English summary:
Aikido is a modern Japanese martial art developed by Ueshiba Morihei in the 1920s and 1930s – yet it is one of the best known genre of these arts, vastly popular around the world. Among practitioners of Aikido it is widely believed that this art is so unique as not having any predecessors in the long history of Japanese martial arts – this short lecture is to revise this picture by introducing Aikido as a continuation of pre-existing trends.
In the history of classical Japanese martial arts (the term classical referring here to their foundation before 1868) a clear tendency can be tracked towards specialization. In the first place these arts aimed to provide an overall training in combat skills, equally teaching fighting with different weapons, but later they started to concentrate on one or two of their favourite areas: swordsmanship schools, spear-fighting schools and so on were born. It was this very trend that gave existence of the comparatively new genre of jūjutsu, the ’flexible skills’, a term not easy to define but roughly meaning special combat skills. Jūjutsu typically included fighting with emergency weapons like daggers, short swords or even an umbrella, tecniques of empty-handed fighting or to tie an opponent with rope. These techniques and jūjutsu schools became very popular during the extended peace of Tokugawa era, hundreds of schools flourished all around the country.
When the Meiji restoration in 1868 and the subsequent modernization/westernization of Japan’s armed and police forces made classical martial arts at once obsolent, masters of those schools were forced to change profession or to try to find new ways how their arts could be adapted to the changing needs of Japanese society. One typical answer was Kanō Jigorō’s jūdō, the thorough modernization of a martial art and its positioning as a competitive sports fitting to the demands of physical education. Another martial art that more or less copied the success of jūdō but on completely different grounds was Aikidō. Its founder, Ueshiba Morihei (1883-1969) was a follower of a religious sect, Ōmoto-kyō and sought to express his desire for a peaceful, divine way of life through his art: making Aikidō unique among martial arts with its emphasis on self-expression and avoiding harsh conflict with the opponent, both physically and mentally.
Still, Aikidō has its roots deep in the development of classical Japanese jūjutsu, that can not and should not be denied: rather it is a fulfillment of one of the possible directions a martial art can develop, faithful to its technical inheritence but novel in goals. The roughly one million people practicing Aikidō worldwide are paying homage each day to this heritage.