For those of you not at the dojo since Covid, we have spent the last nine months doing a variety of weapons practices. For my students, I imagine that doing so many different things could feel overwhelming or random, so I wanted to take a moment to explain the many ways these practices converge.
Traditionally, the Aikido curriculum covers tantotori (knife take-aways), sword and staff surubri (solo cuts and strikes), kumitachi and kumijo (paired sword and staff forms), and jonage (techniques applied with a staff). Because of social distancing guidelines, we have had to get creative and find new ways to train with weapons while avoiding direct contact with each other.
At first, back when we thought the pandemic would only last a few months (ha!), we did lots of suburi, kumitachi, and kumijo. It didn’t take long for that to become tiresome, and we soon branched out, trying new styles of practice, combinations of weapons, and means by which we applied our techniques.
We have gone off the rails a few times to be sure. However, in exploring these new ways I have come to appreciate how each weapon has its own distinct lessons to teach, while at the same time there is a common set of principles that underlies everything we do.
In a practical sense, there are some basic differences between the weapons we typically use in Aikido. The sword is a curved tool used for cutting soft targets that tends to slash and thrust in straight lines. Conversely, the jo (short staff), is a straight weapon used to strike hard targets that tends to move in a circular manner. By virtue of the sharp blade, the sword is generally held only at the handle. The jo permits greater freedom, with the hands sliding, spinning, and moving around with less restriction.
I find that practicing with a sword tends to sharpen my mind and clarify my movements. When swinging a sword, I want each cut to be perfect, and that desire for precision hones my attention.
When I pick up a jo I feel free, even playful. When someone grabs my jo, I find the techniques teach themselves. Feeling the feedback of the other person’s grab and moving in accord with the principles of aiki, it really does seem as though a limitless number of variations are possible.
Now, this doesn’t mean that simply holding a staff in one’s hands imbues him with magical powers. To the contrary, the exact shape, length, and construction of the jo defines, and in some ways limits, how it can be used. In practice, when we understand the nature of the weapon in hand, these characteristics actually help elucidate principles that can be otherwise hard to see in open-handed practice.
The jo is almost limitlessly strong along the length of the weapon. Applying force across the grain—sheer force, perpendicular to the length—jeapordizes the integrity of the weapon and tends to be counterproductive in technique. In a sense, the staff wants to be used a certain way, and practicing with that awareness informs our waza.
This aspect of the jo became evident when we started doing more nagewaza (throws with another person grabbing the staff) after moving from the paved parking lot behind the dojo to a local park where we could take ukemi on the grass. The most common feedback I gave my students when we practiced was to avoid using sheer force and instead move from center in a way that aligns the power of their movement with the grain of the wood.
Practicing with the jo became very interesting because when someone grabs your jo, the point of contact effectively becomes the entire length of the jo. The line of entry, angle of force, and degree of rotation become more clear when reflected in the jo rather than trying to suss out subtle contours of pressure within a grab or strike, as in open-handed practice. Furthermore, the details of the technique become even more obvious when you relax your hands because the increased sensitivity to what’s going on can inform movement.
In a more theoretical aspect, when uke hinders the movement of the jo or applies force to it, spirals are created. A spiral starts with a line of expansive force, and when that line meets resistance it begins to rotate and expand, describing a circular trajectory. Unlike a sword, a staff has two equal and opposite ends that function the same. When a point midway down the shaft is constrained by a grab, those ends serve to illustrate the dual opposing forces (in and out, forward and backward, yin and yang, aiki!) expressed in spiral movement.
Though the sword and staff have much to offer, we eventually needed something new, and escrima sticks fit the bill. I have never trained in Philipino fighting arts and claim no expertise. However, thanks to our local hardware stores and the magic of the interwebs, we made our own escrima sticks and learned a few basic patterns. Soon after, someone grabbed someone else’s stick and a new aspect of our training began to unfold.
Because of the length of the stick and subsequent lack of leverage when the other end is grabbed, it became readily apparent that trying to muscle the other person with hand strength was futile. That’s when I remembered some things Yoshi Shibata Sensei shared a few years back: don’t grab forcefully, let your hand pivot around the stick as you change angles, lead with the butt-end rather than trying to move the person with the tip.
Suddenly, ikkyo became quite doble. Allowing your hand to freely pivot lets you move to where you can effectively apply the mechanics of a sword cut. Sticks and swords—together at last!
Once we had ikkyo down, one of my students asked how to do shihonage. The sword-cut concept alone wasn’t enough to get a solid opening. After noodling around for a bit I was reminded of O-Sensei’s response when Mitsugi Saotome asked him the secret of Aikido: “The sword cuts and thrusts, that’s it.”
Aha! Like a mini jo in your hand you can thrust with an impressive range of motion when you allow your hand to pivot around the stick. From there, the cutting motion allows you to move and throw your partner in other ways. All of a sudden we could do shihonage, kokyunage, kaitennage, and more. Put a second escrima stick in your hand, and atemi (a strike to point out another’s openings) brings techniques to life even more.
The escrima sticks were a welcome change of pace after months of standard Aikido weapons training. They allowed us to practice dynamic, interactive paired techniques that felt much like our open-handed training.
From there, we returned to our bokken sword cuts with the escrima techniques in mind, and we worked to refine the mechanics of our swings with newfound awareness. When we would thrust with the escrima sticks, it taught us how to align our bodies in ways that weren’t obvious with a longer weapon like a jo. The weapons changed, but the principles of movement held. Same, but different. Different, but same.
The escrima sticks were fun, but we soon jumped further into the deep end of the pool. I found out you can buy ‘kids’ bokken’ at bargain-basement prices and ordered a handful for the dojo so we could try two-sword style. Someone had graciously (possibly in violation of copyright law) uploaded Saotome Sensei’s two-sword instructional video and we started working some of the patterns.
Having the escrima sticks in hand really felt like an extension of our bodies. When holding a bokken and wakizashi (short sword, which sounds much more cool than ‘kids’ bokken’) that extension is bladed. Adding this awareness of the blade forced us to look more closely at the angles with which we held the weapons and the arcs we drew. Deflecting an incoming cut required using the flat of the blade, while finishing with a decisive entry meant cutting with the monouchi (the final third of the blade).
Whereas the escrima sticks are blunt tools that inflict damage with the force of impact, the bokken and wakizashi of two-sword style are cutting tools and are therefore meant to move in a different way.
The escrima sticks are light and can be maneuvered easily and quickly. Holding a sword in each hand is cumbersome, and setting up an effective attack more time-consuming. The weight of the weapons required us to move more intentionally from center.
The asymmetry of the weapons’ lengths required us to be more aware of the left and right sides of our body as we moved. The unique characteristics of the weapons demanded a certain sensitivity and awareness of movement that we wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
For the past decade, I have trained regularly with William Gleason Sensei, who studied Kashima Shin-Ryu style sword in Japan. Since I can only make it down to his dojo once or twice a month, I have had lots of exposure to this style of sword but never committed the patterns to memory—until Covid hit, and suddenly I had an excuse to do so.
Compared to the standard curved sword we use in Aikido, the Kashima bokken is completely straight, longer, and significantly heavier. Similar to the jo, a long, straight weapon, the Kashima sword tends to be wielded with spiral movements, which contrasts notably to the stop-and-start linnear chopping movements we tend to see in traditional Aikido sword.
The most basic cut in the Kashima repertoire is kesagiri, a diagonal cut to the base of the neck. Though relatively simple, it’s so different from what we tend to do in Aikido that it took weeks for my students just to get the fundamentals (and trust me, I’m still working myself!).
Though the forms of the Kashima sword are notably different from those of Aikido, the two schools share many similarities in principle. One of the Fivefold Laws of the Kashima Shin-Ryu is kobo ittai, meaning ‘offense and defense are one.’ In the Kashima Shin-Ryu sword kata, there is little blocking and parrying. One stays safe not by defending, but because the opponent is forced to respond to your attack and the two swordsmen interact dynamically without so much need for clashing swords.
O-Sensei is widely quoted as saying that Aikido is ‘90% atemi.’ This may sound uniquely violent, though in Aikido this means we must recognize we are all capable of harming one another and to move in a way that doesn’t leave us open to attack. Offense is defense.
Similar to the jo, when making contact with someone else’s sword we don’t respond by pushing back with greater strength. As Gleason Sensei says, “Strong is dead.” Rather than meet force with force, we maintain the point of contact and pivot such that one side of the sword yields (yin) while the other enters into the opponent's space (yang). Defense is offense.
I recognize it can seem overwhelming at times to learn new things, but there’s no need to worry. Each weapon has something new to offer if we are willing to listen, and with each step the unfamiliar becomes more familiar. Our training should never be about the arbitrary accumulation of knowledge anyway. Rather, when we train properly we move more and more closely into accord with each moment, regardless of the situation we are in.