A lesson from the past

Thirty some years ago when I began studying with Tristan Sutrisno in his Shotokan program I had a chance to also study Aikido with him. His training came from his fathers studies in Japan in the 1930's. Their beginning approach to Aikido was a series of defensive techniques against striking attacks. I studied the first 10 drills in their studies and teach them to this day. While those drills are done against lunging punch attacks, one of my group Michael Cassidy, worked out the logic behind the movements against Japanese style knife thrusts. Where using them against a lunge punch is a training tool, their use against someone trying to thrust a blade into you made their use more apparent. Then in the late 90's a friend Joe Swift helped me purchase a copy of Nakasone Genwa's "Karate-Do Taikan" and I was very surprised to see the section of Dagger disarming techniques presented by Otsuka Hironori, creator of Wado-ryu. This is the same text recently translated by Mario McKenna (titled An Overview of Karate-do). Mario provides a great translation of the techniques, but I'm not sharing to encourage you to obtain your own copy. On the other hand this is a variation on the Sutrisno family Aikido drill 09, from my copy. 11 22