Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Summer Vacation Aikido Club Retreat

Last weekend, the TUFS aikido club went to Niigata Prefecture for a club retreat. The full duration of the camp was Friday to Tuesday, since university students are still on holidays, and will be until the beginning of October. However, since the Japanese language centre where we are being educated runs on a different schedule, our lessons began start of last week, so us exchange students could only attend the camp over the weekend. Even so, I had a great time developing my aikido, and developing relationships with the other members of the aikido club.

Each day we had a training session in the morning and one in the afternoon, both of two hours duration. Not only students from the TUFS aikido club attended this camp - aikido members affiliated with the university but who attend either the NHK aikido club or the Aikido International Headquarters dojo also came to train with us. In total, there were about 20 people in attendance during the weekend. As a result, I had the opportunity to practice with a variety of styles and learn to adapt to different personalities, not just rehash rote learned sequences. As a result of the camp, I feel that performing each technique has become more natural, and consequently more effective. One of the important lessons our aikido sensei taught us was to be responsive to the signals that our opponent is sending, most of which they are performing subconsciously. By tuning ourselves with our opponents' movements, we can literally effortlessly bring them under physical submission. Of course, this theory will take many years of practice to refine.

I was too busy practising aikido to take photos, hehe. But instead, here's some footage of aikido taken at the university's martial arts exhibit at the beginning of the school year. This demonstration, performed by members of the TUFS aikido club, was to promote the club and encourage new members to join, so I think it's ok to help them publicise it. If you ever come to TUFS, consider trying out Aikido for yourself :)


And because we all love Hollywood, here's the aikido master who brought Aikido into the limelight - Steven Seagal.


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