In my kitchen I have a blackboard, which has done a lot for Aikido over the years, and I think it deserves to have its picture taken.

A dozen years ago, I wrote a long series of 23 articles on this site: the ‘Kajo’. I made a mistake in my presentation at the time of this knowledge which is fundamental to a proper understanding of Aikido. Today I would like to correct this error.

It is not possible to go into detail here on what the kajo represent, but you can refer to the explanations and arguments given twelve years ago, because the error I am now correcting does not invalidate what was said in substance.

But let's summarise a little.

The Founder of Aikido, O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba, never referred to the techniques of Aikido by name. This is essential. We miss what we name because the name is a necessarily artificial limit, a limitation.

When teaching his movements, O Sensei used the expression irimi-tenkan (which is not a technique, but the principle of Aikido), and also tai no henka (which is not a technique either, but the first manifestation of this principle). He then classified the eight fundamental techniques (which give rise to the thousands of technical possibilities) according to whether they belong to one or other of the four laws which organise Aikido and which he called kajo.

In law number two (nikajo), for example, we find the fundamental techniques that we now call nikyo and kote gaeshi. When teaching them, O'Sensei didn't say do nikyo or do kote gaeshi, but he did say - for both of them - apply the second law.

His students obviously found it very difficult to understand why two apparently different techniques could be referred to in the same way. They got into the habit - for the sake of learning - of naming the techniques individually, so as to recognise and remember them better. This is how, by accommodation, the techniques began to have an individual existence, and that I can today write all eight of them on my blackboard. Because this alteration by simplification of the reality of Aikido gradually solidified in people's minds, and was then passed on to what can generally be called modern Aikido, or Aikido after Ueshiba.

But this vision was not at all that of O'Sensei, who considered only the way in which the order of Aikido corresponded to an archetype, a universal model. For each kajo is in fact made up of the relationship between two fundamental techniques which are united by the fact that they are both opposed and complementary, inverted if you like. These two techniques express the two sides or the two phases of the same energetic process, one rotating from heaven to earth ( kyo), the other from earth to heaven ( nage). The former are materialised by an immobilisation, the latter by a projection.

Thus :

- the first kajo is the union of the complementary opposites ikkyo / shiho nage

- the second kajo is the union of the complementary opposites nikyo / kote gaeshi

- the third kajo is the union of the complementary opposites sankyo / kaiten nage

- the fourth kajo is the union of the complementary opposites yonkyo / tenchi nage

In O Sensei's book "Budo ’, we can see that all his instructions are organised around irimi-tenkan, tai no henka and these four laws, but there is not a single word about techniques such as we know them today.

The ideogram he uses to talk about these laws is written in Japanese:

This kanji, which reads HŌ and is pronounced PŌ, has two main meanings: law and control. The exclusive meaning retained by O Sensei's students (with the notable exception of Tadashi Abe) is that of control. However, the translation by immobilisation (pin or lock ), although it gives a good account of the four immobilisation techniques ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo and yonkyo, prevents the four projections (shiho nage, kote gaeshi, kaiten nage and tenchi nage) from being classified under the same category. There is a problem here, because by saying IPPŌ for example, O Sensei was designating ikkyo and shiho nage at the same time, which together express, through their relationship, the first law, that is kajo n°1 (ikkajo).

Tadashi Abe, to whom we owe the transmission of the kajo as taught by O Sensei, demonstrated that he understood them. At the end of the 1950s, he published (in French) with his student Jean Zin, the first book on Aikido after the Founder's 'Budo ’ manual, published in 1938. In this work, entitled in Zin's somewhat emphatic style ‘Aikido, the weapon and spirit of the Japanese samurai’, Tadashi came up against a problem. Indeed, the four pairs of eight techniques that I have just mentioned are missing two techniques that also appear to be fundamental: gokyo and irimi nage.

Tadashi Abe, who knew the kajo and understood the importance of passing them on, also of course knew the gokyo and irimi nage techniques. He couldn't imagine leaving them out of the plan that structures the foundations of Aikido. So, unsure of where to fit these techniques into the architecture of Aikido, he created kajo no. 5 by including the opposites gokyo and irimi nage.

I myself stuck to this interpretation twelve years ago, and you can reread ‘Kajo 14’ which justifies it. It was a mistake. If gokyo and irimi nage are indeed two opposites, three essential pieces of information should have prevented me from seeing them as kajo n°5 (and prevented Tadashi Abe before me from adopting this approach):

1 - Gokyo does not exist,

2 - Irimi nage is not a fundamental technique,

3 - O Sensei never spoke of a fifth law.

These three points obviously need to be justified, and that's what I intend to do in the next article.