Brief History of Aikido: Part 1 - Ancient

Minamoto no Yoshimitsu (1036-1127)

Minamoto no Yoshimitsu

The awesome and very unique advantage the principles of Aikijujutsu provided the trained masters of the art meant that the full range of techniques would only be disclosed to a trusted few.

'Gunpo' was the name given to field strategies. And 'Heiho' the collective strategic skills which included horsemanship, archery, spear, sword, Aikijujutsu and other methodologies.

This original evolution born in the serious life and death encounters in the battlefields of old Japan was handed on through the centuries...

The list of notable historical names is remarkable and long and research in these origins will prove extremely rewarding.

ORIGINS

The first glimmers of formulated Aiki type techniques appeared over 900 years ago in the mind of Minamoto no Yoshimitsu (1036-1127), a famous warrior leader of the Kamakura period of feudal Japan.

He and his brother, Minamoto no Hachimantaro Yoshiie, both master warrior strategists of the early Takeda Samurai from the Kai province, are credited with having originated the foundations for what was to later develop into the Daito-ryu (Daito School) with its secret jujutsu, which incorporated a broad and varied spectrum of Aiki techniques. It is said that they experimented with, and studied dead bodies to find out how the body's bio-mechanisms worked, to test breaking strains, limits and capacities.

It appears that they also carefully debriefed possibly thousands of surviving soldiers returning from battle, in order to assess how they survived and to detail and catalogue what worked to enable combat survival. Often such survival was against immense odds for an individual. They noticed the subtle attributes of these circumstances and accounted for them. They approached the matter both as a science and an art and implemented practice regimes to refine these emerging arts.

In 1582 the art passed to the Aizu Samurai clan through the auspices of Takeda Kunitsugu. Over the centuries such legendary notables as Chickamoto Saigo, Tanomo Saigo, known as Genzo Chickamori and others, developed and preserved the science. Because of their very extreme effectiveness, the secrets of Aiki-jujutsu were kept hidden and exclusive, revealed to proven members of the elite Samurai of the Aizu clan alone. This was to give them a decisive edge in battle, as it had their predecessors and those who followed over the hundreds of years of history preceding modern Aikido.

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