Dueling With O-Sensei: Grappling With the Myth of the Warrior-Sage, by Ellis Amdur.
http://www.koryu.com/library/eamdur2.html

Some of us, readers and this writer alike, have taken pride in practicing koryu (a “warfare” art). As I write in [a previous chapter], “When I practice my koryu, I make every effort to reach the spirit of the founders, who were born and died in a bloody era of survival. Such practice has both kept me safe, and enabled me to help and protect other people. But as I practice, I often stop and think, ‘What are you doing? There are millions of people, right this minute, slaughtering others using methods not too different from what you are practicing now.’” A good friend, a man whom I respect very much, wrote to object, saying that he did not feel it was justified to equate what we did (practitioners of koryu, descendants, in spirit, of a bushi tradition) with the kind of brutal murderers of Bosnia or Rwanda. This is my answer. There surely is a difference in a group with a code of behavior and honor, and in one which seems to have none. Yet I also believe that killing on the battlefield is always the same, at least at the moment of most significance. In my own small way, about to smash my friend’s face to a pulp, I found myself no different than any other of the morally insane. This is not to call all people who deliberately walk or find themselves on a battlefield or in a fight for their life to be evil. But at the moment of the coup de grace, with the angel of death hugging us from behind as sweetly as a bride, whether I am a Serbian sniper, a U.S. Marine with a collection of Japanese skulls acquired in the battles of the Pacific and featured in a wartime issue of Life magazine, a terrorist in Palestine setting off a bomb or an Israeli guard at a torture camp in Gaza, a young man smashing an opponent head first into the side of a car in a street fight, or a bold samurai, leaning over the neck of his horse to slash the throat of an enemy footsoldier, each of us is a murderer. Is there then any self-defense or justifiable homicide? Of course there is, but a part of the justification lies in having striven with every fiber of one’s being to never be in such a position that one is forced to take a life.

Which leads me to a couple of questions: Because early Japanese war chronicles do not talk of rape or other atrocities very often, some of us are inspired by tales of bravery and chivalry, and we cling to an image of the samurai as honorable warriors, beyond the degenerate acts of soldiers in the mass. But, was it not the samurai who had the right of kiristute gomen (to cut and throw away), the right to cut down any commoner who offended them? And in the larger part of the Muromachi period, was there not wholesale slaughter? And in the Tokugawa period, during times of famine or abuse of the farmers by their feudal lords, did not the bushi engage in the violent suppression of over 3000 peasant rebellions, mostly with the use of firearms against farmers armed with hoes and picks? Nobunaga’s troops, who burned alive 11,000 men, women and children of the Ikko Buddhist sect, were not of a different breed than other warriors nor were all those who took part in the slaughter of thousands of Christian Japanese. Each group of warriors had a certain leader who led them in certain directions, gave them certain orders, drove them into certain circumstances–that is all. Were the warriors of Nobunaga haunted by the sweet smell of the burning bodies of children, the crackle of their body-fat, the explosions of the skulls as the moisture in the brain turned to steam? I wonder if Zen, practiced by so many warriors, was truly an attempt to cultivate non-attachment and a freedom from fears of one’s own death. Or was it, instead, an attempt to silence the ghosts of the dead and dying that such warriors left on the battlefields, in ditches and fields and on the executioner’s ground?

And a final question: The late Donn Draeger, a man I consider a teacher and a forebear in this odd and sectarian world of martial arts, extols the bushi of the late Heian and early Kamakura as the most perfect, most glorious of Japanese warriors, and certainly, among themselves, there was an elaborate code of honor and chivalry. Yet we have contemporary pictures of famous battle campaigns, the bushi arrayed in many colored armor, glittering and helmet-horned like iridescent beetles, magnificent in the cold mechanical beauty of men at war. Some of these pictures show the invasion of a manor or castle, rooms in flames, men put to the sword. And women running. Why are the women running, if the bushi are made of finer stuff than ordinary warriors? What do they have to be afraid of?

New-Age America produces books and workshops on the “New Warrior,” a man or woman who lives impeccably–austere, protecting the weak, willing, perhaps, to stand his or her ground and fight, but more important, calm and graceful–the warrior as metaphor. We imagine the warrior in bed, in the boardroom, in marriage, the warrior on the golf-course. But these writers seem to forget that the warrior’s values, as admirable as they may be, are won at terrible cost. The warrior as metaphor often offends me, because the battlefield stinks of blood and shit, and sings of screams and flies. Certainly the values that such writers as Dan Millman extol are admirable, as he describes them, but I would hesitate to call anyone a warrior unless we are talking not about a mellow ubermenschen, but instead, a deeply flawed and guilty human being, who strives at the risk of the loss of comfort, of home, of even his or her own soul to protect what must be protected, to maintain a moral sense in a place where no morality can conceivably exist.

It is not known if [aikido founder] Ueshiba Morihei went to battle in the Russo-Japanese war. It is also not clear what atrocities he may have witnessed in his adventures in Mongolia with Onisaburo Deguchi. We know he was traveling with a troupe of bandits, in a land of no government and no law but force, so we can easily imagine what he must have encountered. We do know that he stood in front of a firing squad there, seconds from death, after seeing others shot down, and that later he surely saw the terrible effects of war upon his own people in World War II. He trained in rough martial arts with hard men, one of whom, Takeda Sokaku, described the battlefields of Aizu as his playground as a little boy, running wide-eyed from place to place, gazing on bodies and sights of horror.

I believe that the creation of aikido was, for Ueshiba Morihei, a matter of life-and-death. I believe that aikido was created as an act of desperation, by a man hoping, groping to find a way out of obscenity. At least I would like to think so, for then, all it’s so-called weaknesses and martial insufficiencies are relevant only in the ways that they obscure or impede this intention.

We do not only dance with our victorious ancestors who created charismatic, fascinating martial traditions, which either offer us self-protection or enhance our lives. We also dance with their dead. We dance on altars of bones and lakes of blood. Our music is not only glorious bugles and bagpipes aswirl. It is screams of the wounded and the cries of their children, the crunch of skulls beneath our feet. Bravery and self-sacrifice are glorious things, the flower of a man’s life. But root and stock are embedded in a command to commit no unnecessary harm, to murder no one, at the risk of one’s soul. Life walked on a sword edge. Stand or fall, we are slashed either way.