Wednesday class

Irimi nage. Hmmm, what to say? An interesting fact about this technique is that several aikidokas have experienced the bitter version of it. Obviously every aikido technique can cause death if executed perfectly. With irimi nage, the class version usually ends up with uke's broken nose, if the latter responds too late. But in Kenya we don't worry about this for obvious reasons. Despite this, sensei tried as much as possible to tune our minds to the idea that uke needs to respond appropriately. This was achieved by tori making uke's life as hard as possible. Uke was slapped in the face if they did not move as instructed. In this way, we were able to practise shomen uchi/ai hanmi irimi nage omote.

Since some of the more experienced aikidokas knew the whole sansho 1, the last session of the class was spent practising this. It was mentioned that the rest is up to us now. Knowing all this stuff is useless if we don't make constant use of it...