Yoshinkan Aikido
養神館合気道The harder and more precise line of aikido, founded in 1955 by Gozo Shioda. It is the only version of aikido to have entered police training in Tokyo.
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About Yoshinkan Aikido
Yoshinkan is the line of aikido founded in 1955 by Gozo Shioda (1915–1994), one of the most senior pre-war students of Morihei Ueshiba. It arose from a concrete disagreement about what aikido should be. In the post-war years Ueshiba moved towards a softer and more spiritually pitched conception; Shioda stayed with what he had learned in the 1930s, that is with hard, precise and clearly bounded training. Yoshinkan therefore looks different from most aikido: the stances are lower and more stable, the movements shorter and straighter, the techniques trained in parts and in an exactly prescribed shape before they are joined into a whole. The basis of instruction is six movements called kihon dosa, repeated from the first day throughout a practitioner's life, from which everything else is derived. The practical consequence is interesting: it is precisely this precision and measurability that made Yoshinkan the only version of aikido adopted by police. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police took it into their training, and among others the women's riot unit practises it. The year-long intensive senshusei course, originally meant for those officers, is now open to foreigners as well and counts as one of the hardest courses in Japanese budo.
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