05/12/2026
"Before you go, do you want to ask me something?" ”. I just said, "O-sensei, what's Aikido?"
His response was, “Well, let me write it down for you, and someday you’ll be able to read it and understand it.”
What he wrote were these words:
Intellectual training
Physical training
Virtue training
Ki training
All this produces practical wisdom
He added that it wouldn't work if it failed at even one of those points, that the absence of any of them would make everything stand to nothing, and inevitably slow down personal development globally. One should always, he told me, maintain a harmonious balance between all these points.
(Interview with Mariye Takahashi, Aikido Journal, No. 120.
