1 Introduction

There is a long history of American interest in Asian religion, including important continuities from the late nineteenth century to today, but spiritual practices imported from Asia gained prominence and popularity in the United States in the decades following World War II. To date, religious studies scholarship on Asian religious phenomena in the post-war United States has chiefly focused on institutions and social movements more clearly demarcated as “religious,” such as Asian immigrant churches and temples, Buddhist meditation centres, and guru movements. However, as Per Faxneld has recently pointed out, martial arts with lineages originating in East Asia form an important social field that has been framed as “spiritual” but has gone largely unexamined by scholars of religious studies (Faxneld 2021; 2024). The Japanese martial art of aikido (aikidō 合氣道) is especially notable in this regard, as its founder and early teachings were steeped in religious influences and referents.¹ Moreover, aikido is part of a broader field of practice based on subtle energies and the power of the mind that circulated between Japan and the United States starting around the turn of the twentieth century.

As I have argued elsewhere using the example of the healing art of Reiki (reiki 靈氣/レイキ) (Stein 2023: 12–13, 200–202), aikido’s development and circulation helps illustrate the entanglement of “East” and “West” (as well as “religion” and “non-religion”), which may be considered as part of a North Pacific “intersystem.”² I will show below that the aikido instructor Tōhei Kōichi 藤平光一 (1920–2011) was not only a landmark figure in aikido history for introducing aikido to the United States and for creating a (still prevalent) lineage commonly known as Ki Aikido, but also for introducing ideas from the American New Thought movement into aikido before it ever left Japan. More specifically, the concept of “mind” (J. kokoro 心) that Tōhei inherited from his teacher Nakamura Tempū 中村天風 (1876–1968) and Nakamura’s practice of Shinshin Tōitsu-dō 心身統一道 (the Way of Mind-Body Unification) were strongly influenced by New Thought teachings that Nakamura studied in the United States in the early twentieth century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tōhei’s interpretation of ki 氣/気 as “mind” and his emphasis that “the mind moves the body,” influenced by American mentalism, were well-received by American aikido communities, with Tōhei commenting that his American students were more capable of understanding ki and aikido as “a matter of mind” than his Japanese compatriots.

This article examines aikido’s transnational development in the decades surrounding World War II, with particular attention to the approaches to understanding and translating the concept of ki that constitutes a major discursive and bodily focus in aikido (especially Ki Aikido) for American audiences in the post-war decades. It examines religious influences on aikido’s development and considers how aikido provides aikidōka 合氣道家 (aikido practitioners) an avenue for spiritual experience and development. It demonstrates differences in different lineages’ approaches to the subject of ki, with some relying more on the language of vital energy and life force whereas others employ ideas of mind and spirit. It also compares aikido’s development and circulation with that of Reiki, which bears similar North Pacific influences, having also been influenced by the American New Thought during its development in pre-war Japan and adapted for American audiences in the post-war/Cold War period.

2 The Difficulty of Defining and Translating Ki

Ki (Chinese qì; Korean ki 기) is a fundamental concept in the traditional philosophy, medicine, and martial arts of East Asia. Although there are many premodern theories of ki/qì, from the Daoist classics to the neo-Confucians, it is generally considered to be the fundamental stuff that composes, animates, and transforms the universe, linking the microcosm of the human body, heart-mind, and spirit, to the macrocosm of the universe (Cheng 2002; Liu 2015; Zhang 1999). Ki is considered to be fluid and dynamic and is metaphorically a kind of vapor, as the traditional character is considered to depict steam rising off of cooked rice. It can be understood in terms of yīn and yáng (Japanese: in’yō 陰陽) and the Five Phases (J. gogyō; C. wǔxíng 五行, viz. the Five Elements). Chinese medicine (J. kanpō 漢方) further posits the existence of specific forms of qì, like nutritive qì (yíngqì 營氣), defensive qì (wèiqì 衛氣), and the qì of particular “organs,”³ like liver qì (gānqì 肝氣), and also considers qì to be a kind of counterpart to blood (xiě 血) (Kaptchuk 2000). Furthermore, various philosophical and medical schools have taught practices to absorb, cultivate, and circulate ki/qì to maintain and improve health and morality, even to achieve superhuman powers including immortality (Kohn 2008: 52–62; Zhang 1999: 77–80).

As suggested above, such ki/qì phenomena are said to not only underlie the healing effects of physicalist interventions in Chinese medicine, such as herbs and acupuncture, but also what might be considered spiritual practices, like meditative visualisations where one experiences a unification between the self and the cosmos, or paranormal experiences, such as miraculous healings or a diminutive elderly martial arts practitioner being able to overpower multiple muscular assailants. However, some argue for a kind of “qì-naturalism”: a worldview that can account for seemingly spiritual phenomena, even apparent “miracles” drawing on the power of deities and “karmic affinities” (yuánfèn 緣分), in naturalistic fashions (Cheung 2022; Liu 2015). This perspective has precedents going back to the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhāng Zài 張載 (1020–1077), who influentially portrayed various spirits (C. guǐshén 鬼神), including the human soul, to be “traces and manifestations” of qì’s dynamism (Zhang 1999: 85; see also Liu 2015: 45–49). Some modern theorists, building on this naturalist perspective of qì, have posited that the concept is a premodern understanding of modern scientific concepts like mass-energy equivalence, the quantum field, and dark energy (Liu 2015: 50–53). As with so many other key terms in intercultural encounters, the question of how to translate ki/qì has been a major issue throughout the history of exchange with groups outside of the East Asian cultural sphere. Jesuit missionaries working in China in the first half of the seventeenth century, like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Alfonso Vagnoni (1566–1640), and Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), represented qì as being equivalent to “air” in Aristotelean natural philosophy (aer) or Galenic physiology (Greek: pneuma; Latin: spiritus); Qiong Zhang argues this was an intentional misrepresentation as part of a religious mission to supplant native Chinese naturalism with Christian beliefs in a transcendent, immortal soul (Zhang 1999). And the Beijing-based French Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–1793), a contemporary of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), understood Mesmeric animal magnetism in terms of the Chinese qì and yīnyáng, and conversely understood Chinese folk healers as “magnetisers” (Strube 2024: 21–24).

This approach grew more common in the second half of the nineteenth century, as many American and European missionary-scholars working in China understood qì and other related Chinese concepts (like jīng 精, shén 神, and líng 靈) in terms of vitalistic philosophy and Mesmeric practice, such as “vital force,” “spiritual energy,” and “subtle energies.”⁴ Although some scholars and practitioners of Chinese medicine warn that the meanings of qì are incommensurable with the concept of “energy,” such vitalistic concepts continue to be the dominant mode of understanding ki/qì within both scholarly and practitioner communities (Baum forthcoming; Cheng 2002; Wegmüller 2015). However, even some promoters of so-called “energy medicine” modalities, such as Reiki, recognise that the mechanism underlying such phenomena cannot be fully explained by “‘energy’ as most physicists describe it,” as the biofields and biophotons (low-level electromagnetic fields and light particles emitted by living cells, tissues, and organisms) commonly theorised to underlie “energy healing” only exist locally, but practitioners claim these modalities can also work at vast distances (Jain 2021: 166).⁵

Part of the issue around the dominant translation of ki/qì as “energy” is that it employs a polysemous term used in several, overlapping ways, some of them vernacular (e.g., “I don’t have the energy to go out tonight” or “she devoted her energies to her studies”) and others technical (e.g., “photovoltaic devices can convert radiant energy from sunlight into electrical energy”). This overlap is common in the language of practitioners of healing modalities often described forms of “energy healing” or “energy medicine,” including therapies developed in East Asia and theorised to work via ki/qì, such as qigong therapy (qìgōng liáofǎ 气功疗法) and Reiki. The fact that the same word is used in both vernacular, experiential language and in scientific language helps substantiate qigong teachers’ claim that what one feels when practising qigong is actually “bioelectricity” (Cohen 1997: 45–47; Yang 1998: 9), as well as the claims by Reiki practitioners that the “universal life force energy” at work in their practice is the same described by Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in his famous mass-energy equivalence equation (Keyes 2021: 132; Ray 1983: 45).

Further complicating things is that, in addition to this concept of ki as a vital energy, ki is also used in many common Japanese expressions as having to do with mental and emotional phenomena. Just a few examples: Japanese: ki ga suru 気がする is “to think that” or “to feel”; ki ni suru 気にする and ki ni naru 気になる are variations on “to care about” or “worry about”; ki ga aru 気がある is “to be interested in”; ki ni iru 気に入る is “to like”; ki o tsukau 気を遣う is “to pay attention.” To have “short ki” (ki ga mijikai 気が短い) is to have a quick temper, whereas to have “long ki” (ki ga nagai 気が長い) is to be patient; to “have strong ki” (ki ga tsuyoi 気が強い) is to be brave and to “lack ki” (ki no nai 気のない) is to be half-hearted; to “have your ki taken” (ki ga torareta 気がとられた) is to be distracted; and so on.

For this reason, alongside the “energetic” current that translates ki in terms of vital force (which became dominant by the 1970s), another stream depicts ki in terms of “spirit,” “mind,” or feelings.” In his 1885 outline of Japanese medical history, the U.S.-born physician Willis Norton Whitney (1855–1918) tended to translate ki as “vital spirit,” while also noting that it can denote “air […] vapor or breath” (Whitney 1885: 264). In one of the lessons in his The Spoken Language of Japan (1901), Kuroda Takuma 黒田太久馬 (1867–?) explained the expression ki ni sawaru 気に触る (to bother or offend) with the following notes: “Ki = ‘spirit’; hence (1) ‘intellect’, ‘mind’; (2) ‘temper’, ‘feelings’. Ki ni sawaru, ‘to touch (i.e. ‘to hurt’) the feelings’, ki ni kakeru, ‘to fasten something in one’s mind’; i.e. ‘to be uneasy about’; ‘ki ga mukimasen, ‘my mind does not incline towards’ doing something, i.e. ‘I am not desirous’ of doing it; ki wo tsukeru, ‘to apply the mind to’, i.e. ‘pay attention to’” (Kuroda 1901: 83–84). And in his Handbooks on the National Language Readers of Japan, Ojima Kikue 尾島喜久惠 translated ki as “spirit, feelings” (Ojima 1934: 53). Usage of words like “mind,” “spirit,” and “feeling” as alternatives to the energetic language produces a rather different spiritual anthropology – that is, a different conception of humanity in relation to the cosmic and the divine – than one that relies on the circulation of impersonal “energy.” We shall return to that issue in the conclusion.

3 Ueshiba Morihei and Aikido’s Early History

Ueshiba Morihei 植芝盛平 (1883–1969), aikido’s founder, generally referred to by practitioners as Ō-sensei 大先生 (great teacher), studied and synthesised teachings from several sources, most notably the martial art Daitō-ryū Jūjutsu 大東流柔術 (hereafter Daitō-ryū) and the Shintō 神道 derived new religious movement Ōmoto 大本 (also Ōmotokyō 大本教). Ueshiba, a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), travelled to Hokkaidō 北海道 as part of a settler group in 1915. There, he studied Daitō-ryū under its founder, Takeda Sōkaku 武田惣角 (1859–1943), for roughly four years. Takeda’s teachings formed the basis for what would become aikido’s physical techniques (waza 技), including its well-known system of joint locks and throws. In 1920, Ueshiba moved to Ayabe 綾部, the Ōmoto headquarters, to become a disciple of Ōmoto’s co-founder, Deguchi Onisaburō 出口王仁三郎 (1871–1948), whose ideas would majorly influence Ueshiba’s worldview and teachings. Deguchi encouraged Ueshiba to teach martial arts in Ayabe, and in 1922 Takeda joined him there, eventually authorising Ueshiba as an instructor of Daitō-ryū. At Deguchi’s prompting, Takeda and Ueshiba changed the name of the practice to Daitō-ryū Aiki-Jūjutsu 大東流合氣柔術, emphasising Takeda’s philosophy of aiki 合氣 (Goldsbury 2010: 133–134).⁶ While aiki can be roughly translated as “matching ki” and understood as harmonising oneself with one’s opponent and environment, Ueshiba would say that its nature cannot be captured in words (Stevens 1993: 41). Later, Ueshiba integrated aspects from other martial arts, including training with weapons such as the wooden sword (bokken 木剣) and staff (jō 杖).

Several of Deguchi’s top disciples were Imperial Japanese Navy officers or had other naval ties. One of these figures, Vice Admiral Asano Seikyō 浅野正恭 (1867–1954), studied Daitō-ryū under Ueshiba in Ayabe starting in 1920. Asano promoted Ueshiba within his network, notably facilitating Ueshiba’s demonstrations for Admiral Takeshita Isamu 竹下勇 (1870–1949), Asano’s classmate from the naval academy and the former commander of the combined fleet, who in turn introduced Ueshiba to the two-time former prime minister Admiral Yamamoto Gonhyōe 山本権兵衛 (1852–1933). After several trips to demonstrate his evolving style of jūjutsu, Ueshiba moved to Tōkyō in 1927, eventually founding the massive Kōbukan 皇武館 (Imperial Martial Hall) dōjō 道場 in Shinjuku 新宿区 in April 1931, with an eighty-tatami-mat training area (about 124 square metres) and space to house the Ueshiba family and up to twenty uchideshi 内弟子 (live-in disciples). His students in this period included many military, political, business, and religious elites, including numerous Ōmoto members (Pranin 2014). In 1932, Ueshiba became the founding chairman of Ōmoto’s martial arts association (sometimes considered a paramilitary organisation), the Dai Nippon Budō Sen’yōkai 大日本武道宣揚会 (Greater Japan Martial Enhancement Society). Stanley Pranin writes that “this association was tailor-made” to help Ueshiba develop and spread his martial art throughout its seventy-five dōjō spanning the Japanese Empire, while also “demonstrating the patriotic role of the Omoto religion” (Pranin 2014; also Goldsbury 2010: 134). However, following a massive state suppression (the so-called Second Ōmoto Incident) in 1935, these dōjō distanced themselves from Ōmoto, removing Deguchi’s calligraphy and symbols; many continued to practise Ueshiba’s jūjutsu, although after Japan went to total war in 1937, many lost their younger students to the frontlines (Pranin 2002).

It is difficult to ascertain Ueshiba’s personal politics, but he was closely associated with high-ranking military officers and right-wing nationalists throughout the early Shōwa period (1926–1989), personally teaching martial arts in military and police institutions between 1927 and 1942, including in Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo (Pranin 2020). During the early 1930s, Ueshiba published articles in Ōmoto’s newspaper indicating his agreement with Deguchi’s doctrine that the Japanese emperor should rule the “new world order” (Goldsbury 2010: 134).⁷ His school’s growth was bound up with the imperialistic militarism of its time and Ōmoto’s idiosyncratic political theology, but it seems that Ueshiba had a change of heart as American bombs began to fall on Tōkyō. In 1942, likely due to a number of factors, including poor health, disillusionment with Japan’s government, and his own spiritual development, Ueshiba stepped down from his teaching positions, including the Kōbukan in Tōkyō, and retired to Iwama 岩間, a former town in Ibaraki 茨木 (today part of Kasama City 笠間市) where he built a shrine (the Aiki Jinja 合気神社) and a rustic dōjō (Pranin 2001; 2020). His transformation was tied to his growing conviction that martial arts, especially his art which would come to be known as aikido, should not be used for combat but rather as an expression of divine will to protect humanity and help aikidōka build compassion. Ueshiba came to call aikido the “martial art of love” (ai no budō 愛の武道) and punned that aikido’s true meaning is “the way of the ki of love” (aikidō 愛気道; see Li 2013a).⁸ He also frequently said that instead of victory over an opponent, the true goal of aikido is victory over oneself.

Ueshiba attributed this transformation of martial arts from violence to peace to revelations he received from kami 神. As a longtime practitioner of chinkon kishin 鎮魂帰神, an Ōmoto practice, he learned how to channel divine knowledge through inviting kami possession (Staemmler 2009; Ueshiba 2002: 7). In an initial revelation in 1925, Ueshiba reportedly experienced a shower of golden ki from heaven that transformed him “into a golden being that filled space; the barrier between the spiritual and material worlds had crumbled – ‘I am the universe.’ He realised that the true purpose of budo [i.e., martial arts] was love” (Stevens 1984: 9; Kaku 1996: 249). Fifteen years later, during a water purification (suigyō 水行) ceremony on his fifty-seventh birthday (December 14, 1940), Ueshiba had possibly the most profound possession experience of his life. His guardian kami, Sarutahiko Ōkami 猿田彦大神 (the leader of the earthly kami), informed Ueshiba that his spirit would thereafter be possessed by Ame-no-murakumo-kuki-samuhara Ryūō 天の村雲九鬼さむはら竜王, a Dragon King (usually a Buddhist deity) whose name was rendered “Divine Agency Capable of Eradicating all Evil and Pacifying the World” by John Stevens (1993: 33–35), Ueshiba’s primary English translator. Contemporary aikidōka credit this revelation with Ueshiba’s teaching that “the purpose of Aikido is not to kill or fight but to love and fulfill the heavenly duty of purifying the world,” which is why aikido has no competitions (AikidoDiscovery Admin 2023). Through these revelations, Ueshiba came to believe that he was a kind of prophet or avatar (amakudaru 天下る) to bring peace to the world through aikido, which inspired him to build the Aiki Shrine and promote aikido as the martial art of love (Ueshiba 2002: 17–18, 26).⁹

4 The Role of Ki in Ueshiba’s Teachings

Ueshiba’s teachings are extremely abstruse, even for his own students. They frequently refer to numerous kami and places from the eighth-century Kojiki 古事記 (Records of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (The Chronicles of Japan), obscure teachings of Deguchi Onisaburō, concepts from esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō 密教), and his own spiritual revelations, with little explanation that would be clear to audiences without extensive knowledge on these topics. For this reason, along with Ueshiba’s preference to lecture rather than write, and his pre-war associations with Japan’s military and right-wing factions, much of the material published in the post-war period and attributed to the founder was heavily edited by his son and successor, Ueshiba Kisshōmaru 植芝吉祥丸 (1921–1999) and other top students (Pranin 2012). However, even after the need to cut connections with Ōmoto after 1935 and the post-war editing of Morihei’s teachings, the writings attributed to Ueshiba (and aikido practice today) continue to bear strong influences from Ōmoto, especially regarding emphases on ritual purification (misogi 禊), the previously mentioned Ōmoto possession ritual called chinkon kishin, and the divine vibratory power of chanting of particular syllables (kotodama 言霊, although Ueshiba preferred the reading kototama).

Ueshiba tended not to speak directly regarding the nature of ki, but it is a key term in reference to the concept of aiki which he considered to be the heart of spiritual practice, and it also comes up as the basis for many other concepts that he speaks about frequently, such as yīn and yáng and the kototama of the five vowels and eight consonants. Ueshiba’s concept of ki is deeply influenced by concepts like the undifferentiated “primordial ki” (C. yúanqì 元氣; J. genki) that precedes yīn and yáng, Heaven and Earth. This concept dates to the Daoist classics such as the second century BCE Huáinánzǐ 淮南子 (Liu 2015: 44), but Ueshiba read it through an esoteric Buddhist lens. Ueshiba associated this type of primordial ki with the syllables U and SU and with “the ki of śūnyatā” (shinkū no ki 真空の気), which he also called “true ki” (shinki 真気). He urged his students to link themselves to this cosmic source to “liberate yourself from ordinary ki and permeate your organs with true ki” (Stevens 1993: 27). This true ki would allow them to perform aikido properly, which is to say, as spiritually enlightened, loving beings. A key site of practice for cultivating true ki is the lower abdomen, called the hara 腹 or the “ki-ocean cinnabar field” (kikai tanden 気海丹田). Ueshiba said that those who achieve the essence (gokui 極意) of aikido experience the entire universe within their hara, a merging of the microcosm and the macrocosm that he also described with the Buddhist term “no-mind” (mushin 無心) (Gleason 1995: 56). In addition to these Shintō and Buddhist referents, Ueshiba also explained primordial ki with a reference to John 1:1 (likely inherited from Deguchi and often repeated in American aikido circles), saying that “from within this oneness comes the first spark of life and consciousness,” with “infinitesimal particles of ki radiating life energy [and] the birth of the kototama of Su [… to which] the biblical expression ‘in the beginning was the word’ refers” (ibid.: 59).

Although it is not often said so bluntly, Ueshiba’s mastery over ki also underlies the miraculous powers that he claimed and that were attributed to him. Accounts of his life story nearly always include accounts of his preternatural ability to sense attacks coming, to the extent that he could “see” bullets before they were fired, which he experienced in his time as a soldier in the Russo-Japanese War as well as on an ill-fated mission with Deguchi to Mongolia in 1924. Speaking of the latter, Ueshiba said:

As we neared Tungliao, we were trapped in a valley and showered with bullets. Miraculously, I could sense the direction of the projectiles – beams of light indicated their paths of flight – and I was able to dodge the bullets. The ability to sense an attack is what the ancient masters meant by anticipation. If one’s mind is steady and pure, one can instantly perceive an attack and avoid it – that, I realized is the essence of aiki (Ueshiba 2002: 10–11).

Another famous story involves Ueshiba avoiding the bullets of Japanese soldiers with pistols on a shooting range, seemingly dematerialising and suddenly appearing behind the soldiers, throwing one of them. An eyewitness (and one of Ueshiba’s students) said that he could only consider it to be a “divine technique” (shingi 神技), and in Ueshiba’s own explanation, he also referred to the idea that the kami would not let him die yet because they told him he is needed in the world and his “purification” (misogi) was not yet complete (Shioda 1991: 189–195). Stevens links this story and Ueshiba’s explanation of it to his teaching that he was a prophet or avatar for the world (Ueshiba 2002: 15–17), and, as we shall see again below, Ueshiba believed that the ability to cultivate and employ ki was closely related to one’s relationship with the divine world. Finally, other accounts of this story (or a similar one, where Ueshiba seemingly teleports behind the gunman) suggest a relationship between miraculous powers and one’s ki: “when asked how it was done [Ueshiba] replied only, ‘You can’t do that often, it takes years off your life’” (Gleason 1995: 18). This echoes traditional beliefs about jīng 精 (J. sei; “essence”), a substance related to ki in Chinese medical belief that can determine one’s lifespan.

5 Tōhei Kōichi and Aikido’s Introduction to the United States

In 1953, at the request of a branch of a Japanese alternative health organisation, Tōhei Kōichi, whom Ueshiba recognised as his top-ranked student at the time, was sent to the U.S. Territory of Hawai‘i to demonstrate and teach aikido.

This was not the first time aikido was taught outside of Japan (or, rather, the Japanese Empire, including Manchukuo), which seems to have been in 1951, when Mochizuki Minoru 望月稔 (1907–2003), a student of both jūdō 柔道 (under its founder, Kanō Jigorō 嘉納治五郎 [1860–1938]) and aikido (under Ueshiba), helped introduce aikido to France (Pranin 1991: 28; Ueno 1995: 87). While the French lineages are also important in the development of global aikido, and the aikido historian Stanley Pranin recognised France as possessing the most aikidōka of any nation in the world (surpassing even Japan) as of 1991 (Pranin 1991: 31), I will focus for the remainder of this article on the case of aikido in the United States, with particular attention to Tōhei’s lineage (possibly the largest in the U.S.), which differs from others due to his training in several other methods and his experiences with and focus on ki.

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(left to right) Tōhei Kōichi and Ueshiba Morihei in 1953. Photo originally appeared in Tohei 1961

Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-12345004

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From its beginning, aikido was often compared to jūdō, arguably the first modern martial art, and many early aikidōka came to Ueshiba’s teaching after already receiving a dan 段 ranking (i.e., a black belt) in jūdō.¹⁰ Tōhei Kōichi was no exception. He studied jūdō under his father, a fourth-dan instructor, as a child and continued practising as a student at Keio University, when he suffered chest pain after being thrown hard by a bigger partner.¹¹ He received a diagnosis of pleurisy and was told to avoid physical activity or even speaking loudly. While recuperating at his family home, he discovered a practice called misogi breathing (misogi no kokyū-hō 禊の呼吸法; i.e., purification breathing) being taught by a teacher named Ogura Tetsuju 小倉鐵樹 (1865–1944) that he thought could help cure him. Arriving at Ogura’s centre, the teachers thought he was too fragile, so they made him first practise Zen meditation (zazen 座禅) for six months before undergoing the misogi beginner austerities (misogi shogaku shugyō 禊初学修行), which involves chanting a mantra all day at full strength for three days. Tōhei chanted, enduring chest pains that eventually subsided, and he enjoyed a full recovery that he attributed to strengthening his ki through zazen and misogi.

After his recovery, Tōhei found himself dissatisfied with jūdō, which he found as purely physical and ignoring “the movement of mind” (Tohei 1976: 82). In 1939, one of Tōhei’s jūdō seniors introduced him to Ueshiba, who greatly impressed Tōhei by throwing him without him feeling any force. Tōhei began studying aikido (then called aiki budō) and quickly became among Ueshiba’s favourites because zazen and misogi made him naturally excellent at certain practices despite having little formal training in them. In 1944, Tōhei was sent to the frontlines in China, where he discovered that in a “state of true relaxation […] you are filled with Ki and even bullets will avoid you” (ibid.: 86). He said it was then that he realised that he needed to concentrate his mind in the aforementioned hara (lower abdomen), which he would call the seika no itten 臍下の一点 or “one point below the navel” (also seika itten 臍下一点). When he returned, he was made a sixth-dan in aikido and continued practising misogi, but he was frustrated by the dispirited state of post-war Japan (Tohei 1976: 86–87; Tōhei 1999: 153). It was at this time that he encountered his final influential teacher, Nakamura Tempū, who taught the method called Shinshin Tōitsu-dō, partly based on his alleged study of yoga in India. Tōhei reevaluated everything he knew about aikido though Nakamura’s teachings, realising that “in order to become one with [the ki] of the universe, you have to first coordinate your mind and body” (Tohei 1976: 87) and grew to use ki interchangeably with “mind” (kokoro 心, also sometimes translated as “heart” or “spirit”). As one of Tōhei’s students in Hawai‘i said, “Tohei sensei’s teachings is the waza [physical techniques] from Ueshiba O-sensei and the mind part from Tempu. He put it together” (Li 2013b).

As previously mentioned, Tōhei was invited to teach about aikido in Hawai‘i in 1953, and he spent nearly a year there on his first of many extended stays in Hawai‘i and the mainland U.S. The sponsoring organisation was the Hawaii Nishikai, the Hawai‘i branch of a Japanese association dedicated to the Nishi System of Health Engineering (the official English translation of Nishi-shiki Kenkō-hō 西式健康法, often abbreviated to Nishi-shiki 西式), a system of calisthenics, dietetics, hydrotherapy, and hands-on healing designed by Nishi Katsuzō 西勝造 (1884–1959), who had served as the chief technical engineer for the Tōkyō subway and was an accomplished aikidōka himself (Nishikai Honbu 1992). If he could get aikido to become popular in the U.S., Tōhei felt, then this would help its post-war revival in Japan as well.¹² Once he arrived in Hawai‘i, he demonstrated aikido’s strength by a series of showdowns with much larger men, including professional wrestlers, high-ranking teachers of jūdō and kendō 剣道, and police officers, in which he threw and pinned them all, after which they became his students and Tōhei was named an honorary captain in the Honolulu Police Department (Tōhei 1999: 157–159). On his next visit, he offered free instruction to police forces across Hawai‘i, which was commented on in the local newspaper.¹³

Tōhei’s police officer students became some of the most visible early promoters of aikido in American media, helping legitimise it for American audiences. When aikido was the cover story of the April 9, 1955 issue of Hawaiian Life (the weekend magazine of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin), the image featured two Honolulu police officers in aikidōgi 合気道着 uniforms, one bringing the other to his knees (and, judging by his dramatic grimace, causing a considerable amount of pain) with a wrist lock.

In May 1955, Honolulu policemen demonstrated aikido on the television show You Asked For It, which was broadcast across the U.S. mainland and in Canada, according to local television listings. The following year, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that the police department decided to train all its recruits in aikido rather than jūdō.¹⁴ And Honolulu officers demonstrated aikido to mainland police chiefs at the sixty-fourth conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, held in Honolulu in September 1957 (Stone 1957).

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(left to right) Honolulu Police Department officers Larry Mehau and Ernest Kanekoa demonstrating an aikido wrist lock on the cover of The Saturday Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), April 9, 1955

Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-12345004

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The U.S. military was another important institutional force that helped shape and legitimise this obscure Japanese art for American audiences. Aikido’s connections to police and military training were often commented on in early accounts of aikido in English-language newspapers in Territorial Hawai‘i and the mainland U.S.¹⁵ One of the first Americans to learn aikido was the Hawai‘i-born Nikkei 日系 (i.e., person of Japanese descent) Thomas Makiyama (1928–2005), who was stationed in Yokohama 横浜 during the American Occupation. While in Japan, Makiyama studied Yōshinkan Aikido 養神館合気道 (a school founded by Ueshiba’s student Shioda Gōzō 塩田剛三 [1915–1994] in 1955), in which he eventually reached eighth-dan, and Makiyama went on to write some of the first English language books on aikido (Pranin 1991: 72).¹⁶ In June of 1953, while Tōhei was still establishing the first aikido dōjō in Hawai‘i, a group of high-ranking Japanese jūdō instructors visited the U.S. at the invitation of the U.S. Air Force and included aikido techniques in their seminars (ibid.: 135). The first non-Nikkei instructors of aikido (and other Japanese martial arts) on the U.S. mainland were servicemen and servicewomen who studied while stationed in Japan. U.S. Army Sergeants Eugene Combs and Daniel Ivan (1930–2007) studied Yōshinkan Aikido while serving as military police stationed at Camp Drake in Saitama 埼玉 (outside Tōkyō), and they opened a dōjō in Lawndale in the greater Los Angeles area in 1956.¹⁷ Another early non-Nikkei American aikido instructor (misidentified at the time as “the only Caucasian to hold a black belt in Aikido”) was U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Robert Tann (1931–2001), who began studying under Tōhei while stationed in Hawai‘i; he taught hand-to-hand combat to Marines recruits in San Diego before opening his own dōjō in South San Francisco in 1960.¹⁸ And the Strategic Air Command – responsible for the United States’ nuclear arsenal – regularly sent its pilots to Japan for martial arts training, including aikido and jūdō (Meredith 1962; Pranin 1991: 135). It is remarkable how connections to state power from municipal police departments to national military forces were crucial to aikido’s rise on both sides of the Pacific.

6 Ki in Tōhei-lineage Aikido (Ki Aikido)

Learning to cultivate and use ki is very much at the centre of Tōhei’s style of aikido. Following Ueshiba’s death in 1969, Tōhei was the top-ranked aikidōka and the director of education, or shihan buchō 師範部長, at the Aikikai (Ueshiba’s organisation), but when his attempts to have the main dōjō “adopt his teaching methods which emphasized the principle of Ki were unsuccessful,” he established his own organisation, the Ki Society (Ki no Kenkyūkai 氣の研究会) in 1971. This eventually led to his leaving the Aikikai in 1974 to teach his own style of aikido called Shin Shin Tōitsu Aikidō 心身統一合氣道 (Mind-Body Unification Aikido), more commonly called Ki Aikido in English (Pranin 1991: 121). However, Tōhei had developed his teachings about cultivating ki in the “single point,” seika no itten (i.e., the lower abdomen), through meditation and breathing exercises and learning to “extend ki” (ki o dasu 氣を出す) by the time he was teaching in Hawai‘i. In contrast to what has become the dominant understanding of ki as a form of “energy” that permeates the cosmos, Tōhei and other early post-war English-language coverage of aikido treated ki as a way of understanding the mind and its powers.

Tōhei explained his concept of ki in a two-part article called “Mind over Matter” that ran in the first volume of Black Belt magazine in 1962.¹⁹ The article opens by describing examples of superhuman strength, such as a man throwing a piano in a fit of anger or a woman lifting a car to rescue her son. Tōhei wrote that these can be explained as functions of ki, which he translated as “mind or spirit” (1962a: 14–15). Aikido, he said, teaches its students to cultivate these powers by sensing the flow of ki within themselves and learning to “extend” ki from the “one point” below the navel, leading to the capacity for extraordinary feats. This was illustrated in the lead photo in the second instalment, captioned “Master Tohei displays the power of the ki (mind) by pushing a grown man with his little finger” (Tōhei 1962b: 48), as well as in the oft-repeated story of Tōhei “meditating for eight hours in freezing weather clad only in shorts” (Anonymous 1962: 65; see also Tōhei 1962b: 48–50). Tōhei said that learning to work with ki also helps cultivate morality, writing, “Aikido training, in addition to developing unknown powers and relaxing your tension, also molds character,” and providing examples of helping a student control his temper and transforming “rough, young punks” in Hawai‘i into “proper citizens” (Tōhei 1962a: 16). One of Tōhei’s students in Hawai‘i attested that “the power of meditation, thought, mental dedication is a dynamic lever which can accomplish miracles. It was in such an application of mind, or ki, as the Japanese call it, that Master Koichi Tohei [told the Hawai‘i Aiki Kwai], ‘whenever you are in a predicament, confide in yourself – meditate and extend your ki’” (Yamamoto 1962: 26). Once the students learned to extend their ki, “insoluble problems became soluble. Dwindling classes began to grow” and they raised sufficient funds to build a large new headquarters (ibid.: 27).

Another important concept for Tōhei was that of the relationship between the individual mind and the “universal mind” (tenchi no kokoro 天地の心 or reiseishin 霊性心).²⁰ In his Book of Ki, he wrote about how, if one pursues the concept that everything is ki “to the depth of human consciousness, you will understand the universal mind which governs all creation, loving and protecting all life” (Tohei 1976: 12). Here, Tōhei combined Nakamura’s mentalism, Nakamura’s description of a “universal spirit” (uchūrei 宇宙霊) that is the “original ki from the creation of the universe” (quoted in Kaku 1996: 288; my translation), and Ueshiba’s emphasis on a loving divine presence that desires for world peace. Tōhei considered the potential to realise the universal mind to be a defining characteristic and goal of human existence, which he referenced in several of his twenty-two “ki sayings” that are considered core teachings in Ki Aikido. For example, the English version of the first saying (“Our Motto”) begins: “Let us have a Universal Mind that loves and protects all creation and helps all things grow and develop”; the second saying (“The Value of Existence”) states: “Our lives are born of the Ki of the Universe. Let us give thanks for being born not as plants and animals, but as human beings blessed with a Universal Mind”; and the seventeenth saying (“Reiseishin [The Universal Mind]”) explains: “Human beings are blessed with a mind that is directly connected to the mind of the Universe,” which can manifest completely “when our mind and body are unified and calm […] all suffering and wicked desires fall away, and the Universal Mind of love and protection for all things appears in us.”²¹

It might seem counterintuitive, but Tōhei believed that his American students’ openness to understanding aikido as “a matter of mind” allowed them to understand ki in a way that Japanese aikidōka could not, which led to his wanting to “teach about ki within the Aikikai” and his eventual split from that organisation (Pranin 2015 [1995]). But perhaps this should not be too surprising given that the types of powers attributed to this “mental” interpretation of ki – and the concept of the “universal mind” – closely resemble ideas about the powers of the mind in American “metaphysical religion” (Albanese 2007). Indeed, ideas from the American New Thought movement influenced many spiritual therapies in early twentieth century Japan (Hirano 2016), including Nakamura Tempū’s Shinshin Tōitsu-dō, which powerfully shaped Tōhei’s ideas on ki and mind. Nakamura first encountered New Thought in 1909, while suffering from tuberculosis, which he contracted while in the Imperial Army. After reading a book by the American author Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924), Nakamura travelled to the United States in search of a cure. Nakamura’s official story is that, after two fruitless years in the United States, he continued to travel the world, ultimately spending two and a half years in Sikkim, India, studying yoga under his guru Kaliappa (Ikeda 1995: 55–84; Kaku 1996: 286). However, as Philip Deslippe (2019: 92–93) has written, Nakamura’s “second teacher” was Yogi Ramacharaka, a pen name used by the American New Thought author William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932) for books on yoga that emphasised the power of the mind, including the ability to heal through the medium of prana or “vril” (another vital force that Nakamura also discussed). Given the proximity between the teachings in Ramacharaka’s books and Nakamura’s teachings about the power of the mind over matter, including human health, it is likely that much of Shinshin Tōitsu-dō was a reworking of Atkinson’s New Thought for Japanese audiences.

Despite the mystical aspects of Tōhei’s mentalism, with its emphasis that mastery of ki could produce apparent miracles, he considered it a much more naturalistic approach to ki than Ueshiba’s, which Tōhei pejoratively characterised as “occult.” He explained that, whereas Ueshiba taught that he and his students could become “as immovable as a heavy rock” through various kami entering their purified bodies, “in reality that sort of thing has nothing to do with any gods or spirits. It’s just a matter of having a low center of gravity […]. Anybody can do the things I teach […]. Viewing them as supernatural powers requiring the presence of some god or what have you is a big mistake” (Pranin 2015 [1995]). Tōhei also used mechanistic metaphors for ki, as when describing “ki tests” that check how strongly ki flows the seika no itten through the arms, which he compares to water flowing from a valve (the “single point”) to hoses (the arms).

7 Parallels and Divergences between Aikido and Reiki

The story of aikido’s development, overseas circulation, and translation for American audiences bears many similarities and some differences with that of the healing practice Reiki, originally called Usui Reiki Ryōhō 臼井療法 (Usui Reiki Therapy). Reiki’s founder, Usui Mikao 臼井甕男 (1865–1926), and his successors taught this healing practice – based on the idea of a form of ki called reiki that pervades all existence – in Tōkyō in the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time that Ueshiba was establishing himself there.²² It has already been mentioned that aikido’s growth benefitted from powerful patrons within the Imperial Navy, including important admirals, and Reiki also circulated within naval circles: after Usui’s death, the top leadership of the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai 臼井霊気療法学会 and its offshoot Hayashi Reiki Kenkyūkai 林霊気研究会 were all naval officers (including a vice admiral and two rear admirals), both associations had branches in important naval ports, and it is said that Reiki was practised on Japanese warships at the time (Stein 2023: 62–63). While evidence is lacking for a direct connection between Reiki and Ōmoto (also popular in the Navy), elements of Usui’s hand-healing practice resemble an Ōmoto healing practice called miteshiro otoritsugi み手代お取次 (which became the basis for the hand-healing practice jōrei 浄霊), and I have argued elsewhere that “some of Usui’s disciples from the Imperial Navy [may have been] primed for Usui Reiki Therapy through either membership in or knowledge of Ōmoto and its healing practices” (Stein 2023: 230 n. 81; see also Staemmler 2009: 261–274; Stein 2012: 126–127).

Reiki’s development in Taishō-era Japan (1912–1926) was also influenced by practices imported from the United States about subtle energies and the power of the mind. Just as the yogic therapies described by the American author William Walker Atkinson (writing as Yogi Ramacharaka) were an important influence on Nakamura Tempū’s concept of the mind (and, through Tōhei Kōichi, aikido more broadly), Usui Reiki Ryōhō was also likely influenced by Atkinson/Ramacharaka in many ways, including his conception of prana (sometimes translated as reiki) and techniques – especially the power of the mind – to manipulate that energy to heal (Guillory 2023; Hirano 2016: 78–82; Stein 2023: 71–72). Like Ramacharaka’s Prana Distributing meditation, early Reiki and other spiritual therapies of their time included meditations on the lower abdomen (hara) for practitioners to cultivate reiki and experience the non-duality of the self and the universe (ware soku uchū 我即宇宙) (Stein 2023: 71–72), also described by Ueshiba and Tōhei. Reiki is often understood as a manifestation of a cosmic principle of love, echoing teachings in both aikido and American metaphysical religion.

Also, Hawai‘i was an important space for Reiki’s entrance into the English- speaking world as it was for aikido. The large Nikkei population of Territorial Hawai‘i, originally brought to the Islands as plantation labour,²³ made up the vast majority of the first Reiki students and patients in the United States, just as Nikkei Americans made up the early students and teachers in the Hawai‘i Aikikai, the first aikido dōjō in the United States. The Hawai‘i-born second-generation Nikkei woman Hawayo Takata (1900–1980) used her bilingualism and her cultural familiarity with both Japan and the United States to adapt and translate Reiki for American audiences. Reiki and aikido both benefitted from broader American interest in Japanese religion (especially Zen) and qì/ki-based phenomena like acupuncture, which grew in the 1960s and 1970s through mass media coverage of figures like D. T. Suzuki 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966) and the popularity of “kung fu” (i.e., gōngfū 功夫) cinema and television (Baum forthcoming; Stein 2023: 155–156, 180–182). Takata also translated reiki as “universal life energy” in a similar way that Tōhei translated reiseishin as “universal mind,” with both understanding rei 霊 not as an individual “spirit” but rather as a cosmic force. There is also overlap between Reiki practitioners and aikidōka: Paul Mitchell (b. 1946), one of Takata’s Master students and a leader of the Usui Shiki Ryoho lineage, is a long-time aikidōka who has taught ki training techniques from Ki Aikido in Reiki seminars, and (Joe) Thames Gundy emphasises the overlaps between the teachings of Tōhei and Takata in his book Ki and Reiki (Gundy 1995).

However, there are also important differences between the development and circulation of aikido and Reiki. Unlike what I have found so far in my research on understandings of ki in pre-war Japanese aikido communities, there is some evidence that some Reiki practitioners were describing reiki in terms of “energy” by the mid-1930s, before it ever left Japan (Stein 2019: 90), and Reiki practitioners tend to use Takata’s English translation of reiki as “universal life energy” in contrast to the different streams of translating ki in aikido communities, including understanding ki as “mind.” Also, aikido became popular in the United States much more quickly than Reiki, with widespread media coverage within a decade of its introduction, and dozens of dōjō by the 1960s, whereas it took Reiki decades to reach such popularity.

8 Discussion

Unlike the broader fields of martial and medical arts, which have tended to understand ki as a form of “energy,” Tōhei’s Ki Aikido lineage, one of the most influential in the United States, primarily understands ki in terms of “mind” (or “spirit”). In the post-war decades, when Tōhei was a high-ranking representative of Ueshiba’s Aikikai, his mental interpretation of ki and emphasis was more common than the energetic interpretation in English-language descriptions of aikido. A Canadian correspondent in Japan who was able to interview Ueshiba in 1957 wrote: “[Ueshiba’s] system of aikido means ‘harmony’ (ai), ‘mind’ (ki) and ‘principle’ (do). It is based on a conviction that if the mind is properly trained, the body will automatically develop” (Stevenson 1957).²⁴ However, since the split between Tōhei’s Ki Society and the Aikikai in 1974, it has become more common for aikidōka in the United States to discuss ki as a form of “energy.” Just the following year, a three-part Black Belt cover story on qì [ch’i]/ki, which opened by describing an aikido student learning to extend ki, explained ki as “intrinsic energy […] a vital force in our bodies which enables us to perform acts that sometimes seem paranormal” (Saunders 1975: 39). And John Stevens, Ueshiba’s main translator, told his readers that when Ueshiba uses “the term ki,” he “refers to the subtle energy that propels the universe, the vitality that pervades creation, and the unifying force that holds things together” (Ueshiba 2002: x). Elsewhere, Stevens described ki as “the primal energy that arose from the Void” (Stevens 1984: 21). The idea of ki as mind or spirit is largely absent in such “energetic” accounts. As with the eleventh-century Neo-Confucian Zhāng Zài, this view seems to consider mind and soul (as well as the body) as aspects of ki’s presence.

However, I should not overemphasise “ki as energy” and “ki as mind” as incompatible streams, as there are also significant confluences between them. Even if Tōhei did not explicitly use the term “energy” in regard to ki, instead focusing on spirit and mind, he did describe daily activity as “consuming” ki, comparing an individual’s ki to a car battery that needs periodic recharging (Tohei 1976: 9). A more complex vision of the interconnection between mind and energy is seen in William Gleason’s oft-cited The Spiritual Foundations of Aikido. To explain Ueshiba’s concept of the void (invoked by the vowel U in kototama), Gleason wrote that modern science describes “[this] dimension as an electromagnetic energy field that contains and controls material existence […] unconditional electromagnetic energy or ki” (1995: 57–58). The self appears to be an illusion, as “even the great mountains are nothing but a swirling mass of energy.” However, Gleason then quoted Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics (1975) to say that “all of our concepts […] are merely creations of the mind,” and macrobiotics educator Kushi Michio 久司道夫 (1926–2014) to say that “all manifestations of nature, including the more subtle qualities of emotion, mind, and spirit, are products of Ki” (Gleason 1995: 58). There appears to be a contradiction: is ki-energy a “creation of the mind” or is the mind a “product of ki”? As Gleason seems to suggest that the individual mind/spirit is ultimately an aspect of “the electromagnetic field of universal breath […] or spirit” (ibid.: 59), ki and mind may both result in a concept resembling Tōhei’s universal mind with which the practitioner seeks to merge. In another take on the intertwined aspect of ki as energy and ki as mind/spirit, the high-ranking Yōshinkan Aikido teacher Takeno Takefumi 竹野高文 (b. 1947) said in a 1994 interview that ki “can’t really be expressed in words, but it’s a subtle […] energy, if you will, something profound through which you can control the mind and spirit. But I think it is impossible to manifest this ki-energy without substantial spiritual development” (Anonymous 1994: 23).

The focus on “spirituality” in most aikido lineages has led some, including Christian chaplains, to consider it as a possible way to address Americans’ spiritual needs and lead more fulfilled and ethical lives in ways that late modern institutional religion has difficulty addressing (Hall 1991). An aikidōka who researched the subject found that “approximately two-thirds” of the aikidōka whom he interviewed in the American Midwest (across multiple lineages) considered aikido to be a spiritual practice. Of these, roughly half thought aikido complemented their (mostly Christian) religious commitments, whereas the other half “had rejected or given up traditional Western religious practices and had made Aikido a part of their personal religious beliefs and practices, without aligning themselves with any particular religious institution” (Boylan 1999). Further work in religious studies should continue to examine aikido’s spiritual and religious dimensions and consider its consequences for the category of religion.

Finally, although aikido is considered a “Japanese” martial art, it also exhibits transnational aspects throughout its history. This is most pronounced in Ki Aikido, with its influences from Nakamura, who adapted Atkinson/Ramacharaka’s ideas in his “Japanese yoga,” but even the “Shintō” aspect of aikido’s origins – commonly considered its most characteristically Japanese aspect – was mediated by Deguchi Ōnisaburō, who was strongly influenced by aspects of Western occultism. For example, his approach to the “spiritual world” (reikai 霊界) was influenced by Swedenborgianism, as mediated through D. T. Suzuki’s Japanese-language translations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) work, which he had studied in the United States (Yoshinaga 2013: 61). As such, Per Faxneld has argued that aikido might be considered “a case of cultural entanglement” before it ever left Japan (2021: 227 n. 1). I hope this article’s attention to these complex transnational and translingual components of aikido can contribute to prior work demonstrating the entangled twentieth-century North Pacific history of ideas and practices related to “vital energy,” as my prior writing linked scholarship on the early twentieth-century Japanese reception of practices from Euro-American metaphysical religion (Hirano 2016; Okamura 2019) to Reiki’s adaptation for and (consonance with) American audiences (Stein 2019; 2023). In the future, I would like to extend my examination of the trans-Pacific circulation of ki theories and practices to dive deeper into Nakamura’s Shinshin Tōitsu-dō and also consider figures like the parapsychologist and yogi Motoyama Hiroshi 本山博 (1925–2015), the philosopher Yuasa Yasuo 湯浅泰雄 (1925–2005), and their translators who helped popularise their work in the United States.