Ideas about body and communication in aikido practice
1Tamara Kohn
‘cultures’ in their practice, but they are basking in what Rapport has called
‘the ubiquitous, desiring and creative resort by individuals to the contradic- tory’ (1997: 658). They are allowing diversity to triumph as ‘part of their inside’. For many practitioners it is irrelevant that the art originates in Japan – it only matters that others, who speak the same language of the body regard- less of their national or class backgrounds, are available for practice.
Social analysts and linguists tend to peripheralise or even forget the body when they attempt to understand human communication and social learning.
For most of them, language found in the spoken word is the most powerful and hence most meaning-rich of sign systems (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1966: 49ff.). Spoken language has been presented through Western education systems as the most sophisticated and hence ‘direct’ vehicle available for trans- mitting meaning. Anthropologists attempt to master their informants’ spoken language because they have been taught that the other’s words about his/her lived experiences are closer to some cultural ‘truth’ than the anthropologist’s bodily attempts to feel the other’s experiences through participation, empathy and imagination (Kohn 1994). The way in which individuals learn the princi- ples of a bodily art through touching, feeling and moving is no less ‘direct’
than learning them through the spoken word.
To understand this it is no doubt best to practise such a ‘thinking’ bodily art oneself, but for the reader who cannot do so, I will attempt a short written introduction. The next section introduces the uninitiated to aikido, describes the method and sources used for this study and introduces the prime research site – the place of practice, or dojo– and the people in it.
Aikido
Aikido is a ‘modern manifestation of the Japanese martial arts (budo)’ (K.
Ueshiba 1984: 14) which requires one to ‘blend’ or ‘harmonise’ with and then redirect the energy of an attack to throw or pin an attacker. It is generally practised ‘empty hand’,2 but as its techniques and movements are derived from the art of Japanese swordsmanship, students also practise with weapons.
Coordination and athleticism is required through paired practice, and yet unlike most ‘sports’, there are no winners and losers resulting from its practice.
Aikido was founded by Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969), also known as ‘O- Sensei’ (Great Teacher) to his students.Aimay be translated as ‘harmony’,Ki refers to ‘spirit’, and Do means way – hence aikido can be translated as the way of harmony of spirit. With aikido, even a small physically weak person can learn to redirect the energy of a strong attack if they learn to apply basic principles of movement. Circular or spiralling movements are key in the understanding of how to execute aikido techniques. Later in this chapter we will see how spiralling rather than linear concepts about ‘learning’ itself confront students of the art. Aikido practice is centred on learning a series of forms/movements (kata) in which the student must participate as the
executor of the technique and the receiver in paired exercises. Unlike other martial arts kata, emphasis is placed upon the correct ‘feeling’ of execution rather than visual correctness. It is often said that receiving the technique (ukemi) is the key to understanding aikido, for in ukemi one conditions the body and learns the art of blending with and absorbing the energy of an attack.
The Durham ‘big dojo’ is a room in a local sports hall which is set up with wall-to-wall mats two evenings a week for aikido practice. The ‘little dojo’
covers a smaller area, but is permanently matted (with canvas-covered tatami) and available to dojo members for informal and formal practice any day of the week.3 The people who practise aikido in these dojos are almost entirely male (perhaps two out of twenty regular practitioners are female). They also come from a range of occupational backgrounds (from mechanics to hair- dressers, firemen to nightwatchmen, builders to anthropology lecturers).4 Occasionally students at the local university join the club, but they tend to be transient members who move on by the end of their course. The majority of regular/long-term members are local – born in the northeast of England – and come from working-class backgrounds. I was surprised, therefore, to find that there is a popular mythology about aikido being the martial art of the
‘new petty bourgeoisie’ (Bourdieu 1990: 157).
Bourdieu has suggested that sport is ‘consumed’ (like food or leisure) in socially predictable ways vis-à-visclass – that ‘relation to body … is associated with a social position and an innate experience of the physical and social world’ (1990: 157). Social standing, according to Bourdieu, affects the ‘taste’
that a person will have for one activity over another and for a particular type of body cultivation (1993). He has explicitly used aikido as an example of a sporting practice which appeals to ‘bourgeois’ tastes. He says, ‘one can imme- diately sense the privileged relation that is today established between wrestling and members of the working classes or aikido and the new petty bourgeoisie’
(1990: 157). Interestingly enough, this does appear to be the case from my experiences at courses held in France. Many practitioners there are doctors, lawyers, academics and the like. Why is this not true in England? Why are so many ‘members of the working classes’ treading on the élite Samurai path? Is it because of the way aikido was introduced in this country? (Chiba Sensei, one of O-Sensei’s students, arrived in the 1960s in Sunderland, a working- class industrial town.) Is it because of the time of arrival? (One of my informants sent me an e-mail suggesting it was a ‘60s awakening anti-class thing’.)
Better than surmising is to listen to what people practicing in the Durham dojo have had to say about their own practice. Often they had already prac- tised one or more of the other martial arts until injury, boredom or discontent sent them looking for something new. They might have had a friend who introduced them, or might have spotted a flyer advertising an aikido course.
Virtually all keen beginners speak of their attraction to the non-competitive
aspects of aikido. They speak negatively of the way arts such as karate and taekwondo have become ‘Westernised’ and ‘spoiled’, and have even been reconsumed in the ‘East’ as competitive sports (appearing in the Olympics, etc.). Aikido is a highly effective, practical martial art which various infor- mants have had to apply in real-life conflicts, but it is ‘consumed’ as far more than a craft or skill by people from a large range of occupational and class backgrounds. It appears to break down social class barriers in its philosophy and its practice both on and off the mat. As one friend put it, ‘the job you have is the last thing people find out about. Aikido is a great leveller’.
Evening classes are held three to five times per week, and most committed students attend at least two of these. In addition, some students from that club travel twenty miles away to practise with a respected teacher in a dojo in Middlesbrough, or an equal distance in the other direction to train with a senior instructor in Newcastle. Whenever a visiting aikido instructor comes to town, a special weekend course is arranged and attended by students from all over the region. Serious students who can afford the time and/or money also attend week-long international summer schools in England and abroad where they can gather with well over a hundred other students and learn from senior Japanese masters – shihan– who in their youth may have been students of O- Sensei. The chief instructor of the Durham dojo was one of the first students taught by Chiba Sensei, a shihan who established aikido in the north of England over thirty years ago. Chiba Sensei’s dojo is now in San Diego, California, and many senior students and instructors travel there to study with him and bring his evolving understanding of the art back to their home dojos.
Aikido is a global or transnational phenomenon, but I intend here to concentrate on its manifestation in Durham as an example of anthropology ‘at home’. I came to ‘think (anthropologically) with’ aikido through my own practice of the art and my involvement in the British aikido community over the past six years. My informants are primarily from the northeast of England, although I have shared practice and ideas with aikidoists from elsewhere in the UK, from France and other areas of Europe, from America, and from Japan. I have begun to feel my own body and mind transformed through practice and I have considered both the natural reflections of other club members in social contexts (e.g. in pubs after practice) as well as the ideas expressed in yudanshaessays – essays written by any students wishing to grade for any level of black belt in the art. These essays, often composed by people who have little experience of writing reflexively for an unknown audience, are rich repositories of people’s thoughts about their own progression along
‘the Way of Harmony’.5This path begins at one’s first lesson.
Aikido practice: please don’t talk on the mat Aiki cannot be exhausted
By words written or spoken,
Without dabbling in idle talk, Understand through practice.
O-Sensei (quoted in Aikido Today, Jan/Feb 1998)
The new student tentatively enters the dojo, unsure of how to behave. He is welcomed by the instructor and any senior students at the practice. The class begins with the teacher (sensei) clapping, the students lining up kneeling (in seiza) in order of seniority of grade, and the teacher kneeling in front. First the teacher will turn away from the students, bowing to a picture of O-Sensei placed by the wall in the room of the sports hall, then will bow to other teachers, and finally teacher and students all bow, saying ‘Onegaishimasu [please teach me]’. This is used as an audible cue that practice is about to begin. Both teacher and pupil say ‘onegaishimasu’ to indicate that they learn from each other. Then the teacher generally leads the class in a gentle stretching warmup which involves a number of exercises peculiar to the art (for example stretches in an elongated forward posture, and stretching manip- ulations of ankles and wrists). The new students may be told in a five-minute introductory speech something of the history and basic principles of the martial art, but then the teacher quickly suggests that aikido can only be understood through practice with the body.
Practice begins with the instructor demonstrating a technique on a senior student. This will usually be a stretching and balancing technique, such as a basic irimi (entering) movement. The uke, or person receiving the technique, must learn to keep a firm hold while also relaxing the body and letting it be moved into a position from which she can recover. The move is demonstrated a few times with as little verbal description as possible. Then the students pair off to practise that technique, taking it in turns to ‘uke’ until the instructor interrupts for corrections or moves on to a new technique. On an assistant coaching course offered by an aikido instructor from Birmingham, we were told that body language is by far the most effective means of communication, followed by ‘paralanguage’ (tone of voice, etc.) and finally ‘words’. He also put up an overhead that suggested that for skill retention, only 10 per cent of the things one is taught verbally would remain after three months, whereas 65 per cent of the things told, shown and also practised oneself would remain. While it remained unclear how and where such statistics were obtained, it is true that ‘sports’ pedagogy would reinforce aikido principles about the power of
‘doing’ over ‘talking’.6
One exercise often offered in the very first lesson (but rarely repeated) is designed to prove to novices the power achieved by extending one’s energy (ki) through the fingers and across the room (known as ‘unbendable arm’).
Students are often greatly impressed by the simplicity and the tremendous strength that the mind can offer to the weaker body. This serves to foster the sense of ‘mystery’ and hidden knowledge that attracts many students to take on the study of a martial art (or as one student told me, the ‘feel the Force,
Luke’ experience).7That ‘ki extension’ exercise and the challenge of learning to roll safely out of aikido throws, etc., serves to lure people into a wish to know more.
They are also attracted by the formality and etiquette of practice – the rituals of bowing at the beginning and end of the practice, and also greeting and then thanking the partner for practicing. ‘It [the ritual] gives the practice a clear shape and cuts it off from the stresses of the day – I feel like I’m entering another world in the dojo’, said one beginner. ‘To me it’s about respect and trust. One can only enjoy and grow through practice when you trust your partner not to hurt you’, said another. Another once suggested that it’s good to feel ‘part of a long tradition’, shared with others on the mat and around the world – ‘it’s an international language of respect’. So the ritual of bowing and exchanging words of thanks, etc., joins together a group of other- wise unconnected people into a bond of trust and ‘tradition’ while demarcating the time of practice as being qualitatively apart from other times of day. Hendry (1993: 153), following Kondo (1985: 302), would call these
‘unfoldings’ of ritual time and space.
From the first few practices, one begins to recognise a clear hierarchy within the dojo. Different depths of knowledge and expertise are displayed in variable solidity of stances and differing abilities to execute and receive tech- niques with grace and agility. It is also communicated by wrappings of dress (Hendry 1993). Senior students wear hakamain the dojo – black or dark blue long divided ‘skirts’ traditionally worn by Samurai. The hakama are put on over the white cotton keiko gi(practice clothes) on the mat in the dojo before practice, and are carefully folded on the mat at the end of practice. The state of a practitioner’s hakama and the black belt worn beneath it expresses some- thing of the seniority of the student. With years of practice, the knees of quality indigo-dyed cotton hakama begin to fade, and the blackest of belts becomes greyer and greyer until it is almost white again. Lower grade students look up to anyone in hakama, while hakama-wearing students look out for wear and tear as a possible mark of seniority. Generally,kyugrades (mudansha) are encouraged to practise with their ‘seniors’ (yudansha = shodan/first degree black belt and above), but arranging this can be seen as a skill in itself at large courses with many unknown people on the mat. Ideas about hierarchy are not just observed, but they are reinforced and illustrated through bodily prac- tice. These result from different levels of experience, different ranking and training, and political wranglings between senseis and students from different dojos. They are not, however, seen by practitioners to have resulted from activity in a ‘competitive’ arena – the experience of practicing technique is still perceived to be free of combat, winners and losers.
Students new to aikido often ask questions of their more senior partners during practice, and some students tend to offer advice to others, but the teacher will sometimes discourage the noise and distraction of verbal exchange on the mat. Part of martial art philosophical reasoning is that the
techniques need to be absorbed bodily rather than being talked about, cognised, and translated back into movement.8The mat should resound with the sounds of bodies falling and rolling, but not with voices speaking. Silence is seen to reflect politeness towards the teacher as well as to the special space of the dojo. One of the most common criticisms of certain instructors is that he or she ‘talks too much’ – keen students feel that they learn more from doing and want to fill the time they have in the dojo with bodily practice rather than with too many words of wisdom. When Chiba Sensei and other Japanese shihan teach in English dojos, they tend to talk less and demonstrate more, showing the movements at different speeds and angles, with bodily emphasis placed on particular details of alignment, posture and hand position.
At large summer school classes, the Japanese instructors rarely speak, maybe in part due to the problematic acoustics in large sports halls, and partly, perhaps, following a tradition that they remember from their training with O-Sensei, who rarely spoke as he instructed. Silence is clearly one of the most powerful non-verbal communicative devices available when meaningfully filled with action. The power of silent communication features also in the paper by Christensen et al. (Chapter 4 in this volume). Miller usefully writes of the generation and maintenance of Japanese ‘myths’ and ‘antimyths’, and it is perhaps significant that the Japanese antimyth he describes is the preference for and worship of silent communication (1982: 85–6). Several aikidoka have suggested to me that one’s body cannot ‘listen’ as carefully to ‘contact’ with other bodies during practice if speech is being interpreted at the same time.
If students complain of too much talk, they also sometimes reflect nega- tively about certain instructors who seem to take up too much of the class time with demonstration (whether augmented with speech or not). Mori, in her book about Americans studying the Japanese tea ceremony, makes a similar observation that the non-Japanese student is not willing to learn as much from observation as from participation, and gets frustrated with lessons that lack enough practice. She attributes this to the inability of the ‘Western’
student to give the teacher full authority for decisions of study (1992: 150).
This seems to be only one of a number of possible reasons. Another factor which goes beyond teacher/student relations, and is most relevant for this chapter, could be that time ‘spent’ in the dojo, when seen to be competing for space next to other life demands, is monitored differently than when viewed as an experience contributing to a lifelong pursuit of practice for practice’s sake. Students who can only attend one or two evening classes a week because of demands away from the dojo may feel that to prepare for a grading they will need to use those practices well. They may become frustrated when ‘too much time’ is spent watching demonstrations and not practicing. We will return to different notions of ‘path’ shortly, but suffice to say that varying assessments of ‘good practice’ reveal much about students’ placement of their art in their lives as a whole, as well as culturally informed ideas about ‘learning