Each week sports reporter ROBERT CARRY tries out martial arts from around the world. This week it’s the Japanese art of Aikido
Once upon a time, I was getting changed in the dressing room of the headquarters of the Irish Aikido Federation, off Pearse Street in Dublin, when John Rogers – instructor and head of the federation – sauntered in behind me. The day before, John and I had arranged to make his class the subject of this column, so I donned the well-practiced, jovial-yet-deferential manner that I’ve found martial arts instructors respond well to, and introduced myself.
“Can I see some ID?” he asked brusquely.
“Are you serious?” I answered, genuinely wondering if he was taking the proverbial.
Unnervingly, he wasn’t. To make matters worse, a mix-up with the printers has left me with unusable business cards, and my other means of demonstrating my bona fides were seriously limited. Buried deep in the recesses of my wallet was my National Union of Journalists (NUJ) press card, but it was a long-expired student version. I passed it to John in the hope that he wouldn’t notice.
“This is three years out-of-date,” he replied grimly, handing the useless document back to me.
The half-dozen other people in the men’s changing room – and they all seemed to be lads a good few years older than myself – began to gather around the kerfuffle, and I was suddenly acutely aware of the healthy stack of feudal-era Japanese weaponry leaning against the far wall.
I started to rummage frantically through my wallet in the hope of finding something to reassure the disgruntled head instructor, and my search turned up a general journalist business card. It hadn’t got the name of any media institution on it, just my name with ‘journalist’ printed optimistically beneath, along with my contact details.
“Will this do?” I asked, while wondering what in the name of Jaysus he suspected me of being up to.
“There’s nothing on this that shows you work for the Metro,” he said flatly.
“I don’t work for the free-sheet, I work for Metro Eireann,” I said haughtily, and with that I realised that I had undeniable, irrefutable proof of the fact that I was indeed a genuine journalist here to write a column – in the form of a past edition of the paper.
“There ya go!” I announced, feeling sure the folded-up copy I handed him had ended the pointless, unfathomable question-and-answer session I was being subjected to. “Look, it even has my picture on the inside cover!”
“You’re not trying to sell me advertising space, are you?”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything!” I half-yelled, as the reasons for the fiasco started to dawn and my patience began to fall rapidly away from me.
“Okay then, that’s fine,” said John, before turning on his heels and heading back out to the main matted area outside the changing rooms.
So with the catastrophically bad start to John’s bid to get some free, positive media coverage behind us, I took my place on the mat among the rest of the beginners’ class.
Aikido – Japanese for ‘the way of harmonious spirit’ – was developed by Morihei Ueshiba in Japan around the year 1883. It combines martial arts, philosophy and religion, with the idea of enabling practitioners to defend themselves from assault without injuring their attacker as a central tenet. This is generally done by adopting graceful, circular, low-impact movements to either throw or joint-lock your opponent.
The beginners’ class, as it turned out, featured two students who were instructors in their own right, and no other novices, so I was very much in at the deep end.
The class started with warm-up stretching exercises that consisted of the type of stretches seen the world over, but the moves were punctuated by vocal exhalations from John at the top of the small padded room, and the rest of the students lined up opposite him. The idea seemed to be to combine rhythmic breathing exercises with the normal stretching/warm-up techniques.
The staple white pyjama-style wraparound jacket worn by practitioners of Japanese martial arts was again in evidence, but Aikido black-belts accentuate it by adding a distinctive black skirt-like pair of bottoms called a hakama. John then picked one of the two hakama-wearers on which to demonstrate the moves we would then try out on our partners. These consisted of various throws put in place in response to strikes from your partner and they certainly looked the business when demonstrated by the instructors.
When I tried to execute the moves myself, I discovered that they only worked if the person ‘attacking’ you was entirely complicit in your desire to throw or joint-lock them.
For me, this somewhat defeated the purpose in terms of self-defence, but John felt this was to miss the point of the form.
“There are people who would argue that Aikido isn’t strictly a martial art anymore,” he said. “It is now more about character training and having the benefit of some kind of the strictness, physical strength training and mental attitudes that were part of Japanese warrior culture in past centuries. Aikido, along with some other martial arts, was a means of bringing those attributes and values into civil society and fitting them in an appropriate way.”
A low impact martial art like Aikido does have its advantages. John, who has been involved in Aikido since he was 19 and who has been instructing for the past 35 years, pointed out: “It’s something people can practice for a longer time. Martial arts that focus on competition usually give you a window from when you are aged 15 to 30 to compete, and after that it’s tough going.
“Aikido allows people to start practicing when they are 30 or 40. There’s a 68-year-old Japanese gentleman coming to our summer course this year.”
After practicing a few more of the stylised moves, we knocked it on the head for the day. I had a quick chat with John and headed off with no hard feelings.
This might sound strange but on reflection, I think the nearest thing to Aikido (which is the most old-school of the Japanese martial arts in terms of its adherence to odd practices like bowing to everyone in sight and sitting in a ludicrously uncomfortable kneel while the instructor speaks) that I’ve encountered while writing this column is the WWE-style pro wrestling. They are both based on the idea of one person executing moves that on the surface look real, but on investigation are only possible if the ‘victim’ is a willing participant. But as contrived as they may be, these moves still require a lot of skill.
At the end of the day, Aikido may not improve your combat skills all that much, but it will keep you in shape – and of course, not everyone wants to be a cage fighter.
