Sorry in advance for the long post.
I'll start with a quick intro, so that you know what I'm talking about (I'll have to simplify to keep it short so please bear with me).
Aikido is a variant of daito-ryu aikijujutsu (DR), a martial art founded by Sokaku Takeda. Takeda was a wandering martial artist with formal training in classical Japanese swordsmanship and in a family martial conditioning method, probably of Chinese origin, that is known in DR as "aiki". Aiki means "to unify forces" and, in this context, it means "creating a balance of mutual opposing forces within the body". It's an internal "tensioning" process that makes it harder to apply force on the user and conversely puts the user's entire body into his movements. Aiki happens within the body and has nothing to do with "blending with the opponent". It's actually a Chinese concept: a crucial teaching of aikido is to stand in "roppo", which is called "liu he" in Chinese and means "six directions". Tai chi and xing yi practitioners should know the idea. [Edit: the concept exists in internal CMA but I'm not sure it's called liu he]
Takeda also loved sumo and despite his small size, he could do frontal force outs (
yorikiri) on much bigger opponents, probably due to the aforementioned conditioning. In seminars, he would make people pay a fee
per technique and so to earn more money he'd make up stuff on the spot. Sometimes he would imitate techniques he had seen in other styles. That's why DR has a very high number of techniques (118 basic kata in mainline DR, over 500 in the Takuma line).
Enter Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, who was essentially a DR instructor. Like Takeda and his top students, he also displayed the ability to shed off forces and uncanny full-body power (the abovementioned "aiki"). This made him famous and earned him some top-level politicians and martial artists as students. He renamed stuff several times, including the art, and the name "aikido" stuck. Also, he was a religious fanatic and had close ties with extreme right-wing and ultranationalist movements. His vision of "peace" and "harmony" involved a world unified under the rule of the Japanese emperor, which descends from the gods.
Kisshomaru Ueshiba (Morihei's son) was the second head of aikido. In an occupied Japan, he swept the religious blabbering of his father under the rug and pushed the narrative of "old master Morihei invented the peaceful art of aikido". He simplified the techniques, made them flowing and circular, taught that "there's no attack in aikido", etc. That's where the emphasis on "blending with the opponent's energy" comes from. In a sense, he was more of an innovator than his father.
Fast forward today. Most dojos teach Kisshomaru's version of aikido, which was never meant to be functional (and in many ways has even been "defanged"). You can still find aikido groups that branched off pre-Kisshomaru that teach the older forms from DR (Iwama, Yoshinkan, etc.) or their own stuff (Tomiki). To make things even more complicated, Kisshomaru kept his father's top students in his organisation and let them do their own thing (many were senior to him) so there is strong variation even in mainstream aikido. And since there's no competition, there's no "metagame" that makes aikido technique converge. Lines that descend from Morihei's first disciples tend to have more mechanical validity but also have their own bad practice (e.g. lack of live training). As for the aiki that allowed Takeda and Ueshiba to be so strong in the first place, it's mostly lost today, although some people do preserve the method.
Tohei was strong, and had some good aiki. In the video you posted, he couldn't risk injuring his clearly unskilled sparring partner. Here's an excellent article on this incident:
It Aint Necessarily So: Rendez-vous with Adventure
Yep. For context, the guy learned aikido from this teacher:
Most aikido lines don't teach striking. This is because their practice focuses on the collection of kata inherited from DR (and if you've read the above, you know that these were not designed as a complete functional fighting system in the first place) and/or modified by Kisshomaru. But Morihei Ueshiba considered that "in a real fight, aikido is 70% striking" (in a large sense, this includes also
shoves/throws, remember Takeda's
sumo background?). Some lines do teach striking, though. Here are two aikido headbutt entries by Tadashi Abe:
This is the direct result of how the curriculum was formed, and of people mistaking it for a complete fighting system.
I agree with your analysis but, for these very reasons, I think that "your" definition of aiki is harmful. If aikido practitioners keep understanding aiki that way, they are hosed. Judo, for example, is much better equipped to train "that" aiki, because that concept is simply the "ju" in "judo"!
Non-Kisshomaru lines take the initiative:
In fact, non-Kisshomaru lines (and other branches of DR) train their techniques statically, without relying on overcommitment:
Agreed. Such training methods would benefit the art's functionality, if that's what people are after (many are very happy practising the flowing aikido, and that's completely ok).
