I started to practice Aikido in 1985. Quite early I was asked by my teacher to support him in his contributions to the development of Aikido at a national and international level: in Dutch Aikikai and in the European Aikido Federation. My first visit to the IAF general assembly must have been around 1990 when we visited Taiwan. At this time I was asked to become assistant general secretary, a position I held until 2016.
Around the year 2000 I have 15 years of Aikido and 12 years of Aikido management behind me. I had observed closely how national and international associations worked. I had started a dojo in 1995 at the request of a local gym that wanted to introduce Aikido. After 5 years I had some experience with running a dojo. I started that dojo together with my partner and we ran and instructed together. This cooperation was very pleasant and fruitful.
At that time our national federation went through some fundamental changes. Fujita Sensei and Kanetsuka Sensei had been the main instructors, but they had terminated their roles as technical supervisor and technical director. As a consequence the association had separated into three different groups: dojo’s following Kanetsuka Sensei, dojo’s following Fujita Sensei and those that remained in the original association.
As a consequence of this separation we were left with the question if we needed to find a replacement for a technical director or if a different solution was feasible. We were lucky to get the support from Peter Goldsbury, who was chairman of the IAF at the time. Over a period of time we came to the conclusion that finding a resident technical director or ‘person in charge’ would not be the best solution in the long run. The discussion in the association culminated in another separation: a group that wanted to continue with Peter Goldsbury and a group that wanted to move forward without a person in charge or a technical director.
During a visit to Japan we were talking about how we could move forward without a technical director. One of our presumptions was that we would have to find a way to share the knowledge we had acquired about Aikido over time as the alternative for depending on a single person to provide that knowledge. During the flight back from Tokyo we decided to start a dojo based on cooperation.
When returning home we found a location in Amsterdam, and with 5 friends we started the dojo in 2001. In Amsterdam it is easy and relatively cheap to rent a gymnasium from the municipality. We started with 2 classes a week and no students. To make the cooperation work, we agreed on the formula that each of us would teach for one month, and that all the others would attend those classes. This worked well for about a year. One of the teachers decided that he was more interested in his training of sword and resigned, one teacher decided that he didn’t get the satisfaction he needed from teaching. We continued the dojo with 3 instructors.
The dojo didn’t suffer a lot from their departure. With 3 instructors we managed to grow the dojo steadily and we shared the responsibilities of teaching and managing the dojo. All three of us were also involved in the management of the association, so our work in the dojo was very much aligned with our efforts in the association. But while the dojo ran well, the association was a different matter.
In retrospect I have to admit that the concept of cooperation didn’t work as well in the association as it did in the dojo. While the teachers agreed on the idea that there would be no person in charge, it was a different matter to find another way of working together. Organizing events such as a summer school and a spring course worked relatively well. Agreeing of holding gradings together and conducting them together also worked well. But finding more common grounds turned out to be more challenging. For one part, teachers were far more focused on the challenges in their dojo’s than on the new challenges of moving the association forward. Trying to achieve improvements in the training program or the grading curriculum proved to be far more challenging than expected. Involving new people in the management of the association turned out to have it’s own dynamic.
Those challenges will be the core of another post.
