Stage Yoshimitsu Yamada Zürich

Hi there,

Last wednesday, october 21st 2009, I went with my teacher Daniel to Michi in Zürich for an overnight sleep before leaving towards italy to visit the international stage of Kimura Sensei (details will follow). By luck there was Yoshimitsu Yamada from Aikikai New York visiting Zürich at the same evening. So we directly headed to the dojo to visit this interesting training.

I was really thrilled to see Yamada Sensei in real for the first time as I've seen plenty of videos of him before (search youtube - you'll find a lot of him! For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI_V7yRaIJg) and liked what I've seen so far.

Training started with a very short warmup. It seems not to be usual to have extensive warmup all together - one has to be there early to warmup himself it seems.

The whole training consisted of Shomen-uchi attack on different techniques.
We started with irmi-nage. Yamada Sensei pointed out the importance of bringing uke out of balance and to have a proper stand and position (using irmi-tenkan).
We continued with ikkyo, nikkyo, Kote-gaeshi, Shiho-nage, kaiten-nage (in groups as space was limited) and finished as usual with kokyu-ho. Very interesting to see that the entrance for e.g. nikkyo is the same as for kaiten-nage.

From what I took out of this training, the essence in the style of yamada sensei is to have a very low position when performing the technique. Although he pointed out that one has to know what is best for him (yamada sensei is not a huge person, therefore his techniques are performed in a rather low position), I tried to bring down uke as low as possible as well (which didn't work well all the time of course :-).

The teaching stlye of Yamada Sensei is very nice. He likes to show and point out common mistakes before letting people try the technique. He's also a very funny person, making quite a lot of jokes during the training, resulting in lots of laughters during the training and a relaxed atmosphere - well, at least for an aikido training.

After the training I had the chance to have a quick chat with him outside the dojo. It turned out that he was travelling through europe, mostly all alone. He didn't bring his ukes as most of his students are locals and joining the trainings where he stays.

I found him to be a very nice and keen person and his aikido is really of high quality. Unfortunately, I somehow suddenly had pain in my back in the middle of the training so I had to pause for some minutes. I think this came from the fact that we didn't arrive early enough to warmup ourselfs extensively before the training. It just shows how important it is, to do a proper warmup at the beginning. Unfortunately, the pain didn't actually disappear the next few days. Not the best thing to have when travelling long distance with the car to join an international aikido stage in italy.

Yours,

Stefan