In 1948 he charged his son, the Second Dōshu, with the task of reviving Tōkyō’s dōjō and developing the modern form of Aikido that aikidoka practice nowadays all over the world.
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| Ueshiba Kisshomaru (2nd doshu) | Ueshiba Moriteru (3rd doshu) |
References :
For a complete list of the books published by the Aikikai Foundation, visit: :
http://www.aikikai.or.jp/eng/publication/index.html
and, especially :
- Ueshiba, Kisshomaru; Ueshiba, Morihei (1996), “Introduction”, Budo: Teachings of the Founder of Aikido, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International.
Refer also to the works of John Stevens :
and, especially :
- Stevens, John (1984). Aikido : the Way of Harmony. Boston: Shambhala Publications.
- Stevens, John; Krenner, Walther (2004). Training with the Master: Lessons with Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido. Boston & London: Shambhala.
- Stevens, John (1999). [Invincible Warrior: A Pictorial Biography of Morihei Ueshiba, the Founder of Aikido. Boston, London: Shambhala.
As for Deguchi Onisaburo and Ōmoto-kyō
- Nancy K. Stalker, “Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto and the Rise of New Religion in Imperial Japan,” University Of Hawaii, 2008.