In My Own Way: Early days as an Uchideshi in the Yoshinkan by David Lynch

David Lynch in his early years

“I would hear a piping voice say, ‘It’s old Grandfather Ueshiba here, is young Shioda there?'”

It is somewhat embarrassing, after thirty years of aikido, not to have anything truly profound to offer. It would be nice to be able to demonstrate some powerful insight into the human condition arising from my eighteen years in Japan under the tutelage of masters like Gozo Shioda, Koichi Tohei and Kisshomaru Ueshiba, to name-drop but a few.

That I cannot do so is not the fault of my various sensei, any more than it is them I should blame for my average level of technical skill, notwithstanding the accumulation of dan grades from the Yoshinkan, Aikikai, Ki no Kenkyukai, and Tendokan.

I guess my experience is sufficiently unusual, however, for the editor to invite me to write an article or two and I shall be glad if, in doing so, I am able to help anyone else along the Way.

Taking a line through my various sensei, it is impossible to avoid major contradictions in the philosophical bases upon which their different organizations have been built, in the training systems, and even in the aikido techniques themselves. Human life is a complex thing and differences between people can be vast, so perhaps it would be strange for different teachers and organizations not to develop different approaches. What I found difficult initially, though, was the fact that many of the sensei and their followers would insist that their system was right and the others were wrong. I admit I was quite demoralized at first when, shifting from one dojo to another, I was told that what I had been doing in the previous dojo was entirely wrong.

One can, of course, avoid this embarrassment by staying with one teacher or one system and blissfully ignoring the others and I probably would have done so had circumstances not obliged me to change. I now feel that one should view with suspicion any teaching that claims to be the only right one and promises to simplify everything and eliminate all contradictions. Apart from being struck by the obvious contradiction presented by the lack of harmony between different schools teaching the “Way of Harmony,” it became clear to me early on that blindly following any teacher, no matter how technically superior or spiritually advanced, ultimately would lead nowhere.

Gozo Shioda applying a pin to Kyoichi Inoue c. 1962

It is the same with the grading system. No matter how you set it up and police it you will not eliminate the conflict between people that is actually created by this artificial hierarchy. But I was certainly not in a position to question any of this during the eighteen months I spent as an uchideshi (live-in student) at the Yoshinkan in Tokyo in the early sixties. The training was hard in every sense of the word but I enjoyed the comradeship and the single-minded approach to life, despite periods of culture shock and a nagging feeling that I could have been doing something more creative with my life. For a Yoshinkan uchideshi in those days there was little time to ponder such questions, as we were up very early every morning and had plenty of chores, like cleaning the toilets, sweeping the mats, and wiping clean every inch of dojo, to keep us occupied in between training sessions.

What I found difficult initially, though, was the fact that many of the sensei and their followers would insist that their system was right and the others were wrong. I admit I was quite demoralized at first when, shifting from one dojo to another, I was told that what I had been doing in the previous dojo was entirely wrong.


As I was the only uchideshi with a driving license, I had the task of collecting Shioda Sensei from his home and bringing him to the dojo, then taking him back home again at night. As chauffeur for Kancho (the title we normally used for the “head of the dojo“), I went to all kinds of places a foreigner would not normally get to, including police and military establishments where the Yoshinkan conducted classes. I would also drive him to various dinner parties held in traditional Japanese restaurants, and on one such occasion I picked up Ueshiba O-Sensei from his home and took him to a function with Kancho. I then waited outside the restaurant in the car till they were ready to go home again. The only other contact I had with O-Sensei that I can boast of was on the odd occasion when he would ring to speak to Kancho and I happened to answer the phone. I would hear a piping voice say, “It’s old Grandfather Ueshiba here, is young Shioda there?” I did attend one of O-Sensei’s public demonstrations at the Hibiya Hall in Tokyo but I was in one of the back rows and cannot recall much of the event, apart from his famous “large glittering eyes,” though I do remember being puzzled by some of his “no touch” throws that were very different from the type of technique I had been sweating away at every day.

Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969)

A number of O-Sensei anecdotes were passed on by Shioda Sensei, who spent nine years training under O-Sensei before the war, but most of these have probably been published already so I shall not repeat all of them. There was the one about the live-sword training sessions that O-Sensei conducted outdoors on dark nights, during which he wore a white headband (hachimaki) and invited Shioda and his fellow deshi to attack him full-tilt. Kancho said how frightening these sessions were. They would be able to vaguely see the white headband moving about in the dark, and would move in for an attack, only to have O-Sensei’s blade flash past their eyes or stop just short of their faces. I recently read a version of this in an American book in which the headband had become a blindfold! It makes one hesitate to repeat such stories for fear of creating another myth.

There was another good story in which a very strong and aggressive budo friend of Kancho had asked to meet O-Sensei. On arriving at the dojo this fellow bowed to O-Sensei, but O-Senei did not respond at all, remaining in a bolt-upright seiza position. The visitor, on the other hand, remained in the bowed down position for an abnormally long time, then sat up, muttered the words, “I’m beaten,” bowed deeply again, and immediately left the dojo. Shioda excused himself and hastily followed his friend up the road to find out what he was playing at. Apparently, the fellow had been determined to prove that O-Sensei was a fraud and had planned to leap at him and strike him on the back of the head as soon as he bowed. But when the bow did not materialize, he had the strongest feeling that he was in the presence of a real master who had left him absolutely no opening.

Returning to the dojo, Shioda asked O-Sensei about the incident and was simply told, “That fellow did not bow properly the first time, but the second bow was quite sincere, so I responded to it.” This story was typical of many anecdotes illustrating O-Sensei’s uncanny “sixth sense.”

The only other contact I had with O-Sensei that I can boast of was on the odd occasion when he would ring to speak to Kancho and I happened to answer the phone. I would hear a piping voice say, “It’s old Grandfather Ueshiba here, is young Shioda there?” I did attend one of O-Sensei’s public demonstrations at the Hibiya Hall in Tokyo but I was in one of the back rows and cannot recall much of the event, apart from his famous “large glittering eyes,” though I do remember being puzzled by some of his “no touch” throws that were very different from the type of technique I had been sweating away at every day.

Shioda Sensei, like many other former students of O-Sensei, felt that O-Sensei’s teaching was unsystematic and he therefore devised his own set of basic exercises that were intended to make the art easier for the average person to learn. Some of these basic exercises (hiriki no yosei and shumatsu dosa for instance) are not found in other dojos. The fact that the Yoshinkan was contracted to instruct the police force (the riot squad and the female police) also probably influenced their unique way of teaching, which emphasizes the repetition of techniques “by numbers.” This would have been necessary to enable a few instructors to teach literally hundreds of students at the same time, as they did in the huge dojo at the Tokyo Police School in Nakano.

In the Yoshinkan practically every technique was preceded by a punch to the face. One was supposed to be precise with each movement, from the basic kamae (upper hand, chest-height, lower hand, belt-height, feet one and a half foot-lengths apart, forward foot pointed out at and angle of 45-degrees, rear leg straight, hips turned to the front) to shihonage (punch his face, grip his wrist, slide forward on your forward foot, twist his hand back against his wrist, step through on the rear leg keeping your weight forward, raise the “sword hand” in front of your forehead, pivot, keeping your hips low while transferring the weight to the other leg, throw and pin, then strike his face with tegatana). These moves were repeated over and over, with the sensei or one of his deputies acting as a sort of drill sergeant. All the basic waza had to be practiced by numbers in this way before one could attempt the jiyu waza (free-style techniques) but even then it was generally agreed on beforehand what type of attack your uke would perform, such as a punch, overhead strike, shoulder grip, or knife attack. The dojo stuck to one technique for a whole week, i.e. shihonage one week, ikkyo (which they called by the older name, ikkajo) the next, and so on. For those of us doing several hours training every day, a week of yonkyo meant some pretty bad bruises. It was survival of the fittest and one either became fairly strong or quit. Hard training in those days meant blood, sweat, and tears, and I am rather ashamed to admit, included doing your best to slam the other fellow into the mat. If uke’s head hit the mat in shihonage, that was a good, hard technique! I learned this from Day One, when I first applied to be accepted as an uchideshi.

Shioda Sensei asked me whether I could take ukemi, and I made the silly mistake of saying I could, based on a relatively low rank in judo at the time but no experience of aikido whatsoever. While Kancho watched, I was then told to grip the wrist of Takashi Kushida who, with Kyoichi Inoue, were the other two live-in students in the dojo at that time. Kushida slammed me down with shihonage and my head hit the mat with a thud. This process was repeated many times and each time I got up I was flung down again, until I ended up crawling around the mat, not quite sure who or where I was. I was concussed and had a headache for some days afterwards, but apparently I had passed the “entrance examination” and was allowed to enter the dojo. After six months or so we had the first intake of Tokyo riot police who had been ordered by their superiors to spend two years full-time in the Yoshinkan to form the core of a police aikido instructors’ team.

To be a policeman in Japan you had to have a black belt in judo or kendo and most of this group of about thirty who arrived in mid-winter at the dojo door were kendo exponents. I remember Kancho lining them up and going down the line basically knocking each one over with a sudden foot sweep (aimed at the shinbone) or hand thrust to the chin or neck. He bowled them over like ninepins. It was necessary to select ten out of this group to continue the training and this was done in a similarly ruthless manner by submitting the group to intense discipline and rejecting those who could not take it. For instance, I remember some of these police trainees crouching, shivering around the charcoal brazier that served as our only source of heat in winter. They were ordered to extinguish the heater and stop wasting time! We had intensive training sessions with these police in between the public aikido classes and little or no allowance was made for individual weaknesses. One man had such horrible bruises from yonkyo that he tried wrapping a towel around his wrist to protect it but everyone continued to apply this painful technique, time and again, on top of the towel. At one stage this fellow broke down and tried to crawl out the dojo door, sobbing, but was dragged back and forced to continue training. I am not advocating this type of training, by the way, just recording what it was like. There was a bright side for me with the arrival of the police trainees, as I suddenly rose in status from the lowest in the dojo to a slightly more senior position, and they took over many of the chores from me, including the toilet cleaning detail. They even brought me cups of tea on occasion.

These moves were repeated over and over, with the sensei or one of his deputies acting as a sort of drill sergeant. All the basic waza had to be practiced by numbers in this way before one could attempt the jiyu waza (free-style techniques) but even then it was generally agreed on beforehand what type of attack your uke would perform, such as a punch, overhead strike, shoulder grip, or knife attack.

There wasn’t much talk of ki in the dojo but we achieved a certain intensity of concentration by putting every ounce of effort we could summon into our cleaning jobs as well as the training, and we were constantly on the alert to respond instantly to any summons from Kancho. I believe Kancho and his students saw “ki power” in these terms rather than as the product of relaxation, meditation, or abstract thinking. One’s mental and physical powers were trained through selfless hard work and obedience to one’s seniors and instructors.

David Lynch instructing at his dojo in New Zealand with his son Ken as uke

Our method of washing our dogi was to throw several of them into the huge dojo bath and then take turns jumping up and down of them, stark naked, to create a sort of human washing-machine. We then had to wring out the sodden dogi by hand, which was supposed to be good for techniques like sankyo! Suffice it to say, I have never worked so hard before or since, but there was a certain amount of play as well, much partying, and quite a lot of curfew breaking and sneaking back into the dojo after a night on the town. We somehow managed with very little sleep at night and the occasional nap during the day.

On my day off each week I would often explore Tokyo with a few dojo friends, all wearing our dogi and geta (wooden clogs); in fact most of the clothes and personal possessions I brought with me into the dojo remained in a closet until I finally left to rejoin the “real world.” Foreigners in Japan in those days were seen as fabulously rich (how things have changed!) and were treated with great deference, to their faces at any rate. They were not expected to speak Japanese, and the “culture gap” seemed impassable. Thus, it was a great source of pride and comfort to me to be treated as a Japanese, sharing the family spirit of the dojo and doing things the same as everyone else. But, of course, while I learned to do a pretty good imitation, I am not Japanese and this fact has led me, through much heartache, frustration, and feelings of divided loyalty, to question many cultural assumptions over the years.

I remember Kancho lining them up and going down the line basically knocking each one over with a sudden foot sweep (aimed at the shinbone) or hand thrust to the chin or neck. He bowled them over like ninepins. It was necessary to select ten out of this group to continue the training and this was done in a similarly ruthless manner by submitting the group to intense discipline and rejecting those who could not take it.

I have been obliged to take the same approach to the many varieties of aikido, and I hope in future articles to share with my fellow aikidoists some of the conclusions I have reached in the process.

Till then, sayonara.

The preceding article was prepared with the kind assistance of Kathryn Hathaway.

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