Reports

Ronchamp March 2018

Seminar with Yoshigasaki Sensei

Franche-Comté

This year's seminar with Doshu Yoshigasaki in Ronchamp took place from March 16th to 18th. As usual, the seminar began on Friday evening and ended around noon on Sunday.
As always, club members from Ronchamp, Beaucourt, and Belfort, as well as guests from Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, were on the mat. Yvette and Bernhard came from Ticino. Yves and Michael came from Baden-Württemberg, but they had to return immediately after the morning training on Saturday. Like last year, Eric, who is blind, came from near Nancy. This meant that Sensei repeatedly addressed details that are important for blind aikido practitioners and that sighted aikido practitioners rarely pay attention to.
Overall, the seminar was not particularly demanding in terms of physical fitness. This was partly due to the large number of veterans on the mat and also because Sensei presented and practiced a new concept for understanding aikido techniques.

Acts

Sensei distinguishes between technique and technology (at least in French, English, and Italian; in German, technology has a different meaning than in English!). Techniques are human actions, while technology is processes involving materials, i.e., machines.
He further distinguishes between act and action (Akt – Aktion, atto – azione). He was inspired for this distinction by the English "action," which is used in filming. According to him, an act is a part of an action, i.e., an Aikido technique. After each act, a decision can be made as to how to proceed. An Aikido technique is a sequence of several acts. Although the acts are less precisely defined individually, their combination results in a precise technique.
Sensei therefore had students practice various simple attack situations and corresponding acts, such as katatedori, ryotemochi, yokomenuchi, which then evolved into techniques such as ikkyo irimi and tenshin, shihonage, or koteoroshi. The concept obviously complements the 4 rules for real-life Aikido that we already know.

Kotodama

On Saturday, Christoph took his JODEN exam, and André his OKUDEN. Therefore, Sensei again focused on the Kenkotaiso in great detail. He supplemented the knee bending and straightening exercises with sideways jumping exercises. On Sunday, he had Yvette demonstrate Aikitaiso and refined the explanations with further forward and backward jumping exercises for the ikkyo zengo undo.
Since misogi had been practiced little in Ronchamp up to that point, he also addressed this topic. The sound sequence TO-HO-KA-MI E-MI-TA-ME has no meaning, or if someone interprets meaning into it, it is not important to us. It is a KOTODAMA (言霊), i.e., a word/sound sequence whose sound is important. See also the Wikipedia article Kotodama . Sensei explicitly denied that the Kotodama had any magical meaning, as it appears, for example, in Kabbalah.
This type of misogi was first practiced in a religious group in Japan and was probably comparable to chanting, the reciting of mutra. It was then discovered by a samurai about 150 years ago and adapted for the training of young samurai.

心身統一

In this context, Sensei also addressed the true meaning of Shin Shin Tōitsu. Until now, it has always been translated as "unity or union of mind and body." The author suspects that this is due to the first English-American translation, where the first shin (心) is translated as "mind." In Japanese, however, it means "heart." According to Japanese tradition, Sensei says that the mind plays a less important role; what is important is the relationship between the heart (emotions, feelings) and the body (身).
In general, many explanations in Sensei's teaching arise from the differences between Japanese and European languages, and in the latter case, from the differences between Romance languages such as French and Italian and Germanic languages such as German and English. This makes it easy to observe the different concepts that exist in the various languages and how they are reflected in Aikido practice.

Conclusion

The seminar in Ronchamp was once again well organized by "old hand" Pierre Cornu, whether it was the meals at Le Rhien or the obligatory carp dinner on Saturday afternoon at Bruno's.
Many thanks to the aikidoka from Ronchamp; the next seminar with Sensei will take place at the same location in March 2019. See also the interesting report by Jean-Paul mars 2018 in French.

Group photo