Complete Aikido. Christopher Watson G.

dojo etiquette as bowing to the kamiza before and after each practice session, and is a direct result of that first Hombu encounter. One may also consider it, as Suenaka Sensei does, another demonstration of O’Sensei’s guiding philosophy that “The true nature of budo lies in the loving protection of all things.” When new students, at first uncomfortable with the practice, ask why they must embrace at the end of class, always Suenaka Sensei’s reply is, “Because O’Sensei hugged me.”

      At O’Sensei’s invitation, Suenaka remained at the Hombu that day. Nobuyoshi Tamura, at the time one of O’Sensei’s uchi deshi (live-in disciples) and whom Suenaka had briefly met with O’Sensei in Hawaii, was kind enough to give him a tour of the Hombu and to make arrangements for Suenaka to stay the night, seeing to it he had a room and could find his way. After managing to squeeze a bit of practice into what was already a very full day, Suenaka was preparing to retire when O’Sensei happened by and extended an invitation to join him at breakfast the next morning. Suenaka went to bed a happy man.

      Suenaka Sensei with O’Sensei at Iwama, home of the Aiki Jinja (shrine); April, 1964.

      What was originally intended to be a brief afternoon visit turned into a three-day stay. Suenaka rose the next morning, making sure he was at table by seven o’clock sharp for breakfast with the Founder. “I was overwhelmed by the honor,” Suenaka recalls. “I don’t remember much about it other than that. The fact that my Japanese wasn’t all that great kept me from really carrying on a conversation, but I did ask him many questions. It was just a very honorable event to be there.”

      Breakfast concluded, Suenaka headed off for the day’s first class. As the years passed and their relationship progressed, O’Sensei often invited Suenaka not only to breakfast, but dinner as well, a pattern that began during this first visit and continued throughout all of Suenaka Sensei’s stays at the Hombu in the years to come. “Naturally, I was always there. I never missed out having breakfast or dinner with him!” Suenaka usually sat with others at the same table as O’Sensei, rather than the separate table reserved for deshi, while O’Sensei’s wife Hatsu, as per custom, took her meals in the kitchen with the domestic help.

      The first full day at the Hombu unfolded predictably enough. Sometimes O’Sensei would teach the first class, although often, at his father’s discretion, the first class of the day was taught by Kisshomaru Ueshiba Doshu, known then as wakasensei, a title given to the son of a system founder before he becomes the successor (today, Moriteru Ueshiba, son of Doshu, bears the title wakasensei). Afterwards, Doshu would usually turn his attention to administrative duties, leaving the day’s instruction in the hands of a shihan. At that time, Koichi Tohei was still in Hawaii, but when at the Hombu the responsibility of teaching the next few classes was his, though he would often designate various students to teach throughout the day. Instruction commenced at around 6:30 a.m., and ended just before 9:00 p.m. Suenaka attended as many classes as he could, and enjoyed dinner with the Founder before retiring that night. The third day proceeded as the first: breakfast with O’Sensei, then classes all day long, and dinner before falling into bed.

      O’Sensei at Iwama during the Aiki-Matsuri (Aiki Festival); April, 1964.

      For more than the obvious reasons, Suenaka found his first aikido instruction at the Hombu, and his study there in the ensuing years, a singular experience. When one studies an art or style of art, no matter what it may be, under one instructor or group of instructors for a long period of time and then visits another dojo teaching the same art or style, quite often the student notices differences in technique—sometimes subtle, sometimes significant—that can make it seem as if he or she has studied an entirely different art. There is always a degree of pride at stake, of wanting to acquit oneself and one’s teachers well in a familiar, yet foreign environment. It was no different for Suenaka; indeed, if anything, the responsibility he felt was even greater. He had spent eight years studying aikido in Hawaii, thousands of miles away from where he now stood, under the watchful eyes of the Founder. He was one of the first fruits of the seed Koichi Tohei planted in Hawaii in 1953, and very much represented the outcome of that maiden effort. And there was another source of pressure as well. Though Japanese by blood, Suenaka was American by birth. While completely Japanese in appearance, English was his native tongue; as Suenaka has noted several times earlier, though he could make himself understood, he was at the time by no means fluent in Japanese. He was, in many ways, a foreigner, as much as any American serviceman stationed in Japan, though in his case his native hosts’ expectations of his behavior were immeasurably higher.

      It was with a mixture of confident anticipation and wariness that Suenaka first stepped onto the Hombu mat. The other students were friendly, but distant, and were obviously testing him with each and every technique. Despite his credentials, learning aikido under Tohei Sensei and his designated instructors, Suenaka realized he would have to prove himself. It is a tribute to his skill and tutelage that he was not found wanting:

      “The waza at the Hombu was somewhat different, in that there were several other shihan teaching, so the style of aikido, so to speak, was a little different from what I had learned in Hawaii. Everybody had his own interpretation of what aikido was, under O’Sensei, so it wasn’t really drastically different, but I noticed little differences here and there, which made it interesting for my study. My aikido fit in pretty well, because at that time, or course, Tohei Sensei was the chief instructor, and so everybody pretty much followed suit; his particular style of aikido was reflected in all the other instructors’ aikido.”

      During his years at the Hombu, Suenaka noticed one major difference between the way O’Sensei taught and the way Koichi Tohei taught, a difference that prophesied Tohei’s later split with the Aikikai:

      “O’Sensei never really emphasized ki. He talked about ki, but more than, you could say, ‘instructing’ ki, he demonstrated ki in his waza, whereas Tohei Sensei really stressed ki development and using ki in aikido techniques. O’Sensei would give lectures on ki, but not while he was demonstrating aikido. He would mention specific techniques during his lectures, and demonstrated using ki in techniques as part of the lecture, in a lot of different ways. But Tohei Sensei stressed ki a lot more while he was teaching waza than O’Sensei did.”

      Though he needed no further convincing after his private experiences with O’Sensei in Hawaii, it was during one of O’Sensei’s lectures that Suenaka received a forceful demonstration of the power of ki:

      “O’Sensei was demonstrating what true ki was supposed to be like or feel like, and he used me as uke. He was holding a chopstick in his hand, but he didn’t say what he was going to do. I was kind of skeptical, but I trusted him. I never hesitated to attack him. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me or really hurt me badly. He didn’t tell me how to attack him, he just said, you know, ‘Come get me.’ As I attacked him, he struck me in the forehead with the chopstick and knocked me down. He knocked the heck out of me! I almost lost consciousness, very close to it. Everything went white for a few seconds, then I got up and went back to my place and sat down, and I asked someone there ‘What happened?’ They said, ‘Man, he knocked you down with a chopstick!’ I had a big welt in the middle of my forehead from where he’d hit me with this chopstick! He knocked me silly!”

      As Suenaka says, while O’Sensei never lectured about ki during waza, the strength of his ki—as well as his considerable physical strength, despite his advanced years—was apparent:

      “There was another time, when we were doing katate-tori,

      where I would go in and grab O’Sensei. He would grab my wrist as he countered the attack and throw me across the room. And when I got up, there would be a bruise already forming on my wrist from where he’d grabbed me. [O’Sensei] didn’t like it when the uke didn’t give him a strong attack; some-times it would seem like he would throw you even harder if you didn’t attack him hard. And then he would hardly ever use you as an uke again. [O’Sensei] used me as an uke a lot, because I always came in and attacked him hard! I knew he would wipe me out when I did, but again, I knew he would throw