Interview with André Nocquet 8th Dan Aikido

You just published a new book "Morihei Ueshiba - Presence and Message" for the editions Guy Tredaniel Editeur Before you started Aikido, you were already interested in other practices, including Judo, how did you get from one to the other? My journey was quite lengthy. I started at the age of 17. In the attic of my father, I found a book on the Sandow bodybuilding method, and since I was not very big, I thought that having muscles would avoid me getting beaten by the of the kids at school. So I bulked up. Later I opened a fitness club and a physiotherapy cabinet in Angoulême. I then met the master Kawaishi, founder of French Judo, and I immediately started Judo. How did you get from Judo to Aikido? I had developed Judo throughout the all South West of France when a Japanese instructor called Minoru Mochizuki arrived in France. In what he was doing, there were no more grabs and no prearranged stances. You know that in Judo, there are prearranged moves, and that we hold each other. I thought that if someone attacked you in the street and that you grabbed, it would not be very good. I therefore considered that Judo and Aikido practiced together could lead to something very complete. Where did you hear about Aikido first, from your readings, or from a demonstration? At the arrival in France of Minoru Mochizuki, who had been invited by the founder of French Judo, master Kawaishi. When I saw this man at work, and I immediately enrolled in his classes. Did this discipline look like it was the right thing for you? I found it really remarkable. Movements were very round, very beautiful, and the falls were not slapped on the ground. I consider that Judo is a great sport but Aikido is something different, and but both fit well together. Professor Jigoro Kano, the creator of Judo was a friend of Ueshiba. When he saw Ueshiba at work he said: "That is my ideal Budo". He greatly admired him. What is Budo? I actually asked what Budo meant to a monk in Kamakura. DO, and this is the way, and BU means stopping the sword, which means, to make peace. I read books in English that spoke of the aggressive spirit of the Japanese. This is not true at all, there is no aggression, we seek peace in martial arts, we try not to fight. You went to Japan in 1950-55 right? I went to Japan under the advice of Tadashi Abe, the second Aikido master who came to Europe. He told me "you are so fond of Aikido that you should see the founder Master Ueshiba". I said: "hang on, I have a club Bordeaux with 300 students, I cannot leave like that". I thought about it for months, wondering what to do. At this time, you were still teaching physical education? No, only Judo, I have taught all the teachers in Southwest, from Poitier to Biarritz. You spent three years in Japan right? I went for three years under the guidance of Mr. Duhamel of the French Academy, who was a friend of my family. He told me "You must not take the plane, Asia must be earned in small steps." You took the maritime mail boat. Yes, the ship was the "Laos", I was in fourth class. Were you alone? Yes I was alone in fourth class but I taught some Ju-jutsu techniques to the officers, and in return, when it was too hot, they gave me a first class cabin, which was very nice of them. It took a month to get there. How was your arrival in Japan, you did not speak Japanese did you? I do not speak Japanese, English is the language of business, and most Japanese speak English. So I did ok with the English had I learned at school, there was no problem. Master Ueshiba did not speak English, how did you communicate with him? He spoke only Japanese, but with such a master, there is no need to speak, the teaching is from mind to mind. This is what you call Ishin-Denshin? Ishin-Denshin, that is it. You did not need to speak with Ueshiba. He said once: "It is not easy to get Aikido into the head of Nocquet". How did you understand what he said? Via my interpreter. So I asked how I was going to learn Aikido. He replied, "I'll teach him when he sleeps, because then he can not say anything and I can more easily penetrate his mind". When you got to Master Ueshiba's dojo in Tokyo, were you the only foreigner? Yes I was the first in the world to have been invited directly by Master Ueshiba in his own family. You lived with his family? I was eating with the master and sleeping on the floor. The food was frugal, a lot of rice and fish. I sometimes got giant urticaria because of the fish. The master would blow in my face and the next day it was gone. Funny isn't it? How did he behave in intimacy? Was he someone who knows intimacy or was he always the same regardless of the circumstances? In private, Ueshiba believed that all men, all his students, were his own sons. Were there other students who stayed with him? There were many Americans who came but they did not sleep at the dojo, they came every now and then, sporadically. I was sleeping on the floor, waking up at 5 a.m. to clean the dojo with master Tamura. He now also teaches in France. Yes Noro Masamichi too, they were my favorites partners. We were in the dojo for 1h in the morning and after the master would arrive and begin the lesson. We trained 5h a day. It was a bit of a hell for a Westerner like me, it was really hard. The pace was different? The pace was different because the Japanese practice Aikido in a manner that is different from Europeans because we are influenced by Descartes. We want to understand before doing something. The Japanese do not not, they have a global mind. We practice the same movements for hours and hours, it frees the mind and it is transmitted to the body, it is the Zen aspect of Aikido. The Japanese man practices, and when he has practiced a movement a thousand times, the mind is completely gone, it's over, and the body takes over. Whereas in Europe, we show a movement that the students practice, and all of a sudden they want to see another movement, and then another. They do not understand much that way. You mentioned the Zen in Aikido, can you summarize the personal and spiritual journey of Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido? Master Ueshiba was a man who could not walk until he was seven years old, he was very frail. So he wanted to become strong, because he was also quite small. I'm not a very tall man but he was ten centimeters shorter than me, about 1m55, no more. Gradually, through certain movements, he became stronger and stronger. In order to learn dodging, some students used to throw stones or beets at him, and he was trying to avoid all that. This is how Tai Sabaki was born. But the way of Ueshiba, not the spiritual route, but the physical one, was that he met many masters. In Hokkaido, for example? Yes, Hokkaido, but before that he went to many dojos. We wandered around and when he saw a master at work, he immediately challenged him to see if he could beat him. He beat a lot of them and used to say: "I have nothing to learn from people I beat". One day in Hokkaido, he met a teacher named Takeda. It was behind an inn, in a small room, he was very surprised to see that he [Takeda] was doing a lot of dodging. How could he know that it was a master? He had been told. He saw his work and asked him immediately if he could fight against him. Then, something extraordinary happened, the small body of Ueshiba was thrown around sixty times in a few minutes. He had found his master and began to work with him. Takeda took him as student, but he taught him less than 5 minutes per day. The rest of the day, he had to wash his master and prepare his meals. This is Japan, you do not pay, but you have to give of yourself to the master. It does not happen in Europe. Today, even though you are yourself a master of Aikido, you do not convey the same education system right? I have been taught in the traditional Japanese way but I try to transcend that, to do what is called ecumenism in religion. I try to the merge the Japanese teaching with Cartesianism, but it is not easy. Going back to Ueshiba's journey, I think that he met someone from the Omoto sect. Yes he did many things, he went to Manchuria, he fought at war, he might even have killed, there were a lot of things. He was too short to do his military service, but he wrote letters in blood to the emperor and was able to do it after that. Ueshiba was an extraordinary man. Then he met at the Omoto-kyo a man named [Deguchi] who spoke of the principle of love between humans. That surprised a lot and delighted him. His Aikido is a bit of that, but not completely. During a snowstorm in Hokkaido, his master became a little mad. He said: "Ueshiba, go out in the storm, there is an enemy waiting for me". Ueshiba went out, but saw nothing. Takeda said: "I know he is there". This is because Takeda had killed men. It was still the age of chivalry, almost medieval. Ueshiba said: "if the Budo created by my master requires to kill, it is not true Budo". For him, a true Budo is the love of all people, not to kill anyone, but to control men, that's all. Aikido is born this day through that feeling in that snowstorm in Hokkaido. I have a very important article that I could publish one day. It is by another Japanese master, but I'm not sure I can publish it. Ueshiba created Aikido in 1922 didn't he? He created Aikido through different stages, one can not create something like Aikido in one step, it is imposible. It is a journey. Yes a journey. There are French masters who prefer the Aikido practiced by Ueshiba when it was very hard, square techniques, even though the master was working in a very round way at the end of his life. There is a path that the master took. There is always a path in everything we do. So it may be that in fact, Aikido was born at the death of Ueshiba. Aikido was born, not at his death, but when he was about 75 years old. It was at about the same time, in 1959 I believe, that Aikido began to spread outside of Japan. Yes, Aikido developed because the Japanese sent many teachers to different parts of the world. I arrived in France in early 1959, after having taught in the United States for a while, to the police. I got there, I was alone. Master Tamura came in 1964. Another Japanese expert called Masamichi Noro, also very strong in Aikido, came, but he has since developed a slightly different approach called Kinomichi. Kinomichi has very beautiful movements, but this is not the actual teaching of Ueshiba. We can say that it is Tamura, who I work with, and who was my partner in Tokyo. He made me suffer a lot when I was in Tokyo. We worked out for an whole hour and sometimes, my shoulders would hurt a bit as a result. How can we define exactly Aikido? Going back to Japanese Kanji, DO is the way, and AIKI is the search for harmony? The Japanese master, during his youth, practiced many Japanese and extreme oriental martial arts. This allowed him to realize that most of them were aimed at destroying the enemy's aggression by destroying the enemy himself. This finding led him to think that there was a deficiency: the mental basis of these martial arts was violence. The big idea of the master was to destroy the aggressiveness of the opponent via making him feel that it was useless This whole idea of non-aggression towards each other is part of an overall perspective of the universe itself, the origin of which happens to be explained in Aikido when he explains the origin of matter and Ki, but yet you are telling in your book "Morihei Ueshiba, Presence and Message" that Aikido is not a religion. No, Aikido is not a religion. One day I asked master Ueshiba: "You always say that Aikido is Love, isn't there a very narrow link with Christianity? " He told me: "Yes, there is but if you go to Europe, never say that Aikido is a religion". "If you practice Aikido well, you may become a better Christian" "but if a good Buddhist practices Aikido, he will also become a better Buddhist." Aikido is a way, it helps to better understand religions and philosophies, but it is not a religion. What is the influence of Zen in the foundation and the spirit of Aikido? It is very simple, Ueshiba has always said that Aikido is Zen in action. It is obvious that this is true because we work in the moment, in the instant so there is an economy of gesture, while in a sport such as Judo, we are working in time, there is an effort in time. For us Aikidoka, there is an effort in the moment, and in the moment, we do not get tired. Besides, you also say in your book that Aikido can help the warrior to wield his sword, but also the musician his bow, the architect his compass, the poet his pen, the painter his brush. Yes I wrote that but it did not come to me spontaneously, I wrote it and rewrote it, with time. You talk about spiritual alertness, is the goal of Aikido to reach and refine this vigilance? At the beginning, we should not really practice philosophy. Do not make it a spiritual quest. We must watch the body, and perform many movements without thinking of this spiritual quest. Master Ueshiba said: "Aikido is 95% perspiration and 5% philosophy." By saying that, I have said everything. It means that it takes a lot practice, and once you have reached a third or fourth Dan grade in Aikido, you can begin to address the spiritual aspect. I was often reading at Ueshiba's dojo, but the master told me: "No, Mr. Nocquet, do not read, you have to practice more with your body, you do not practice enough." I told him that I was tired, and he said: "It is meaningless for an Aikidoka to talk about being tired, tiredness does not exist." It took me a lot of time to write this book "Presence and Message". You were in Japan in the years 1955-1959 and this book is now out in 1988, so this is really the result of a lifetime of study isn't it? Yes, it is the fruit of a lifetime, and the next book I'll do, I'll call it the "Heart and Sword", because when I left Japan my teacher told me: "project your heart rather than your sword." It is very important to project the heart, and we know that there is mediation between the heart and the mind. I discussed it with doctors and they told me "what you say is very symbolic," but I told them that it was from Claude Bernard, the great 19th century physiologist who showed strong evidence that the heart, body and mind, the brain, are together. The East understands this much better than the West. Oh yes. A man, if he has only the brain in action, will slice the flesh, he will sometimes be wicked and evil but as soon as the heart does mediation, works with him, the man becomes good. This is why Aikido is a matter of the heart. You say that Aikido training is not only psychological, but it is a training of the whole person. For me, the psychology Aikido is to defeat the other before the other defeats us, to anticipate movements. Besides the opponent in Aikido is simply a relative strength, it is not an absolute opponent. There is no opponent, if a man attacks, I consider that the man is inscribed in a sphere, as represented by Leonardo daVinci. When the two spheres collide, it is Judo, because we hold each other. It does not happen in Aikido because we don't hold each other, so both my sphere and my partner's are tangential. So Aikido is the art of tangential action. There is a beautiful picture to understand Aikido: imagine a spider's web. This web is a circle and the spider stands in the center, waiting. Me too, in my circle, I wait, and when someone walks into it, I can act. I must wait until another attacks and gets into my circle. This is an individual practice. Yes it is an individual practice, then, I turn around the opponent and in the principle of non-opposition, Yin and Yang become complementary. This is what people should understand. You say that in France and the United States, in particular, there are some mistakes in the approach of Aikido as it is seen a self-defense, while for you, it is not that at all. Aikido is an excellent self-defense. But it's not only that. No it's not only that, but it is clear that in the street, if we are attacked, we can defend ourselves because there are still some atemi, which are strikes that can be used. It is not easy to make love with a man who has a weapon. Aikido is Love but if a man attacks with a knife, he can kill you, so you must disarm him, then it is ok to strike a blow in vital areas that do not result in death. I love training with weapons. If a man has a gun, a knife, or a sword, I still consider weapons as an extension of the arm. I don't set my mind on the weapon. I see the whole man, and do not look at what he has in his hand. The movement... Yes, the whole movement. Aikido is very beautiful; young boys and women can practice it, because the falls are not brutal. More and more people practice, even if it does not grow as fast as Judo or Karate because there is no competition. There is no competition possible in Aikido. How is this teaching of Aikido being transmitted? By disciples? I have a lot of followers in France and Western Europe, I formed the European Aikido Union, there were about eleven nations and amongst my best students, there are French people of course, but the most faithful, and those I love the most, are the Germans. It is funny my dear lady, I am a former prisoner of war, I fought against the Germans, and now I teach them Aikido, it is beautiful. I teach men where there was war, and now there is no more war. The other day I said to a German student: "if there was another war between us, what would you do?" I said it to Rolf Brand, who is the president: "I have a gun and you have a gun, and we meet, there is a war between the two nations". He answered: "we put down our guns and we go do the movements of Aikido". I was very happy, it is great don't you think? Love has no boundaries. In your book, you also talk of a hidden meaning of training, what do you mean? Hidden meaning... it is not easy to explain; Aikido is practiced but not explained. It takes much practice of Aikido to understand the practice, but words do not work, they are useless. The hidden meaning is to overcome our aggressive nature, a lot of things in us that are bad. Is there a selection in the students who enter the dojo? No there is no selection. Students learn little by little. In general, people who are beginners are always taught by more advanced people, black belt, 1st or 2nd Dan. We take care of beginners like that, little by little. There is a path, and it changes every ten years or so. A man, at the end of ten years, has realized something. I once asked Ueshiba "Master, can I ask you a question? He looked at me and said: "I cannot answer your question because you are not ready to understand". I asked him when I would be ready and he said: "I will decide that myself." After two years, he taught me that thing I could not understand at first. To receive his teaching, you had to have an empty mind. He said one day: "your cup is full of coffee, empty the coffee and let me pour my tea in it." I think he wanted a renewal of ideas because there was another thing he said that went: "if a cup is always full, the water stagnates, and for the water to be fresh, it must be emptied regularly," and "if your ears resound with the sound of your own voice, how can you hear the divine harmonies?" This is a really good quote that I did not even know. Do you think that the West can access this knowledge with no critical thinking? Yes I think that gradually Aikido could be united in the spirit that we are talking about now and I hope that the world, and the world of Aikido will see a real unification. It's coming. The Doshu, who is the son of Master Ueshiba, is coming to France on March 31st to teach a seminar in Paris. I think he will make a speech on friendship, because the most important thing in Aikido is to develop friendship.