Yoseikan Aikido
養正館合気道The oldest offshoot of aikido, its dojo dating from 1931. Minoru Mochizuki studied under Kano, Ueshiba and Funakoshi and reassembled budo into one whole.
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JapanCharacter & Origin
Organisation & Competition
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Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
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About Yoseikan Aikido
Yoseikan aikido is the oldest offshoot of aikido and at the same time the one that most resists being filed as an "aikido style". It was founded by Minoru Mochizuki (1907–2003) when he opened the Yoseikan dojo in Shizuoka in 1931. What is decisive is who taught him. He passed through the hands of three founders at once: Jigoro Kano guided him in judo, Morihei Ueshiba in aikido and Gichin Funakoshi in karate. Out of that came the conviction that gave the school its shape — that Japanese budo had broken apart into specialisms and so lost the whole, and that the task was to assemble the major techniques of the Japanese martial tradition back into a single structure. In practice this means that more than aikido is trained at the Yoseikan. Alongside the grasping techniques and throws Mochizuki brought from Ueshiba, judo groundwork, karate strikes and weapons work are also taught. Many practitioners therefore see the Yoseikan as a comprehensive budo rather than as aikido with a qualifier. The school holds one further historical first. Mochizuki was the very first person to teach aikido in the West: between 1951 and 1953 he worked in France as a judo instructor and used the occasion to introduce aikido to Europe — a decade before official emissaries of the hombu dojo began operating there.
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Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.