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Meeting Morihei Ueshiba
A.J: When
did you enter the Ueshiba Dojo?
Tohei Sensei: I
think it was in 1940. Kisaburo Osawa came in about a week later. I had been
thinking what a poor state of affairs it was that I could train on my own
for a couple of weeks and come back and throw everyone in the judo dojo.
"Why bother with a martial art like that?" I thought. It was then
that I met Ueshiba Sensei. Shohei Mori, one of my seniors at the judo club
who had worked on the Manchurian Railway, told me about a teacher with
phenomenal strength and asked if I’d like to meet him. He gave me a letter of
introduction and off I went.
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Tohei with Aikido
Founder Morihei Ueshiba in 1953
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Tohei in Hawaii, circa 1953
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Ueshiba Sensei was out
when I arrived at the dojo and I was met by an uchideshi named Matsumoto. I
asked him what aikido was all about. He replied, "Give me your hand
and I’ll show you." I knew he was going to do some move on me, so I
stuck out my left hand instead of my right. Being right handed, I wanted to
keep my strongest hand in reserve. He grabbed my wrist and applied a sharp
nikyo technique. I hadn’t strengthened that part of my body at all, so it
was agonizing. I’m sure my face went pale, but I wasn’t about to let him to
get the best of me, so I endured the pain as long as I could. Then I threw
a punch at him with my right hand and he got flustered and let go.
I was just starting to
think that if this was aikido I might as well forget it and go home. Just
then Ueshiba Sensei returned. I produced my letter of introduction and he
said "Ah yes, from Mr. Mori..." Then as a demonstration, he began
tossing one of the larger uchideshi around the dojo.
I thought it looked
kind of fake until Ueshiba Sensei told me to take off my coat and come at
him. I got into a judo stance and moved in to grab him. To my great
surprise, he threw me so smoothly and swiftly that I couldn’t even figure
out what had happened. I knew right then that this was what I wanted to do.
I asked permission to enroll immediately and began going to the dojo every
day from the following morning.
I found the training
very strange and mysterious, and I was dying to know how the techniques
were done. When someone uses power to throw you, there’s always something
you can do to react or counter. But it’s a different story when the person
isn’t doing anything in particular and you’re still getting thrown. I
thought, "Wow, this is the real thing!"
In the beginning I had
no idea what was going on. Even high school students could throw me without
any trouble. Finding that rather odd, I tried grabbing even more strongly,
but of course then I was only thrown that much more easily.
At the same time I was
continuing my training at the Ichikukai [see the interview with Hiroshi Tada
in AJ101 for more information]. I used to stay there overnight and
practice zazen and misogi. The training focused on achieving a kind of
enlightened state in which both body and mind become entirely free from
restraint. It was exhausting, and afterwards I would rush to aikido
practice, already dead tired. To my surprise, I found that in that state
people who could always throw me before were completely unable to do so! It
didn’t take me much effort to throw them, either. Everybody thought it was
strange and kept saying things like, "What’s with Tohei?! He skips
practice and comes back stronger than ever!"
It’s a lot more
difficult for someone to throw you if you let go of power, and it also
becomes much easier to throw your opponent. I thought about Ueshiba Sensei
and realized that he was indeed relaxed when he did his aikido. It was then
that I suddenly understood the real meaning of "relax."
My aikido continued to
progress as I continued with my misogi and zazen. After six months or so I
was even sent to teach at places like the military police academy in Nakano
and the private school (juku) of Shumei Okawa. No one except Sensei could
throw me. It took me only half a year to be able to achieve that degree of
ability, so I think taking five or ten years is too slow.
Even now most people
are trying as hard as they can to learn techniques, but I was learning
about ki from the beginning.
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