What if a super-warrior had a clumsy student? After Japan’s surrender, everyone was confused, humiliated, and poor. Japan had been occupied by the Allied Forces. All the martial arts had been prohibited. An old man was growing rice and yams in a country village and was teaching an underground martial-art class in a small dojo surrounded by young pine trees. He had about five kids at the nightly training.
I was part of that group, studying with Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido. (We were a bunch of boys; no girls were practicing in the class—perhaps the only class of aikido in Japan, and that means in the world, at that time. My brother Shigeyoshi and I were in the first postwar group of learners, as my father had been previously a disciple of Ueshiba’s.)
A thirteen-year-old boy who loved the dense smell of Western philosophy, I was not at all physical; every movement I made was destined to be chaotic. While my fellow students were beautifully thrown down by the master, I would cling to his arm so he had to shake me off.
After one of us was thrown down by Morihei and rolled on the wooden floor, he would kneel and keep him down with a little finger, making no effort whatsoever. Sometimes he sat on his knees and let all of us try to push him down; he was relaxed with a smile, and it was impossible to move him an inch, however hard we tried. I had no idea how this short man with a white beard could do such a miraculous thing, and I had no clue as to how to get the secret of the art.
Our training with Grand Master, as we called him, was mostly a repetition of the same routine. First, we would choose a partner and sit on our knees facing each other. One of us would grab the other’s wrists and press hard. The other would fully open the fingers with palms up and turn his wrists while twisting them forward and up in a screwlike motion, eventually throwing the partner down onto one side. This is called “breath movement.” In my understanding this is how we learn to exert force by incorporating breath energy with a body movement. Aikido means “unifying breath way.”
Then, the master would call on one of us and show us a movement. He would ask the student to attack with a “hand sword” (using a straight hand with fingers together as a “cutting weapon”). He might signal us to attack him with a spearlike thrust with the fist, or with a grab to his wrist or onto part of his washed-out training clothes. The master would move in a circular motion, divert the student’s forthright force, utilize the momentum of his movement, and throw him down.
Then we would work in pairs imitating his movement. In aikido’s bare-hand training, there are only a few basic patterns, but they can be executed with infinite variety. We learned them over and over again.
Ueshiba’s basic teaching was nonresistance. We were not supposed to resist any oncoming force. He would hate it when he saw us struggle or compete in our strength. We were taught to fully collaborate with the partner’s movement.
He also talked about nonviolence and strictly cautioned us not to use the art for fighting. For him aikido was not any kind of sport; we had no matches or competitions.
Ever since his youth, he had participated in innumerable matches and built up his reputation as an invincible warrior. Then, in 1925, he had an enlightenment experience, realizing that the source of the art of warriorship is love. Soon he created aikido based on that principle. But at the time of the expanding empire, many people went to study with him trying to acquire the art of winning battles and of conquest. Thus, before and during World War II, aikido was a synthesis of the two contradictory elements—the art of love and the art of fighting.
Japan’s defeat in war led him to redefine his art as one of peace and partnership rather than competition and combat. Although we kids could have been viewed as a bunch of criminals for not complying with the prohibition on martial arts mandated by the general headquarters of the occupation forces, we were students of a master who was pioneering the martial art for peace. We were his guinea pigs.
Morihei Ueshiba
I was perhaps his worst student. Eventually, I had to quit and leave for Tokyo to be an apprentice printer, as my family was so poor. Nevertheless, the master offered me the gift of a rank, which was equivalent to a black belt later in the aikido community, an adaptation from judo’s ranking system. When he had a chance to talk to us individually, he would often say, “Please take care of aikido.” I felt from him a sense of being entrusted with the teaching and still believe I am responsible for transmitting his teaching in some way.
The world must have learned from the bitter failures of severely oppressing and humiliating Germany after World War I, which caused the emergence of fascism. The occupation of Japan by the Allied Forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur was by contrast generous and helped Japan to reshape itself as a democratic and peaceful society.
Several years after my training with the master, martial arts became legal again as Japan regained independence. My fellow students started teaching the art in schools and community centers, and eventually all over the world. The number of practitioners increased to thousands, millions. Meanwhile, I became a painter, after studying aikido with the master only briefly. I was a dropout from the warrior’s path.
I moved to the United States in 1977. The scale of my brush has increased over the last thirty years. Its shaft was as thick as a finger, then a thumb, an arm, and finally a human body. The movement of the brush became ever more sparse and decisive, to the point where I would create a large painting with a single stroke. Decades after the death of Ueshiba, often without my knowledge, I was still in the process of learning from him. Through visual art, I gradually experienced what he was demonstrating in his subtle movement with free-flowing breath force—intensity, effortlessness, and a spirit that accepts all the energy coming at him and turns it in a positive direction.
In the early 1990s I was mainly using black paint on white canvas. But when asked to participate in an exhibition at the Zen Hospice, a residential program in San Francisco for those in the process of dying, I thought a black-and-white painting would not be appropriate, as it might not be uplifting or healing for the residents. So I decided to use color. A multicolor Zen circle on a canvas scroll was the idea I settled on.
In June 1993, I stretched a canvas, about five and a half feet wide and seven feet long, over a wooden panel that was laid down on the floor of my basement studio in Berkeley, California. After priming the canvas with white gesso, I put together strips of felt with raffia straws, enough to draw a line over one foot wide, and bundled them up around a wooden shaft. I poured generous amounts of acrylic paint here and there on the canvas. Overlapping spots of paint together formed a circle, which touched the sides of the canvas. The top of the circle was red, yellow, and golden, and the bottom had darker colors.
I wet the “brush” with light parchment-colored paint, stood on the canvas, and traced over the circle with the brush almost in one breath. The paints washed together, forming a complex mixture of colors, yet retaining an uninterrupted flow of the brush movement. I thought it was a fair representation of a world with joy and hope.
While I cleaned up, went away for a cup of tea, and came back, the paint on the canvas was still moving slowly, creating marble-like patterns. The very dark blue puddle in the bottom found a path into the center of the circle and started running toward the upper right. I could have stopped the traveling of paint by vacuuming or blotting it, but I just watched it. It seemed that the circle was sending a message. After several hours, the circle stopped changing, having become a sort of Q shape. The painting was no longer pleasing or healing, but disturbing and alarming.
I thought of giving the painting a dark and ominous name. But, finally, I decided to name it A Small Circle, in honor of the very tiny class my master taught in the village. It also meant that I was hoping to create a larger circle.