Letter from the Editor, May 2022

You may have noticed that we’ve taken a hiatus from publishing the last few months. And although you’ve not seen many new articles recently, much has been going on behind the scenes at Aikido Journal.

Aikido Journal Academy

We’ve updated the Aikido Journal Academy site, where most of our video and book products can now be found. We upgraded some of our older courses and products and made them available on our new (and better) platform. You can now find video courses and books on the site from (or featuring) masters such as Koichi Tohei, Morihiro Saito, Shoji Nishio, T.K Chiba, and others. We plan on modernizing more of our product catalog and making it available here later this year. 

Aikido Pioneers: Postwar Era

Our first print project in 20 years, the limited edition Aikido Pioneers: Prewar Era, generated more interest than expected, and people loved the finished product. Many asked if there would be an Aikido Pioneers: Postwar Era. Stanley Pranin and Aikido Journal had never published this book, but we discovered a nearly complete manuscript in the archives.

Aikido Pioneers: Postwar Era was a project that Stan would have loved to see come to life. I think he’d be proud of what we did with his Prewar Pioneers book and I know he’d be delighted to learn that we’ve now made a commitment to publish his unreleased Postwar Pioneers book. This important book contains interviews with teachers many of us have trained with – Moriteru Ueshiba, Morihiro Saito, Shoji Nishio, Yoshimitsu Yamada, Mitsunari Kanai, T.K. Chiba, and many others. We’re now in a pre-production phase and will soon make a formal announcement about the release of this new limited edition tome. 

Interviews

As lockdowns eased, it’s been wonderful to travel again to other dojos. In recent months, I’ve had the opportunity to train with teachers like Yoshimitsu Yamada, Mitsugi Saotome, Frank Doran, Patricia Hendricks, Michael Friedl, Kayla Feder, Penny Bernath, Peter Bernath, Jimmy Friedman, Lee Lavi, Jim Alvarez, Philip Greenwood, Jim Graves, Ray Feliciano, Don Ellingsworth, and Guy Hagen.

In the coming months, you’ll start to see new interviews and editorials – including one with Yoshimitsu Yamada, now 84 years old. You’ll also be able to access more of Aikido Journal’s older interviews as we continue to republish content that was previously behind a paywall. 

Budo Accelerator

On a personal level, I’ve also been intensely focused on building Budo Accelerator. The pace and strategic challenges of building an aikido-based social impact organization for scale have been formidable. 

We’ve gotten major educational institutions and philanthropic foundations to take a serious look at Budo as a new platform for social impact and education, and young people love the programs. 

All this would not be possible without the support of the aikido community. I’d like to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who has partnered with us as instructors, curriculum designers, mentors, donors, fundraisers, and advisors. Through our combined efforts, we’ve done good things both for young people facing formidable life challenges, and for the art of aikido. 

I’ll have more exciting news to share in the coming months about Budo Accelerator’s progress. We have big plans and we’re just getting started. 

The Post-Pandemic Pioneers 

It’s been wonderful to see the aikido community emerging from the pandemic and our dojos coming back to life. The last 2 years have been devastating for the aikido world. Much has been lost, but we grew stronger in some important ways. I believe that with creativity and determination, we can make something better than we had before. People are looking for new ways to connect and build human relationships. I believe the art we all love so much can play a bigger role in providing this fundamental human need as we find our way out of a time of social isolation and polarization. 

When we kicked off our project to publish Aikido Pioneers: Postwar Era, I couldn’t help but think that all of us are the post-pandemic pioneers and we are creating the history of a new era of aikido now. Let’s do our very best to learn from each other, keep the best of who we are and what we are doing, and be willing to leave behind the things that hold us back.   

A new age of aikido lies before us, and it’s ours to shape.

With gratitude and friendship,

Josh Gold