Dojo-cho’s Column 4 — The Power of Repetition

When the autumn rainy season begins, more rain falls than in midsummer. In that damp weather, with the heat of exercise on top, an hour and a half of training is not easy. Even so, the members pour with sweat and repeat the same technique endlessly.

Aikido does not have many techniques. From ikkyo to gokyo, plus six or seven throws, and that is all. Yet the more these few techniques become part of your body, the more forms they take.

When I first began teaching, my own capacity was not deep enough, and various problems arose. Teaching these simple techniques every day and training in them together, a kind of boredom set in from having to repeat the same techniques day after day. I worried about having done ikkyo yesterday, and doing ikkyo today, and having to do ikkyo again tomorrow. “What if the members ask, ‘Ikkyo again?’” “What if they ask, ‘We learned this last time; isn’t there anything else?’” With worry upon worry, I often lamented my own lack of skill.

But that worry drove me into constant training and became the force that kept me going back to my teachers. As you keep repeating, experience builds up, and you begin to see the shortcomings you had passed over without noticing. As the depth of your technique grows through repetition in this way, the number of your dan rises too.

There is a saying, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” It means that a person who keeps making the effort does not fall behind but keeps developing. On the other hand, there is also a saying that “the moss on a stone set in place is beautiful.” It means holding your ground and making the effort without being shaken by anything. Aikido training holds both of these meanings. You must keep making the effort, and rather than being distracted by other things because you think you know it now, you must keep searching for what you have not yet understood and keep working at it.

At Jeju Oseung Dojo, the first technique you learn when you join is ikkyo. It is no exaggeration to say that if you fully understood ikkyo, your study of aikido would be complete. The reason the easiest and hardest technique is learned first is that it is the one you must do the most.

The ikkyo made by endless repetition is always changing. The ikkyo of a first dan and the ikkyo of a fourth dan are clearly different, and I would not even dare to explain the ikkyo of a sixth or eighth dan. This is the power of repetition.

On days when a cold draft beer after work is very tempting, seeing the members striving not to lose the battle with themselves, I cannot stop training either. The basic techniques you learned in this chapter are the same. They are not finished once you have learned them; little by little, as you do them today and again tomorrow, they become your own technique.