Children

What is aikido?

What on earth is that? No, you can't eat it! Aikido is a Japanese sport. It looks a little bit like judo, but really only a little bit. Just like in judo you wear a judo suit, you train barefoot on a mat, and you learn to roll and fall. Apart from that, aikido only looks like aikido! In aikido there are no competitions. That might seem a shame, because then you can never win. But look at it from the other side: you can also never lose! You learn all kinds of techniques that you have to carry out in pairs. One person attacks, the other performs the technique. Beforehand you agree who attacks, and with what kind of attack. That sounds more dangerous than it is, because grabbing someone by the wrist is already called an attack in aikido! But you also learn to respond to strikes and thrusts. If you do aikido for a while, you become very supple, and you stand more firmly on your legs. You learn to react quickly and your fitness improves. Sometimes we train with 'weapons': a wooden sword, the boken, a staff, the jo, or a wooden knife, the tanto. We don't do that very often, because then you need a lot of extra space and the hall soon becomes too small. But sometimes it is good to practise; it all seems just a bit more real, perhaps a bit scarier, so that you work extra hard and pay more attention.

History

In Japan the knights were called 'samurai'. They were important men; you could not just become a samurai. Just like European knights, the samurai were of noble birth. Honour, honesty, courage and loyalty - those were what they valued. From the time they were toddlers they learned to fight and to ride horses, but also to write neatly and how to behave when, for example, you have to visit the emperor. Many things in aikido come from this: for instance, we sometimes train on our knees - because in Japan they sat on the floor at home, and you also have to learn how to defend yourself if you are attacked during lunch! We also don't kick in aikido. Kicking, the samurai felt, belongs to street fighting. After all, you don't show the other person the soles of your feet, which are dirty from the street! If you have been doing aikido for a long time (5 years or so) your teacher may perhaps let you wear a 'hakama'. That is a long black or dark-blue garment that you put on over your judo suit. A hakama is very wide with lots of pleats. If you don't look carefully it almost looks like a skirt! With a hakama like that you look just like a Japanese knight!