the story of the aikido mafia

You might recall that the YMCA here in Valparaíso got bullied into canceling their aikido class some years ago, when Aikikai Chile came around and demanded a bunch of money, and control over how it was taught. Plus I did find a place in Valparaíso that offers aikido classes, but they're on hiatus right now until the teachers get re-certified...by Aikikai Chile. (I'm going to stop by and see if I can be a substitute teacher and we just won't tell anyone.)

Today I visited the Santiago dojo again and asked the teacher if they have any deal or business with Aikikai Chile. I told him the story of the Y, and the suspended class here in town.

"No, we don't talk to them at all."

"Why not?"

"Well, we're very strong here. They know we have a strong practice and a strong lineage. But I think I know who the Y's director talked to, and that's definitely how he operates. And some random little club probably doesn't have the strength or resources to argue with him."

The story is interesting, complicated, sad, and completely Chilean:

The guy who spoke to the Y was JR. He was, for many years, the head of Aikikai Chile, but much more than that, during the dictatorship, he was the only person in all of Chile authorized by the government to teach aikido. Anyone who wanted to teach had to go through him. So his mindset can be, kindly put, monopolistic. I imagine Aikikai Chile tells itself some story about maintaining the quality of instruction or something, but the Y's director said JR was running a business, and if you're really just interested in quality, large sums of money aren't really required. The teacher I spoke to didn't doubt that they have "aikido" registered as a trademark, but it seems they enforce it selectively.

Things have changed a lot: there are now many dojos like the one I visited, that operate outside Aikikai Chile, affiliating directly with organizations in Japan. There's just a ways to go.

It's a sad and ugly thing. O-Sensei saw aikido as a way to bring people together, to help us learn to resolve conflict peacefully, and thought that spreading aikido was the way to make the world a better place.

I'm constantly shocked by how much damage the dictatorship did here, the extent to which it poisoned everything. In theory, you can see why a military junta would want to control the teaching of martial arts, but the reality is that the military junta controlled just about everything, indiscriminately. Sometimes it feels like any place you scratch the surface in Chilean society, you can find some kind of sad wreckage from those two decades.

[EDIT: I'm a little uneasy about the tone of this post's title. I don't actually know anyone at Aikikai Chile, and while the odds are low that anyone involved will ever read this, I don't want to start a fight. I'll leave it in place, but hey, if anyone who has a real connection to aikido in Chile sees this, leave something in the comments. I'd like to hear more of the story, especially any parts I've got wrong.]

a worthy anecdote for third-hand blogging

From Anne Schwartz, via Dan Meyer (who adds light commentary and his blog is prettier):

student: why do you want to be a teacher ms. schwartz?
me: have you meet you? you're awesome. i get to hang out with kids like you all day!
student: okay but why do other teachers want to be teachers?
me: probably for the same reason, because kids are awesome.
student: that's not true. you're the only teacher i have who likes us.

That's awesome. And sad. And awesome. And sad. And awesome.

I'm glad my kids know I like them. And they like me, or at least if there are any who don't, they're quiet about it. I do have to admit that "hanging out with 14-year olds" was not on my list of why I wanted to teach. I originally signed up to teach adults, because I thought it'd be more manageable (and I was probably right). Then again, I guess to decide that I'm going to teach kids really is signing up to hang out with them all day.

Some parts of this project I thought through really well. Others, not so much.

maybe why it's not so big here

At the Y yesterday I finally plowed through my shyness--I know, hard to tell by looking at me, isn't it? it's also why I take so long to call you the first time--and went to see the Sports Director to ask about offering aikido classes. The Y had an aikido class, and it's still on the website with a broken link, but the desk lady told me they hadn't had aikido in about 4 years.

The director, Mr. Valderrama, said that they were the first to offer aikido in Valparaíso, and it was hugely popular. They had so many people that they were ready to buy tatami mats, which would probably have been a relatively permanent installation, since they're a pain to move around. (If you're using tatami in an aikido dojo, you usually put it on some kind of a sprung floor and then cover it with rubberized canvas or something. It's not exactly like falling into a pile of pillows, but it gets the job done.)

He said, and I had to double-check this a few times to make sure I heard right, that "aikido" is a registered trademark in Chile, belonging to Aikikai Chile, and that their head at the time, Jorge Rojo, had said that if they wanted to put "aikido" on their building or materials, they had to pay money to the organization. I think they may have wanted some control over the instruction as well, I'm not sure.

It's sad that someone would take something that was intended to be shared, that can be such a positive force in the world, and limit its growth for money. And it's absurd that you could trademark the name of a martial art you didn't create.

Then again, I wonder if that's the full story. Does the Iwama dojo in Viña that I went to pay some kind of fee, with their disdain of anything named "Aikikai"? The other dojo in Viña I haven't been to yet? I don't know.

But it looks like I won't be teaching aikido at the Y, at least.

cranky

The aversion is back this week; partly, the switch to 60-minute classes has upset what little groove I developed last week. Lots of stress and tension floating around, enough that I skipped breakfast this morning and didn't drink tea with the teachers, much to everyone's shock. I think it's a common Chilean belief that if you don't have enough refined flour and tea in your diet (minimum RDA: twice per day) you'll get sick.

Besides being unhappy and very much not wanting to do the thing I'm here doing for the next six months, the other difficulty is that Chileans are incredibly sociable, and under stress I get even more introverted. I get more irritable, and not wanting to either dump that on other people or take energy talking to them, I stop wanting to talk to them, especially here where so few people look past the language barrier to try and listen for the person on the other side. So I find myself in the teacher's lounge, surrounded by people who want to chat (often at me rather than with me, though they mean well) with no space for my emotions. If I latch onto that (or anything), I can get more cranky, but I'm usually pretty good at not doing that.

I may be revising my history, but I think I was feeling okay until curso G yesterday. Maybe they're my primary teachers while I'm here.

turning off the news

I'm speechless with rage at the seemingly unlimited uselessness of the Democratic Party. I had hoped that after the cowardice of the BushCo years, once taking power the Democrats might actually govern. And Obama embodied that hope: I didn't buy into the messianic thing that so many people did, but I did believe very strongly that at least grown-ups with a shred of human decency might finally be in charge.

But no. The spinelessness of Congressional Democrats seems to know no bounds. I had always thought you could at least rely on politicians to want to get re-elected, since it's too much to ask them to care about human beings per se, but they're not even doing that calculus: they seem ready to commit mass political suicide by letting health care die, because...I'm not sure why, exactly. Because they don't have a Senate supermajority? As Jon Stewart points out, President Shrub never had one, and he ran roughshod over everything anyway.

It's like all the cards are on the table, and it turns out that

1. Democrats never wanted to pass health care reform anyway, and this is their excuse to bail on it, and
   
2. the only thing the Democrats really want is for Republicans to like them, which is like sucking up to the school bully in the hope he won't punch you and steal your lunch money like he has every day for the past sixteen years.

It's pathetic. The Republicans are grasping amoralists, but at least they have ambition. They want things to happen, badly enough to ignore the rule of law and basic ideas of human rights and welfare. Democrats, it seems, don't want anything. Nothing motivates them; they just stumble around in a moving sea of mediocrity and then squeal like panicked cowards if anything difficult comes up.

The BushCo years were tragic, and that orgy of criminal incompetence made me angry, but this...this is the first time in my life I've ever seriously considered giving up on the American experiment, which I've loved ever since I was a kid and Dad taught me how it worked, in all its glorious insanity. But democracy requires ambition, and better yet, competing ambitions: people who want social justice, more powerful corporations, fundamental civil rights, warrantless wiretapping, all making their arguments, and out of that comes the direction of the nation, for better or worse. Now one party is batshit insane, ruled by fundamentalists insisting the President is secretly a Kenyan Citizen Muslim Fascist Communist Atheist, and the other party is rocking back and forth, curled up in a puddle of its own urine in the corner. Democracy can't function like this.

I've stopped reading political news, because I don't need the heartbreak or the rage, and I have plenty of packing to do and other things to keep me busy before I leave town for a little while. Especially after this week, I could use the time away.