Morihei Ueshiba & Morihiro Saito

Iwama: Mecca for foreign practitioners

Morihito Saito

The popularity of his books and his extensive foreign travels have resulted in the Iwama Dojo becoming a Mecca for foreign aikido students wishing to train intensively and gain experience in the use of the aiki ken and jo. Over the years, literally hundreds of aikidoka have journeyed from abroad, and often the foreign practitioners outnumber their Japanese counterparts at the Iwama Dojo. Perhaps the secret of Morihiro Saito Sensei’s success among foreign enthusiasts is his unique approach to the art, a mixture of tradition and innovation. On the one hand, he is totally committed to preserving intact the legacy of techniques bequeathed by the founder. That is to say, Saito Sensei views himself as providing a sense of continuity that enables present-day practitioners to understand the origins of aikido. At the same time, he has displayed considerable creativity in ordering and classifying the wealth of technical knowledge passed on by Morihei Ueshiba so as to reveal its internal logic and facilitate its transmission to future generations. The clarity of his instructional methods has been well received abroad.

Aiki ken and jo certification system

Saito Sensei has also instituted a novel system for the certification of instructors of aiki ken and jo, whereby traditional handwritten scrolls are given to those who have demonstrated certain skill levels with weapons. Separate from the dan grading system, the aim of the program is to preserve the ken and jo techniques developed by the founder that are closely related to and inseparable from aiki taijutsu. The scrolls include the names and detailed descriptions of aiki weapon techniques and are patterned after the mokuroku awarded in traditional schools before the introduction of the dan ranking system. This method of certification is quite unusual among modern martial arts.

Today Morihiro Saito Sensei continues a heavy schedule, instructing morning classes devoted to the aiki ken and jo and general practice in the evenings, where he teaches taijutsu techniques. Also, a number of training camps are held each year at the Iwama Dojo, a practice that has gone on since the days when the founder was still living. He is continuously honing his technique and devising new training routines to make his teaching methods more effective.

In the aikido world today, there is an ever-increasing tendency to regard the art as primarily a “health system” and the effectiveness of aiki techniques as almost inconsequential. In this context, the power and excellence of Morihiro Saito Sensei’s technique stands out in great relief and, due to the efforts of Saito and a few others, aikido can still claim the right to be regarded as a true martial art.

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