Matabei
This essay is late. You could say it’s delinquent. It’s certainly too late.
Twenty-three years ago, I left Chiba Sensei’s kenshusei program to enlist in the US Army. The country was attacked and I was enraged. I wanted to fight. My apprenticeship was incomplete, but I didn’t care. One evening before class, I went to Chiba Sensei’s office and told him I was leaving. Our meeting wasn’t a debate, just a courtesy. I expected an argument, but instead he extended his hand to shake and nodded his head. I left the dojo a short time later.
Twenty-one years ago, after returning from the first of many combat deployments (and the first of two wars), Chiba Sensei asked me a question. It caught me off guard and I didn’t have an answer. I deflected with some excuse about needing time to think. He seemed a bit dejected with my non-answer, but didn’t persist. His question stayed with me over the years as I deployed again and again. What is the relationship between Aikido and combat?
This essay was started, stopped, and restarted many times over the decades. Each time I reflected on his brobdingnagian question it grew more daunting. Whatever I wrote seemed hollow, imprecise, inadequate. As years passed, deployments took priority, and his question fell into the background hum of life. I thought I had enough time to provide an answer. Next month, I’ll sit down and write a letter. When I get back from this mission I’ll call him. When I have a lull in deployments (something that never seemed to happen) I’ll visit. I was deployed again and writing a version of this essay when I learned he had died. He never heard my answer.
The days studying under Chiba Sensei and Murashige Sensei were some of the best of my life—the good old days that I didn’t realize were so good until long after I left. Like other kenshusei, I trained hard, slept too little, ached too much, dreaded some classes, and treaded water in the turbulent sea of San Diego Aikikai. Unlike most other kenshusei, I never wanted to teach. Sensei was a truly gifted teacher of teachers, but that wasn’t my focus. I’m too much of an introverted misanthrope for that. I joined his dojo out of obligation to my first teacher, Paul Sylvain Sensei. I went because it was anachronistic and exciting. I went because it’s exceptionally rare to find someone so gifted, and rarer that the person can transmit his knowledge. I went because I was stubborn. I went to be forged.
What I couldn’t find in training was peace. I was challenged, strained, engaged, stretched thin, astounded, and transmuted, but never at peace. Never, except fleeting moments during the chaotic nights when Chiba Sensei was angry. Those nights injured kenshusei sat scattered about the edges of the mat and all I wanted was to be his uke. It was the only time I felt truly calm. Until I went to war. For me, combat is jumping into a fast-moving river, anarchically in control while out of control. I miss the frantic nights training with Sensei and I miss the pandemonious moments of a firefight. Not a day goes by that I don’t want to be back there. If I could snap my fingers and appear in the middle of a firefight, I’d do it without hesitation, because that’s where I was most myself. I don’t know what the relationship between Aikido and combat is for anyone else, but for me, that’s it. The calm and quiet I felt as Sensei’s uke during a brutal kenshusei class is akin to fighting on an Afghan mountainside or in an Iraqi city. Not the same in gravity or intensity, but fundamentally the same feeling.
Most of the lessons Chiba Sensei tried to impart didn’t register when I was his student. I don’t think I was the kind of disciple he really wanted, and my obstinacy too often clashed with his. I got in my own way a lot. But time and experience have a way of bringing things into focus. My thoughts on his question are reflective of my time as his kenshusei as well as my years as a soldier. So, what is my answer to Chiba sensei’s question? What is the relationship between Aikido and combat? The truth is that I don’t know. I don’t have a general principle to share. What I have are highly subjective realizations from my time as a kenshusei and a warrior. I like to think Sensei would agree with my ideas, but I’ll never know. I think I missed or misinterpreted the truly important things he tried to convey, but I still owe him an answer. So here it goes.
Techniques are transitory reflections of tactics and context. Some work better in certain circumstances, others work better for different people, some hardly work at all. What matters is the person underneath the intention, behind the technique. Training adds things to a person’s repertoire. Forging takes things away, like impurities removed from iron in the conflagration of a forge. Forging tempers and shapes and refines potential. Chiba Sensei had a singular talent for forging students. His methods were difficult and not for the faint of heart, but his ability was undeniable.
Be in the moment. It’s the only instant you truly have. The past is a malleable memory. The future is an unsecured potentiality of continuation. There are too many things out of your control that can end you at any moment despite your training and skill. Right now, only now, is yours.
The why of a situation is secondary to the situation itself. Just enter with full, unwavering commitment. Put everything on the line, damn the consequences, and see if you come out the other side.
It all comes down to you. You must enter the fray. You must commit to the strike. You must accept the pain and uncertainty and loss of control. You must decide there is something worth the sacrifice, something worth the suffering. You must decide to keep going. You must get up one more time than they knock you down. You must believe in yourself even if no one else does. No one can do it for you, and you can’t do it for anyone else.
Some people train for thirty years. Most train for one year, thirty times. Make your time count. Don’t waste anything even when you know it’s impossible.
Seek out the interesting, the challenging, the uncertain. Don’t accept complacency.
The singular moments of crisis and chaos are where everything comes together.
Sometimes you just have to go for it, regardless of the risks or cost, because you believe. Because something bigger than you matters more than you.
It is possible to do everything right but still fail.
No one deserves anything. Not happiness, not a long life, not peace, not prosperity, not esteem. But you can be worthy of it.
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in Remembering Chiba Sensei, the chapbook given out at Summer Camp 2025.