Breathing in Death, Breathing out Beauty

On Monday, Shihan’s theme throughout the session is “feeling the techniques breathe”. Especially memorable as an illustration of this is a flowing irimi-nage starting from shomen-uchi. As uke’s arm comes up to be brought down in shomen-uchi, nage’s arm rises simultaneously and without touching uke’s arm, simply moves, drawing uke’s body forward in an open and inviting gesture as nage steps around in tenkan, and forms a wide open ring of energy with the additional use of his other arm, then steps around again and finishes in an elegant pose, the front hand slightly rising up as an afterthought, “zanshin”- as if he was waving good bye to uke, who is gracefully rolling away at this stage. In this particular irimi-nage, there seems to be hardly any direct physical contact between nage and uke.
While we are in the middle of practising this, Shihan interrupts to comment that right now, our technique is breathing, and we should be conscious of that and remember the feeling.

The following Wednesday, he takes up the thread saying: “Last time I said your techniques should breathe. Yamada-Sensei often spoke of breathing trees. I suppose the tatami in this dojo are also breathing. Practise in that spirit!”
When he is demonstrating another technique, he pauses to tell us about a Moroccan researcher who bought one of his DVDs in the Netherlands and thereupon decided to come to Shosenji this summer to study aikido.
“On this DVD,” says Shihan, “it said ‘The aikidoka uses his opponent’s own power to topple him.’ Many Western people seem to be under the impression that once you start training aikido, the world is going to turn into a Steven Segal movie. What people often fail to see is that in aikido we are trying to achieve harmony with our partner. What we are trying to do is not to topple someone, but to be really good friends with everybody we are practising with.”
And with this, he demonstrates a beautiful, flowing kotegaeshi, with a slight fermate on touching uke’s arm with his arm closest to him, maintaining a light but irresistible connection, keeping it at bay, before the other hand and the tenkan come in and lead to a harmonious finishing chord.
I get to practise a seated nikyo with Sumiyoshi-Sensei who kindly enlightens me on some technical basics, like moving off to the side with a sweeping atemi to set up the finishing move that has uke lying on the floor with a sore wrist, unable to get up.
With Itamar, I practise a sankyo to yonkyo transition, and Shihan comes in to explain to us how in the sankyo part uke’s arm, needs to be twisted towards him, turning the outside of his arm in the direction of his centre and beyond, with a tendency to aim the movement behind him, in order to make him uncomfortable enough to want to move out of it. Then follows the yokomen sword cut-like yonkyo, stepping around into ura to bring uke down.
I get to practise a pretty throw from ushiro-ryo-kata-dori with Hattori-san, and again Shihan comes to our help, this time explaining that before we can put the finishing touch to this move, we really need to wind up our body and take uke’s balance away in order to then have an easy time finishing off the throw.
We do a kokyu nage with nage sitting, and uke attacking him from the side with a katatedori. We witness a demonstration of this being achieved mainly by inviting uke using hip-movement while seated. Consequently we try to give the technique this subtle, powerful twist, which proves to be a difficult quest.
We finish with our usual seated kokyu nage, another breathing technique.
Meanwhile the wind outside is breathing the flowers off the trees, and for these weeks we have to watch the flowers fall, I suggest that everybody has a listen to Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden”, a European exploration of the topic of youth and death. But it has to be the Amadeus Quartett performance. In most other performances, the piece is distorted beyond recognition because it doesn’t breathe.
Listening to this work while watching the blossoms fall, European artistic romanticism meets Japanese seasonal romanticism. And although their shapes are as different as night and day, the Japanese subtle and seeking individual, internal harmony with nature, the European pronounced and seeking the communicative articulation of every emotion, we can see a common theme here. The cherry blossoms are beautiful and die young, at the height of their beauty: a close link exists between the seemingly opposing factors of youth and death.
Motojiro Kajii creates an even starker contradiction to be contemplated at the sight of the pure, pink beauty of Japanese spring. In his famous short story “Under the Cherry Trees”, to appreciate the unbelievable extent of the blossoms’ beauty, he has to conjure up images of sickening multitudes of dead bodies buried underneath the trees, crawling with maggots, pouring their detrital juices into the ground to feed the trees’ roots and thus give them the power to grow their celebrated beauty.
His European counterpart Schubert who took on the same subject around 100 years earlier knew what he was talking about when he wrote Death and the Maiden. Out of his 16 brothers and sisters, 11 died in infancy. He witnessed the sudden transition from youth to death as a natural phenomenon, just like we do here in Japan every year, seeing the blossoms sprout, bewitch the world with their beauty for a few weeks, and then come down in soft spring snow storms, melting into the sun of May, then dissolving into the rain of June.
Like in the Tao Te Ching, however, it is only this contradiction of opposites that makes the world whole and enables us to exist and perceive inside it. At Fred’s Café recently, they were playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A good choice, as the spring flowers and their death make us especially sensitive to the change of the seasons. But I cannot even hear a single season in the flat sound that comes dripping out of the speakers. There is no depth, no articulation, no imagery, no life. In Japan many people seem to be under the impression that once you start learning how to play the violin or the piano, you can conjure up the beauty of Mozart, or Bach, or Beethoven, and the world turns into a symphony. What they fail to see, however, is that what we are really trying to achieve in performing is to achieve complete harmony with instrument or voice, to breathe through it, and let it breathe. Only then will they come to life, and youth and beauty spring forth from places where before, there was nothing but ugliness and death.
So, let’s hear the wind breathe, watch the blossoms fly, listen to the maiden die, feel our techniques breathe, and make really good friends while training aikido. This is the principal of life, and of the arts, including the martial arts. You breathe in death. And you breathe out beauty. Ah, here comes the blow. Um, here comes the throw. The eternal circle expressed in the open and the closed mouth of the two lion dogs guarding the temple. Spring is almost over, and as the sultry summer heat is fast approaching, we have to remember to keep breathing.