A Martial Artist Making a Difference - The Biography of Founder Morihei Ueshiba - Part VIII
Paul Rest, San Francisco Examiner
The periods during the war and after found O Sensei living Iwama. Kisshomaru Doshu writes that O Sensei believed that “fighting and farming are one” (Heino-ichinyo). It was during this same period of time that he made the rural location the “new home of Aikido.” No doubt this was partially because there was a possibility that the dojo in Tokyo could be destroyed during a bombing raid.
On a historical note, the war years saw Aikido co-opted into a national bureaucratic structure that governed all martial arts in Japan. O Sensei, it would appear, quietly stepped back from this. As the Doshu writes, “He did not openly oppose the actions of the government, but his integrity would not allow the art he had built in his own lifetimes, through blood, sweat, and tears, to be subsumed for convenience into a mere section of a large, bureaucratic organization.”
Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who began an underground church to avoid becoming part of the national Protestant church created by the Nazi government, so too O Sensei continued on his path outside the state's sanction. A small Shinto altar was built in an old barn on the property in Iwama. O Sensei told one and all that this was the “birthplace of Aikido.” Read More
On a historical note, the war years saw Aikido co-opted into a national bureaucratic structure that governed all martial arts in Japan. O Sensei, it would appear, quietly stepped back from this. As the Doshu writes, “He did not openly oppose the actions of the government, but his integrity would not allow the art he had built in his own lifetimes, through blood, sweat, and tears, to be subsumed for convenience into a mere section of a large, bureaucratic organization.”
Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who began an underground church to avoid becoming part of the national Protestant church created by the Nazi government, so too O Sensei continued on his path outside the state's sanction. A small Shinto altar was built in an old barn on the property in Iwama. O Sensei told one and all that this was the “birthplace of Aikido.” Read More
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