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The following editorial was contributed by Jason Perna of Old City Aikido.

When I first stepped on an Aikido mat, O-Sensei had only been gone for about 20 years.

My teachers still spoke of him often and instilled a very strong sense that O-Sensei was the absolute source and represented the pinnacle of martial understanding, a level that none of us who followed should reasonably hope to achieve.

His first-generation students, having all become teachers themselves, were all still alive and actively helping to spread the art, and as I began to encounter some of them, the message was quite similar.

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They all protected him very carefully and spoke of him in a way that preserved that sense of awe-inspiring devotion. The practice was mostly that of preservation – very careful preservation – without much room for experimentation or innovation.

I didn’t question any of it at the time, but now, decades later, I am left to wonder if