Japanese Culture

I decided to dive into Aikido a little bit. According to wikipedia, Aikido is a modern japanese budo. The name Aikido is formed of three japanese characters ai-meaning union/harmony, ki-meaning universal energy or spirit, and do meaning way. So it can be translated as "the way to union with universal energy," or "the way of unified energy." Another common interpretation of the characters is harmony, spirit, and way, so Aikido can also mean "the way of spiritual harmony" or "art of peace." The japanese word for 'love' is also pronounced 'ai,' but a different kanji is used for it. Aikido was developed by Morihei Ueshiba over the period of the 1920s to the 1960s. Ueshiba is also known by practioners of aikido as O-sensei meaning "great teacher." Aikido contains a very significant spiritual component which is the result of O-sensei's interaction with the Oomoto religion, as well as Shinto, and Buddhism.

Aikido was born out of three Enlightenment experiences of O-sensei. In each of these, he received a divine inspiration that lead away from the violent natures of his previous training, and towards something more peaceful or "spirit of peace." He ultimately said that the way of the warrior is the "way of divine love that nurtures and protects all things."

A little bit on training: Training is done through mutual technique, where the focus is on entering and harmonizing with the attack, rather than on meeting force with force. Uke, the receiver of the technique, usually initiates an attack against nage (Nage is also reffered to tori or shite depending on style) who neutralizes this attack with an aikido style.

This style sounds soo cool :D I think it would be interesting if our world consisted on martial arts as the form of fighting rather than weapons and such XD.

information came from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aikido
image came from : http://www.aikido-wuerzburg.de/media/kimeda2002/index.html