Aikidō for Life

Aikido for Life – Gaku Homma

There is a nice second hand bookstore in Mountain View called , I alway go there when I’m in town, even if it is only for the smell of old books. One book I bought there is Aikidō for Life by 本間 学 (Homma Gaku), a direct student of Ueshiba and Iwama Ushideshi who moved to the US and opened his own dōjō. While the book is basically an overview of his beginner program, I found the observations and the insights around it interesting.

Aikidō for Life

North Atlantic Books
ISBN : 9781556430787

Clearly Homma is an outsider, 日本館 (Nippon-Kan), his dōjō, is un-affiliated and he seems un-impressed by most of the talk about ki or any mystical force, his book concentrates on the pragmatic aspects of running a beginner’s class. There is a quite a bit of work separating aikidō from other, more competitive and/or agressive martial arts, but also quite a lot of interesting insights in how the students behave, how they sit on the mat, how partners are chosen. In that sense, the book is refreshing because it describes what really happens in a dōjō, certains persons preferring cute girls as partners, people being tired, confused, or simply out of sync with their partners.
These explanations are interleaved with a few actual techniques, and some illustrations that help give a idea of what the author is trying to convey. I liked the fact that Homma insists early on that there is not so much right and wrong techniques, but more a sense of consistency between the techniques and that each technique must be adapted for the practitioner (tori) and the receiver (uke). There are also some insightful explanations on the relationship between tori and uke.

With 110 pages, this is a quite a short book and certainly a worthy reading. A scan of the book is available on the web-site of his dōjō.

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