Aunkai Seminar in Hong Kong - March 2014

 

 

I remember in 2008, there was a great deal of discussion on Aikiweb regarding internal power, largely prompted by Ellis Amdur's book "Dueling with Osensei", alongside a deep unease and growing consensus that O Sensei Ueshiba Morihei did not teach the secret of Aiki to his students. Modern day Aikido was an empty art, which was useless for a real fight. After much heated debate, four names kept cropping up who seemed to have the "goods", who had rediscovered the secrets of internal power and were openly teaching these secrets to Aikidoka and other martial artists.  As a result of this "revelation" the Aikido community was and remains split between the traditionalists who favored the old way of doing waza and those who wanted bring the Aiki back into Aikido. The names of these four people were Dan Harden in Massachusetts, Mike Sigman in Durango Colorado, Sam Chin in the Hudson Valley New York, and Akuzawa Minoru in Tokyo.

 

At that time I was working training Aikido quite diligently 3-4 times a week, as well as Bagua and Yiquan twice a week, and having just started in a very bureaucratic job it was shortly after I started this blog in 2009. I had ample time to read and research on internal marital arts and internal power, pretty much trying to get my hands on any book in Chinese, English or Japanese that dealt with the topic. Books such as "Karate and Ki" by Kenji Ushiro and "Transparent Power" by Tatsuo Kimura were a couple of such tomes that were translated into English and being discussed on Aikiweb. Being stuck in Hong Kong, I did not believe that I would ever have the opportunity to meet any of the big Four and as was becoming quite apparent, much of the problem with Aiki is that "it has to felt". It didn't help that my Chinese IMA teacher never talked about dantian and my Aikido Sensei seemed to be teaching traditional Aikido. 

 

So fast forward to 2014, and today I have had the great honor of being invited to be the translator for Azukawa Sensei's first seminar in Hong Kong hosted by my friend Xavier Duval. Xavier had trained with him in Tokyo and who also trained with me under the same Aikido instructor in Hong Kong. Xavier is a jujitsu instructor and his website is Nihon Tai Jitsu Hong Kong. It is a culmination of a long journey for me, and I have to express the utmost gratitude that having now had the honor of training with and feeling three of the four masters, something definitely unforeseen and beyond my wildest dreams. (For those interested, you can search the old posts on this blog). 

 

The seminar was set to start at 1.15pm until 8pm at night and there was a pretty good turnout for the what can be considered a pretty esoteric and obscure art. However I have to say that Azukawa Sensei is 47 yet moves like a man many years younger than his age. The seminar began with a brief introduction regarding Azukawa Sensei's background and the fact that he had trained in Chinese martial arts (including xingyi) and Sanda in his youth and had even taken part in a competition in Beijing almost 25 years before, which was when he first came to Hong Kong. However after he returned to Japan, he met some masters who were involved in Kobudo, who showed a very different way of moving and training. From his foundation he began to study and craft his own system. For further details please refer to the Aunkai Official Website. 

 

The first session consisted of his three basic exercises - Shiko, Mapo and Tenchijin. Not a great deal of time was spent on Shiko, but it was emphasized that it was a basic exercise for building up the legs, and one should start doing it 20-30 times and then work up to 300 times in one session. Sensei emphasized that it was an exercise also for training alignment of the body. Next the Mapo exercises (which are the same characters for horse stance in Chinese) were used to demonstrate how to ground an incoming force and how to realign the body to push out without bracing or muscle power. This is done by relaxing the chest, sinking into the tanden, while keeping the body in a natural upright posture. No concaving the chest and fajin for Azukawa Sensei.

 

What impressed me most, and albeit this was just a taste of Aunkai was that Azukawa Sensei was very good at realigning his body internally and using the power from shifting his center of gravity to throw his opponents. And this was all done much more softly that the impression I had obtained from his DVDs, this may have been due to the fact that apparently Sensei has softened a lot over the years. And he did his best to try and covey how he did this by doing (to my eyes) exaggerated movements of his torso and area between his sternum and tanden. The second part of the seminar then moved on to applications that arose out of the basic exercises. Many of his waza or techniques that he used to demonstrate were from Aikido (such as Aiki-age and Shihonage and Iriminage) as I think the vast majority of his audience in seminars in Europe and the US were from the Aikido community. He kept saying that one thing that Aikido did well was its ability to popularize the art. But there were a few examples from Karate also (as there was also a 4th Dan Shotokan instructor amidst us) and he was not shy to demonstrate that his punches were done in a relaxed internal manner without overt use of muscle, where he "brought the force of gravity to his fist".

At the same time he would also demonstrate how the techniques were done traditionally in a fast and muscular manner, and he can really move fast. He had already mastered the usual method of fighting, which relied on speed and power, before moving on and evolving this new internal system.

 

Azukawa Sensei kept his descriptions to a minimum as he wanted to focus upon the relaxation aspect of the art and taking the muscular tension out of the practice. But there was a sense that there was also a rich theoretical framework behind the art that he did not have time to share with us, such as lines of force behind the back. Most of the work was done in partnered practice and he would go around and try to resolve misunderstandings and do simple corrections.  

 

I do not know how much one can retain from a single day's seminar but was definitely worth going to see and to feel Akuzawa Sensei, and to see how the internal art or aiki can be expressed in a different system from the other masters that I have visited in the past. I hope to visit his dojo in Tokyo on my next trip to Japan!