With six hundred thousand cars, a million motorcycles, and 2.5 million residents in a frenzied non-stop race to get somewhere, Taipei runs on an unruly mix of verve, nerve, and swerve. No wonder two of the city's rarest commodities are peace and quiet. And like most scarce goods, these two usually come at a high price. But one place charges no admission fee and yet is so peaceful and quiet that thoughts of the madness outside soon fade. Not a library, not a temple, and not a school in the typical sense, this is a dojo, a training hall for students of the Japanese martial art of aikido.
The dojo is located in the basement of an aging apartment building, just off raucous Yenchi Street in eastern Taipei. First-time visitors, even those armed with a map and explicit instructions, can easily miss the entrance. Once downstairs they find a large room laid with tatami (straw mats) but no furniture. The tatami are new, and the smell of fresh straw is lightly sweet. The only sound as class begins is from the ceiling fans blowing cool air over thirty kneeling students lined up in several columns and facing their teacher at the head of the room. They are absolutely still.
When the senior student gives the first command, “Bow,” they all lower their foreheads to the mats in unison. Teresa Wang (王琇娟), the dojo's chief instructor, bows in return. Behind her on the wall, four photographs show the dojo's lineage, including Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of aikido and Paul C.N. Lee (李清楠), the founding president of the ROC Aikido Association.
Wang begins the class with ten minutes of yogic exercises designed to warm up muscles and help her students gradually adjust to the quietude of the dojo. The exercises also work all of the major muscle groups, connective tissues, and joints. The result is a remarkable flexibility and feeling of clearheadedness, one reason why aikido students have a low rate of injuries. Another reason is the mandatory review of special rolls and falls designed to protect students during practice.
Once the review is over, Wang has the students kneel in single file on either side of the room. Choosing an experienced student to be her uke or “throwing dummy,” she demonstrates the highly efficient techniques characteristic of aikido. The students sit in silent awe as the 115-pound woman throws someone twice her size around the room with apparent ease. Suddenly, it's over, and the students pair up to practice the same techniques.
Talk is discouraged. Wang does not want to hear verbalized descriptions. She prefers students to use their bodies to interpret the moves they have just seen. If a move doesn't work, the students begin again, gradually gaining an intuitive understanding of the physical principles involved in aikido techniques – relaxation, focus, balance, non-resistance, and “circularity,” meaning the use of circular movements to redirect and dissipate the force of an attacker, thereby controlling or subduing him.
Wang moves among the students, watching them practice and occasionally offering advice. She has a reputation for demanding perfection, for being as tough and energetic as a Marine Corps drill instructor, but without the abuse. When necessary, she stops the class and demonstrates the techniques again or introduces new ones.
Twenty-three years ago, at 16, Wang signed up to study judo under Paul Lee. The class was full, so she opted for his aikido class. Had her parents known, they would have been shocked. “Taiwan was much more conservative then,” she says. “Even after I got my black belt, my parents tried to persuade me to stop practicing. They felt Chinese men would be afraid to marry someone who could challenge their authority.”
Aikido has become central to Wang's life. “Lee was such a dedicated and caring teacher,” she says, “I decided that I too should be committed to promoting aikido.” She now holds a sixth degree black belt (eighth is the highest, and is awarded to few outside Japan). Besides the dojo classes, she teaches aikido at the Military Intelligence Bureau, the National Police Administration, and National Taiwan University. By sleeping only four hours a day, she also makes time for a regular, full-time job as a courthouse administrator and for working as the secretary-general of the ROC Aikido Association. Any remaining time goes to writing books on self-defense for women.
Wang has the students line up again and go through a set of exercises to cool down, then saves a few minutes at the end of every class to share her thoughts on ethics with students. Moral instruction of this sort, once so much a part of Confucian heritage, is becoming rare. The students kneel on the mats according to their seniority and face the instructor. Wang asks if anyone is injured. At the very worst, someone will have twisted a wrist or stubbed a toe. She will treat the injuries with her own brand of massage therapy after the class is dismissed, but first she has a question: “What does the smell of this new tatami remind you of?” A student replies that it reminds him of a meadow. “Is that all, just a meadow?” Wang asks. She says the smell reminds her to be grateful. “When you smell the sweet tatami, think of the old men who wove them and laid them here,” she concludes.
The students, having no further comments or questions, bow a final time to their teacher. Then, along with Wang, they bow toward the four pictures of aikido masters at the front of the room. After the beginning students bow to their black-belted peers and assistant instructors, the senior student shouts the last command of the day, “Class dismissed,” and all the students clap once in unison. The formal portion of the class has ended.
Before showering, the students are expected to bow once more toward the photos, pour a glass of water for their teacher, and sweep the mats.
“Aikido teaches more than just physical techniques,” Paul Lee says. “It cultivates the human spirit. It is a spiritual art. The older you are, the weaker your body becomes. But, until the day you die, you can build on and draw from your spirit, which means that aikido training is appropriate for people of all ages.”
Lee, current president of the ROC Aikido Association and first vice president of the International Aikido Federation, speaks from long experience. Born seventy-three years ago in the small town of Lukang in central Taiwan, he started studying martial arts as a teenager. He also qualified for one of the few spaces reserved for Chinese in the university system during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. After graduating, he went into business and now runs Rosa's Food Co., one of Taiwan's most successful bakery chains.
But martial arts always remained an essential part of his life. In 1958, at 37, Lee won a gold medal injudo at the Asian Olympics. And in the early 1960s, he introduced aikido to Taiwan. Since then, two thousand people have earned aikido black belts in Taiwan, and all of them have studied directly under Lee or one of his students. Lee, who holds an eighth degree black belt in judo and a seventh degree black belt in aikido, still gets up before dawn three times a week to teach aikido classes.
Lee says that the number of aikido techniques and their various combinations is actually limitless. “Once you master the principles upon which they are based, the variations are infinite,” he says. The Taipei dojo students learn the principies of aikido through a basic repertoire of twelve techniques, not including the defensive rolls. But it takes time and dedication to learn-at least two and a half years of one-hour practice sessions three times per week to acquire a basic understanding of aikido precepts and techniques.
“Aikido can be a life-long study,” says Wang Li-min (王立民), who has been practicing aikido for six years. “It usually takes people six months to three years to get into the groove, depending on their previous knowledge of martial arts, physical conditioning, and mental attitude.”
Lu Cheng-jung (呂承榮), another student, stresses the need for patience. “Some students are in too much of a rush,” he says. “They want to learn as many techniques as possible, but they miss aikido's subtleties, the philosophy, and the sense of fellowship.”
“Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of aikido placed a great deal of emphasis on traditional Asian ethics,” Wang Li-min says. "Aikido in Taiwan preserves this focus. The rules of conduct help novices maintain the discipline that is so crucial to martial arts training. The rules are gradually internalized, so students naturally manifest them in relations with others.”
Ueshiba was born in 1883 near Osaka, Japan, into an old samurai family. He studied martial arts as a youth, experimenting with various styles before pulling together a syncretic selection of techniques that he considered to be most effective and beneficial. At first only members of the Japanese imperial household were allowed to study aikido. But after World War II, he decided to promote the martial art internationally, believing that the discipline, self-control, and non-aggressive nature of his art would have wide appeal.
Not long before his death in 1968, Ueshiba had this to say of his art: “The secret of aikido is connecting oneself to the complementary harmony of the universe, thereby making oneself one with the universe .... Aikido is not resistance. The true Martial Way means adjusting the vital energy of the universe to protect and cultivate all forms of life. The root of the Martial Way is the love of spirit and the spirit of loving.”
Respect is central to aikido. “My peers never told me to respect the teacher,” says Joshua Tseng (曾建源), a beginning student. “They just showed more respect for the teacher than I did, and 1 decided to follow their lead.” All dojo members use traditional kinship terms when talking with each other. Students call those who have been in the dojo longer than themselves “elder school brother” or “elder school sister.” Those who started later are called “little school brother” or “little school sister.” As in Japan, the head of the dojo, in this case Paul Lee, commands absolute respect and his word is law. But Lee does not put unreasonable demands on students. The environment of mutual respect fostered in aikido explains why it is called in Chinese “the gentleman's martial art.”
The aikido ethic of personal discipline and respect for others is expressed in its vast array of techniques. These rely not on brute strength and physical force but on coordination and judgment. In many other martial arts, such as karate, students are taught to inflict instant and irreparable damage on their attackers – someone attacks, his nose gets broken. Aikido techniques allow one to bring assailants under control without hurting them. If an attacker continues to fight, the aikido student can opt to inflict increasing degrees of pain on the attacker until he surrenders or suffers bodily damage. The person being attacked must therefore rely on his judgment to decide what degree of control is to be applied – precisely why aikido puts so much emphasis on ethical discernment.
Aikido is practiced by more than one million people in fifty countries. Japan is home to 350,000 practitioners, the United· States has 50,000, France 30,000, and Taiwan 25,000. Why study aikido? In Taiwan, most students say that they saw a demonstration of aikido techniques, either live or on television, and were impressed enough to seek out the ROC Aikido Association. Rocky Li (李輝祿), sixty-year-old owner of a trading company, recalls, “I saw aikido on TV, and all the masters were over sixty years old. When I heard that Mr. Lee was providing this excellent place to practice aikido, I jumped at the chance.”
If the powerful techniques of aikido properly demonstrated are what first capture peoples' imaginations, it is the immediate physical benefits of an aikido workout that keep people coming to class. “Aikido promotes coordination, psychoanatomical harmony, and aerobic fitness,” says Chiu Nan-hsiung (邱楠雄), a Western-trained surgeon who has been studying aikido for four years. “Aikido is suitable for young and old, men and women alike, as long as their cardiovascular health is good.”
Another reason aikido is popular in Taiwan is that Chinese generally consider martial arts training to be a proper and dignified aspect of a healthy lifestyle. “My wife is happy that I spend my time in healthful activities rather than drinking all night in some firetrap karaoke bar,” says Yang Jen-lin (楊仁麟), a senior customs officer at the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. “I keep practicing because I know I'm picking up useful skills.” Sometimes the training comes in handy for other reasons. Recently, Yang was participating in an outdoor chess tournament when a piece fell into the nearby stream. “When I bent over to pick it up,” he says, “I slipped on a mossy rock. In the blink of an eye, I had used one of the special falls we learned at the dojo. I wasn't hurt at all.”
The ROC Aikido Association manages clubs in most of the island's major metropolitan areas. The Taipei dojo offers early morning and evening classes six days a week. For beginners, classes are free for two months, then students are charged the regular monthly fee of US$46. The association is recognized by the International Aikido Federation and the World Aikido Headquarters in Japan, so black belts earned in Taiwan are generally recognized by the worldwide aikido community.
Despite the popularity of the martial art, aikido clubs face some major challenges. Exorbitant real estate prices make it very difficult to set up new dojos. The association's non-profit status also means it must rely in large part on government subsidies for attending international aikido events and holding demonstrations. The association has had to hire a full-time secretary just to handle the red tape that inevitably accompanies applications for government funding.
Moreover, all of the dojo teachers are volunteers who have to hold full-time jobs to earn a living. Teaching four hours of aikido a day, working a nine-to-five job, and fulfilling family obligations is a tough combination that only the most dedicated people can manage. But the dedication is there. It is fed by a firm belief that aikido teaches people the balance, flexibility, and clearheadedness that will allow them to lead more healthful and productive lives. - Jonathan Welch, an editor and translator based in Taipei, holds a first-degree black belt in aikido.