Associations are the necessary legal structure for dojos in many European countries. While I have no scientific data to back up this claim, I do have a wealth of experience to do so. This fundamentally has to do with the fact that sport is promoted by governments and they support democratic organizations. For instance, in the Netherlands to be affiliated with the Dutch government you must be affiliated with the National Sport Federation. This requires your organization to be a democratic association.
And as governments tend to copy one another, one can predict something similar is taking place in many European countries.
But also the IAF requires its members to be democratic. It does not specify at which level, but the applying organization does need to be democratic.
In Aikido associations are not the most probable organizational structure. A dojo is primarily conceived as a place to train, led by a senior instructor, who determines how things shoudl be run. This highly authoritarian approach is much closer to organizations such as a private business, where there is an owner, there are customers, and in an economic sense there is profit. My impression is that for instance in North America this is the preferred model.
In Japan it’s probably not a legal or economic consideration, as much as a cultural custom. However, the problem for all organizations outside of Japan is that we try to understand and copy Japanese custom without properly studying it (present author included by the way).
I would like to rephrase this as follows. We’re copying Japanese culture although we don’t really know what we’re copying and why it exists in that manner. We are forced into a legal choice by our culture, government and laws. These approaches have conflicting consequences. The following blogs will deal with issues that follow from this conflict.
