The Ballad of Bob (or, my limited Tomiki experiences part 2)

Bob (not his real name) had severe head injuries.  In a fight years before, his head had been struck with a baseball bat multiple times, leaving him legally blind.  His ankles, knees, shoulders, and back appeared to be made of glass – his first forward roll attempt left him too injured to practice for a month.  All the instructors at this school quickly wrote him off, which meant he came to me.  Seiza and any ukemi were all seriously painful and seriously injurious to him.

Bob was also 6’8” and around 320lbs.  When I tried to load him in a koshinage, he could leave his hands and feet flat on the ground while lying across my hips.  He could not arch backwards without his back spasming – a simple backbend left him sitting out for half the class.  His shoulder would spasm when he was gently stretched in Ikkyo.

This wasn’t my school; I had moved to a new city after getting my Shodan in 2000 and intended the move only be temporary.  The head instructor there had Shihan aspirations and was something of a rogue in our association.  He had his own way of doing everything, but he had skills that I was interested in and this was the only Aikido school in town.  The instructor also had other influences besides Kawahara Sensei, and really planned to be an equal of his shihan rather than a student.  To his credit, this teacher did achieve the rank of shihan before his untimely death.  This was not a Kawahara Sensei dojo, and this dojo was soon to be thrown out of the CAF.  The CAF test syllabus and Kawahara Sensei were not followed there.  Many things I wish I had known before I moved there for work and family reasons.

When Bob would ask me, I would tell him Aikido might not be for him.  He would take it as a personal challenge, redouble his efforts and show up for every class (spending most of the class in too much pain to do anything resembling Aikido as I had been taught it.)  I was completely at a loss.

He would take the bus to the dojo, then by the time class was over the bus would have stopped for the night.  Legally blind, he would walk miles on icy streets in the dead of a cold, hard, windy winter to get home to his trailer.  I started to drive him home after class. 

It was very apparent that his size had not been enough to keep him safe in the past from his injuries.  However, his size alone was enough that a local security company hired him as a night watchman.  I was nervous for him.

He quickly got bored and frustrated practicing Tenkan.  He could not receive anything on the entire 5^th kyu test in the CAF.  He was determined to test, even to perform the koshinage.  It didn’t matter that Kawahara Sensei took one look at him at a seminar and said not to bother – “John, he’ll never do koshinage for real.”  I learned this was like waving a red flag in front of a bull to tell Bob this:  he responded by trying to do koshinage to everyone in the dojo.  His hips came up to my rib cage when he stood naturally, and he could not bend his knees much without pain, and his back would be messed up for several minutes just for taking any weight on his low back.

Weapons work was not a solution.   He never wanted to practice solo.  His shoulder and wrists would quickly get injured with any momentum or impact and he couldn’t raise his shoulders above his head comfortably.  His vision also meant that he would swing at the vague outline of the person in front of him, with no precision really possible but enough power to make any of his partners nervous.  Bob stated he would never carry a stick with him, he wasn’t allowed to use one at work, and the average ceiling was too low for him to do a Shomen uchi.  Really, a Bo staff fit him like my Jo fit me.  His mammoth neuropathy-fraught hands would frequently lose control of the jo and send it flying/falling in a variety of disconcerting directions. 

He still said he loved Aikido.  I offered to drive him to a Taiji class, knowing he would not quit if I asked him to.  I was disgusted with the actual instructors at the dojo who continued to encourage him while never instructing him.  He injured himself with frightening rapidity, and I got exhausted just listening to the litany of damaged muscles and joints.  He had people telling him all his life even before his injuries that he was a freak and a loser and not good enough.  His life had been a hard, long list of challenges that mostly beat him down.  He had pride, determination and a desire to Eat Bitter like no one I ever had the privilege of teaching.

 

 

A neurologist had been teaching Aikido briefly in Saskatoon and had retired from Aikido.  As part of leaving the Art, he donated a large number of books to Saskatoon Aikikai.  I had jumped on a number of books at the time, and found two small thin books by a woman named Dr. Lee Ah Loi.  I knew very little about Tomiki Aikido.  The books sat on my shelves.  The material was too vastly different from what I was training in, so I thought someday I would return to them when I was ready.

Then, thanks to the internet I found out Tomiki had been six feet tall.  He had not been the usual 5’5” or less that I was used to seeing in Japanese instructors.  O Sensei had a student that must have towered over him and everyone else in the dojo.  I started to re-read those two books.

The differences really were in the basic starting point.  The “Hand in the Face” that I had never heard a name for had several distinct specific variations.  In practice, we seldom did these motions but they did feel natural in randori.  Except, we never practiced the falls out of these techniques, so they scared everyone in randori.  Even when this technique was appropriate to do, we had a laundry list of techniques we tried to do instead.  A certain aggressive personality type became associated with “Hand In The Face.”

In contrast, this dojo was trying to teach Bob Shihonage, Kaitenage, Koshinage, Aikiotoshi and Suwari Waza.  He could sort of do Iriminage or Kokyu Ho (Sokumen Iriminage) but the upward motion meant he tended to miss my head (the top of my head could have rested in his armpit).  He would miss Ikkyo and hit me in the head at least as often as he would control my arm.

He loved Shomenate right away.  His vision let him dimly see my head, and his bearpaw hands covered my whole face.  I had to work on my own ukemi to avoid a concussion.  The first three Tomiki techniques came very naturally to him.  The third in particular was very strong from a high position.  He was thrilled and felt like he was making progress.  He liked my poor attempts and adaptations of the releases.

I hoped I would never offend any Tomiki teachers if I met them – and I had no illusions that I was doing their techniques well.  I vaguely knew some Aikikai teachers would be angry I had gone in this direction if I paid Tomiki Aikido credit – but few Aikido teachers even knew what Tomiki Aikido looked like.  At this point, the local head instructor was out of the country all the time and his own students did not teach anymore.  I had inherited a regular class time by sheer attrition.  I was only in this particular city temporarily, and it was getting time for me to leave.

Bob insisted on being tested for 5^th kyu.  I was not present.  The local instructors asked him to do an otoshi variation for koshinage that left him too injured to practice or work for a month just for attempting it.  I had even told them Bob was given dispensation specifically from the technical director of the CAF, and this was only an optional technique for anyone anyway.  Bob was given his 5^th kyu by those present.  Months later when I was living in the USA, he called me upset when he found the test paperwork had never been sent in or filed.  He never received a 5^th kyu certificate to my knowledge.  The dojo had collapsed after I left, and Bob had been ordered to quit Aikido by the people who “promoted” him.  He missed my classes.  For all the times I asked him to quit, I felt livid on his behalf.  I have lost contact with him, and I hope he is happy and in good health.

The lesson I learned from my brief and poor study of Tomiki Aikido was that different heights do make a difference in how techniques are performed.  O Sensei did not demand the first Aikidoist 8^th Dan he ever promoted act like a short man.  The heavy emphasis on “traditional samurai suwari waza” was nowhere near as evident.  The more-difficult-to-apply but safer standing pins were given more emphasis.  Atemi were given more emphasis.

I also learned about my own technique – at 5’11” I was the second tallest in my original school.  My one time nemesis was, of course, the taller man at 6’1”.  All I had known at the time was this one person was harder to throw than the 5’8” guy who had been my uke for years for grading.  With 6’8” Bob, my ego had to be left at the door and I had to wake up.  My Ikkyo was for a taller person against a shorter person; most of my techniques were.  I had to spend huge amounts of time playing with hanmi handachi (either role) to find out what I decided Tomiki Sensei already knew.

Someone with superior height, superior reach and superior stride did not have to be a “bad,” challenging Aikido student.  I could teach a tall man to work to his strengths.  I did not have to order Bob to imitate someone 5” tall to have him practice our art.  I could practice and teach around devastating injuries – and no one has ever come close to offering the same challenges that Bob did. 

As time went on, I also learned that Tomiki was the original Wartime Sensei.  I had been shown many practices that were declared “more martial” by the dubious virtue that they were painful and injurious to practice by all concerned.  In “Angry White Pajamas,” the Yoshinkan student author states that too much Aikido practice meant he had to stop running and take up cycling instead.  By contrast, the powerful simple movements that Bob was practicing also were less harmful to his body.

I am unhappy that I was never given the name of “Hand In The Face,” nor a specific training method for it and it’s variations.  For any Aikido students reading this, I highly recommend the Randori No Kata of Tomiki Sensei as worthy of study.  The first four techniques do not appear on our test requirements, but they are so fundamental that they appear spontaneously in our free practice all the time.  This is a piece of Aikido heritage that I recommend we embrace.  Damn the politics.  We all know this technique.  It has a name and a teaching method.

I really enjoy Nick Lowry's work on Youtube.  If you, like me, never learned the name of "Hand In The Face," check out his video on Shomen Ate, the first basic in Tomiki Aikido:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urELp6i07u4

The Second Technique, or Aigamae Ate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaJv7LHHfps

The Third Technique, or Gyaku Gamae Ate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA_eWzV8too

There are 17 techniques in Randori No Kata, and I recommend the videos whole heartedly.