More of what is in a name - Omote and Ura reconstruction

O Sensei himself was not regimented in how he taught, and apparently neither was Sokaku Takeda.  For the students who followed them, the well formulated methods of teaching that Kano Jigoro successfully advocated for and successfully implemented nation wide for Judo probably influenced everyone to some degree.

(Not necessarily directly, though Kano shared many students with Ueshiba.  I mean more in the same way that BJJ and MMA has forced everyone to consider their ground game.  Kano arrived in the scene with methods that helped students and teachers clearly understand what was being taught and how well the student was progressing.  The promise of understanding within years, instead of decades of chaotic instruction must have had huge repercussions and mass appeal.)

There are separate associations with their own names for techniques.  The wide variety of practice methods out there would seem to indicate that O Sensei's teachings were very different for each student and a wide variety of technical expressions were tolerated.  

Wide varieties in names were also apparently tolerated or eventually came to be.  For example, a very rudimentary wrist twist is known as Kote Mawashi, Nikajo, and Nikyo in Aikido alone.  It exists in some form in every martial art I have every seen demonstrated, with many different names.

One technique I was required to learn was called both Ikkyo and Nikyo Omote.  I never learned how to distinguish which was which.  This picture is labelled Ikkyo below, and this is the technique I am referring to.

I learned this next one as a Wakigatame.  Someone asked Sensei if it was Gokyo, and I remember him saying, "No."  Another higher ranked direct student of O Sensei I met a few years later said, "Yes."  Here is a picture of Shioda Sensei doing the same technique, labelled Nikyo (by an American dojo - Shioda used Nikajo to my knowledge, and maybe never used Nikajo for this movement.  The point is how badly we communicate within our collective art).  It appears in Daito Ryu, but I don't recall which catalogue or what it's name is.

As people were coming to train with O Sensei with a wide background in traditional martial arts, many techniques in the Aikido syllabus already had multiple names.  The student could fall back on terms stemming from guarded family arts, insular clan arts, as well as exposure to the martial arts of other countries including Okinawa, China and Korean.  If O Sensei didn't provide the name, the student already had a framework for labeling the technique.  Look up words like "walk," "stand," or "hold" in an English thesaurus - I am glad to have only a handful of Japanese terms for these subjects!

Names eventually became "correct" as declarations of allegiance to political bodies especially in the West.  Language barriers probably played a role.

To a native Japanese martial artist, the names might very well be completely interchangeable - most of the Japanese technical terms like Kote Mawashi are very rudimentary and describe the movement, offering no deeper spiritual meaning.  

If that is the case, the fault isn't really with the Japanese labels but rather in Caucasian monolingual nobodies like myself who are trying to learn "Thee Right Way."