Who is Prosper Weeder? Could he possibly be yet another guy nobody has ever heard of, who gets named a sevenfouteenth dan and shihan at the Kagami Biraki?

Nothing of the sort.

If we look at the kanji that make up Morihei Ueshiba’s name, 盛平植芝, and translate them literally one by one, the result is, in order: prosperous, full, plant, grass.

With a bit of imagination, we could therefore translate Morihei as “Prosper“. Then, thinking of a Japanese person planting grass, the only image that comes to mind is that of the patient work of rice farmers transplanting seedlings into paddy fields. Thus, Ueshiba would turn into… (rice) Weeder.

Every culture changed and still changes the original names into more familiar and “sound” ones: think of historical figures, towns, countries…

It’s something very human: to “make our own” something that doesn’t belong to us. To look at it through our own lens and somehow dress it in the fabric of our daily experience. To absorb it into the culture to which we belong.

After all, there is a tendency, also human and understandable, to mythologize what we don’t understand. In the case of Martial Arts, exotic-sounding Oriental names seem to contain all sorts of arcane secrets that we, poor ignorant souls, cannot grasp-and this is why we struggle so much.

Thinking of Morihei Ueshiba as a hypothetical Prosper Weeder helps us see him a bit more for what he was: a man. Talented and visionary, but still a man.

In this sense, Morihei Ueshiba’s human experience was, like ours, unique and unrepeatable. According to his own words:
“Budo have evolved in the same way as that of the universe and its celestial bodies, and that’s why it should not stay still. Ueshiba’s budo is done by the first generation of Ueshiba, and the second generation of Ueshiba should step over it and reinvent it as if it were new.“

Without the efforts of students like Morihiro Saito to catalog techniques, and the systematic dissemination by O Sensei’s son and grandson, none of us would have ever practiced Aikido.

Or rather, “that collection of techniques and habits we label as Aikido”, which probably resembles the founder’s Aikido about as much as Prosper Weeder recalls Morihei Ueshiba.

We are convinced of the need of practicing from both perspectives. If we practice Morihei Ueshiba’s Aikido, we have the responsibility to occasionally focus on a “philological” exploration of the technical and cultural roots from which the discipline originated. This is not to establish the supremacy of one style over another, but to fill the forms we practice with sense. It’s no coincidence that O Sensei was decidedly opposed to confining the martial experience to sterile repetition of forms, of kata.

To integrate Aikido into our perspective as 21st-century Westerners, to make it a tool that speaks to the needs of today’s men and women-this may be the essence of the phrase “reinvent as if it were new.” Generation after generation, leaving space even for Prosper Weeder Sensei.

Thus, beyond “westernizing” Morihei Ueshiba’s name, it is really about making the present and tradition speak to each other. Two “local” realities, separated by time and space, united by a search for meaning.

For a teacher, this is a challenge because it requires knowing -truly knowing!- both. For anyone stepping onto the tatami, it is -or should be- a moral imperative.

And this is precisely what, keiko after keiko, Aikido practice strives to achieve.

Disclaimer: picture by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels