Adele Westbrook

I have been training in aikido more than 35 years, both in the US and Japan, and have met and learned from some very good teachers (also many mediocre ones). I hold what you might call "mid-level" Hombu dan rank. I have founded a dojo. Speaking Japanese fluently, I have live-interpreted several times for Hombu shihan at seminars outside Japan, and once at a seminar in Japan attended by many visiting foreign students.

I have never owned, or tried to read "Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere", show more although I have always known about it. Recently I checked it out from a library, and I have to say that it really raises my hackles. Not because anything written here is "wrong", necessarily (I have almost no desire to do more than skim it). But simply because of the absolutely breathtaking arrogance of the authors. They don't hide the fact that it had only been 8 years since they were rank beginners, fresh off the streets of NYC, knowing nothing, without even experience of another martial art. At the time of publishing they held only the first-degree black belt rank each, and had reached that stage being taught mostly by a Japanese man named Ohara who (no shade on him though) held only 2nd degree. For the non-martial artist reading this, these ranks may sound impressive, but I assure you, they are not. At this level, you are considered a serious beginner. Just to give you the sense of things, Mr. Ohara was also relatively young, was not a formal representative instructor of the Hombu, and I'm going to guess that he had acquired his rank in his university club, before moving to the United States to get an MBA.

The world knew almost nothing of aikido yet. Even in the Japan of 1970, the community practicing it was tiny compared to older arts like judo and kendo, at very few dojo, and the average person on the street had not yet heard the name "aikido", let alone had people in any other countries. The two authors were apparently graduate students at Columbia University in New York City, where Mr. Ohara was also a student, and the initial group that formed around him seems to have centered on the university. Because of the direct connection to Japan, they seem to have enjoyed a special advantage in this "brave new world" of a cool new, unknown martial art, especially because Hombu was just beginning its push to spread the art overseas, and so it was receptive to them. It sounds like they had the great fun and fortune to travel to Tokyo for their shodan (1st-degree) tests, and to spend a little time training there, where they surely met the Founder, who was still alive. And though everyone and his grandmother travels to Japan to train nowadays (usually by the time they hit brown belt), and many millions more people travel there for tourism, at this time when Japan was still a very exotic place on the far side of the globe, that might as well have been Mars to the average American, it must have been quite a heady experience for them.

Still, you need to keep your head on straight. The word that just screams through my brain reading this book is "pretentious". I'm pretty sure I would not have had the guts to even think to write it, had I been in their shoes. I would have been too busy learning and training (and being a graduate student in some academic field!)

Maybe they made enough money from this book to take the rest of their lives easy - if so, good for them. I note that after publishing this book, the authors went on to publish another book or two on Japanese martial arts, but otherwise seem to have fallen off the edge of the martial arts world, or indeed any other world. They never went on to distinguish themselves as aikido instructors, or apparently even in the academic fields they were studying in the 1960s, from what I can google. They don't appear in Stanley Pranin's 1991 Encyclopedia (a book that has its own issues, but that's another review). I can't even tell for certain if they ever earned their 2nd-degree black belts.

Bottom line: if you have this book, and have gotten some value out of it - Great. If you are an aikidoist (not "aikidoka" - don't get me started :eyeroll:) and want to have it on your shelf just because it's considered a "classic" in the English literature of the art - Fine. The illustrations certainly are attractive, and have become quite iconic.

It is not my purpose here to tell you that the content of "Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere" is wrong, in general (although some of it _is_). It certainly is overly wordy and pretentiously written (I mean, we can start with the title...). I suppose my purpose with this review is just to vent my indignation that some privileged young white folks with limited life experience overall, as beginners in an art form deriving from an ancient foreign culture they had practically no understanding of, somehow thought they were qualified to produce a tome like this, "preaching" about the philosophical underpinnings of aikido, and of course going on at great length on the "correct" way to perform its many techniques (I wonder if they noticed while training at Hombu how much the technical styles of the various teachers there differed!)

Westbrook and Ratti appear to have been enthralled by aikido (as so many are), saw an opportunity, and took advantage of it, lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and having just enough chutzpah. I guess I can't blame them TOO much for that. But let's keep the right perspective on the ultimate value of this book. show less

If you wish to learn the art of Aikido and could only have one book; this would be it. It is effectively illustrated, better than photos. From history and theory, dojo etiquette and fundamental techniques of defense...all is covered. This book will give you broad overview of the mental and spiritual underpinnings of Aikido as a whole.

Having studied Aikido in Guam for 4 years under Sensei Ben Galarpe I had some exposure to what the authors were saying before reading the book. This is a great introduction to Aikido and its background philosophy with the authors doing a good job of introducing the art to a broader audience. The illustrations also help tremendously.

Amazon: Reviewer: A reader
This is truly an impressive attempt to cover all of the martial skills that the feudal warriors of Japan studied. Unfortunately, their section on Aiki-jujitsu and Aikido has some serious errors. First, they claim that Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido was the only legitimate heir of the Daito Ryu school of aiki-jujitsu. This is incorrect. Tokumine Takeda, son of Sokaku Takeda (Ueshiba's Daito Ryu teacher for over a decade), was the heir of Daito Ryu. The current show more headmaster is Katsuyuki Kondo. There are also several other branches of Daito Ryu: Kodokai, Roppokai, and Takumakai, which were started by students of Takeda Sokaku who were actually senior to Ueshiba. Ratti and Westbrooke also stated that Daito Ryu no longer exists, and that we have no way of knowing today the techniques of the the Daito Ryu. Again, untrue. Daito Ryu is one of the most widely practiced traditional styles of martial arts (Koryu Budo) in Japan. Finally, they state with some authority that Daito Ryu descended from Prince Sadasumi. This cannot be verified, even by Daito Ryu practitioners. Like many oral tales, it is a history that people accept in the absence of confirming or contradicting evidence.

What is disturbing is that after twenty years, this information was never updated. Perhaps this was because Ratti and Westbrook did not use any original source, i.e. Japanese, material (at least I did not see any when I glanced through the glossary). Perhaps it was because they felt some need to promote aikido at the expense of Daito Ryu. It does not matter, really. Writing a traditional Japanese martial art out of any book that purports describe the history of Japanese martial arts is a gaffe that makes me wonder what else about the book they have gotten wrong.

I give the book three stars for effort, but let the buyer beware. When reading, don't believe anything until you verify, verify, verify.

Reviewer: Barbara Nostrand "drbarbaranostrand" (Geneseo, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I am writing this review, because people are erroneously using this book as a source for research into pre-modern Japan. It should not be used for this purpose. It belongs to a genre which I call "gosh golly" books. I will proceed to comments relating to previous reviews.

1. The illustrations are modern and appear to have been drawn by a western artist. What it does not contain is reproductions of premodern woodblock prints, paintings, &c. or photographs of actual artifacts.

2. While it has a large bibliography, the works are pretty much exclusively in English and appear to be popular rather than scholarly publications.

3. This book contains descriptions of Japanese "martial arts" such as "tessenjutsu" which do not appear in reliable Japanese literature.

4. This book contains descriptions of highly improbable "martial arts" such as the supposed ability for a seated practitioner to kill an armed opponent by shouting at him.

5. The historical descriptions in the book betray a woeful ignorance. For example, chapter 1 includes a claim that Buddhism is "monotheistic". This makes me wonder how the authors managed to use the correct Japanese words for the military class and the court nobility. Saddly, the scattering of accurate information in this book makes it even less desireable as it lends credance to the book's fantasy elements.

6. One commentor recommended the books by Stephen Turnbull. If you are interested in more scholarly treatments of Japan's medieval period, I recommend consulting books by Marius B. Jansen, Paul Varley, John Witney Hall, William Wayne Farris, and Jeffrey P. Mass. Heavenly Warriors by Farris specifically deals with the origin of the buke class going beyond earlier work by Mass.

7. If what you are looking for is battle paintings, pictures of military artifacts, &c. then you should cosider ordering books from the Mook Series published by Gakken. These can be ordered online from amazon.co.jp. A representative title in this series can be found by entering the following ISBN number into their search engine: 4056042489.

In short. If you are seriously interested in Japan, please buy better books. show less