INTERLUDE TWO
Kuroiwa's techniques were seamless. One followed another. You will observe in the clip, from Aikido Journal, 1985, ([1] -- link provided with permission of Stanley Pranin. For the original DVD, please visit the Aikido Journal website) Kuroiwa-sensei moving slowly and smoothly as he explains his method, and the koshinage, in particular, may appear unrealistic to some. But it was amazing to feel in person. He would drop just like a great wrestler would with a single leg take-down, and his timing was so impeccable that he'd disappear, and you'd spill over his back. I've seen a photo of Kuroiwa in his prime, at the point he stands out from under the throw and his uke is upside down, shoulder to shoulder with him, with his feet vertical in the air.
I was still traveling around Tokyo, visiting several friends' dojos, and one day I arrived at one place, and this group of yakuza was doing a dojo arashi. Their leader was the son of the oyabun (boss) -- named Momose. They were old-school yakuza -- bakuto -- (gamblers) and even though their group has always been really small, because of their lineage, they are like diplomats -- when some of the big gangs have disagreements, Momose's group used to negotiate, because they are considered to be part of the old ways. Anyway, Momose, the son, was a big guy, about 110 kilos, and he was fourth dan amateur sumo. And he had just trashed everyone in the place. So I called him out and I threw him four times in a row with my koshinage.
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INTERLUDE THREE
For a number of years, I'd visit Kuroiwa-sensei with my family for the Asakusa Matsuri, a yearly festival in the old part of Tokyo. And every year, Momose, now oyabun himself, would bring about ten gang members who would wait respectfully outside the house. Momose would come in with a gift, bowing low with real respect to "sensei." Momose told me the story of his defeat himself, the second time I met him, still marveling at Kuroiwa's throws.
But bowing to the man who defeats you is a particularly Japanese form of kata in such men's world. It didn't make him anything less of a thug. The first time I met Momose, I had a cast on my thumb due to a fracture, and Momose deliberately took my hand, and began to squeeze my broken thumb. I squeezed back and smiled in his eyes. The two of us grinning like a pair of junk-yard dogs. We were just about to have a Hallmark moment when Mrs. Kuroiwa, one of the loveliest human beings who ever walked, a real shitamachi girl who missed nothing, traipsed over and said, "Momose-san. Do you want to stay for a bite to eat?"
He disengaged from me and said, "Oh, no thanks. I'm going to go get drunk and get laid in a whorehouse."
"Oh," she said. "Well, have fun."
I started presenting my koshinage in the All Japan aikido taikai. Arikawa-sensei told me to stop. He said it wasn't aikido. I told him that until Osensei told me to stop, I'd keep doing it.
I did go to one of the all-shihan meetings recently. Nidai Doshu asked if anyone had any more questions, and I said, "We should stop doing tachi-dori and jo-dori in public demos. There are lots of real swordsmen in the audience, people who've really trained with swords, and they know that we can't really do such techniques. We are making fools of ourselves." There was dead silence in the room. Finally Doshu changed the subject. Later, Saito-sensei came up to me. I thought he'd be angry, but he slapped me on the back and said, ‘Yoku itte kureta.'("Thanks for saying what needed to be said"). Well, maybe it needed to be said but nothing's changed, has it?
INTERLUDE FOUR
The last time I met him, I asked Kuroiwa sensei about O-sensei's power. "Wanryoku," he replied. Raw power. "Ueshiba-sensei was just an immensely powerful man. And he trained harder than anyone."
"How about aiki?" I asked. "For example, how about him extending a bokken horizontally and his students couldn't move it. Were you ever one of the people pushing?"
"Yes. And I couldn't move him either."
"So what do you attribute that to? He was an old man. He couldn't have had that much power left."
Kuroiwa sensei smiled -- "You can't knock your teacher over when your teacher just announces in front of an audience that you can't knock him over."
INTERLUDE FIVE
http://www.aikidojournal.com/article?articleID=463
http://www.aikidojournal.com/article?articleID=558
As one can see from these articles, Kuroiwa-sensei had a beautiful mind, with an original, iconoclastic approach. He asserted that idealism of aikido was insufficient, saying that aikido practice, alone, was a yin practice, like religion, with both partners participating together. He asserted that it must be complimented by yang practice -- such as competition or even fights.
Yet, he never flourished. Relatively few people studied with him and only a few in depth. A man's life story is his fate, and somehow, Kuroiwa-sensei was fated to live in a beautiful past, where he was a bold and brawny youth, afraid of nothing and no man. He blossomed for a while in aikido, with a remarkably creative style, among the most beautiful yet powerful aikido anyone has ever seen or felt. Terry Dobson told me, "Kuroiwa was the scariest guy at Hombu Dojo. He was built like a Greek god, and he was so fast -- but he never hurt anyone. That's what made him so scary. You knew what he could do if he really unleashed it -- and he never even felt the need to show it."
But his health was soon broken -- ulcers that emaciated him, detached retina's kept him tied to a pager in case the doctors found suitable transplants (when they did and he finally agreed to the operation, they nearly blinded him in a botched operation) and then, lung cancer, from chain smoking and emphysema afterwards ravaged him. I visited him last year -- he was tethered to an oxygen hose, very frail -- and he told me the same stories yet again. I listened like they were new.
http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17729
, taj opis su dali oni koji su prisustvovali njegovoj demonstraciji u okupiranoj Mandžuriji 1939. godine među kojima je bila nekolicina poznatih majstora iz drugih borilačkih veština od kojih su neki naveli baš taj opis. Dakle čisto objektivno posmatranje