1. “The atom bomb inspires an avant-garde martial art”

Hiroyuki Aoki, the founder of Shintaido, has been called a “pioneer,” and the discipline he created with the Rakutenkai group in the 1960s has been called “an avant-garde martial art.” As children, Aoki and members of the group experienced the bombing of Japan during World War Two, and many lost family members to the atomic bomb. But even as the technology of war continued to increase its destructive power, these young people dove deep into the traditional fighting techniques of Japanese martial arts to transform the essence of these ancient teachings into a movement discipline for modern society.

As one of Aoki’s students, Michael Thompson, writes: “Shintaido contains elements of the martial arts which appear violent and meditation which is quite calm and peaceful. They are not any more mutually exclusive than the two hemispheres of our brain.”

Another of Aoki’s students, Haruyoshi Ito, writes: “The more violence is turned into a form of spiritual garbage through misunderstanding and suppression, the more virulent is its odor when the cap blows off and it is finally released…”

Mr Aoki’s aim in founding the Rakutenkai group was to seek creative solutions to the psychological, interpersonal, and ecological challenges of violence. Along the way, they invented an amazing system of training for both body and mind that can benefit everyone, regardless of age, gender, or physical condition.

This is the story of the body movement discipline they created in answer to the challenges of modernity: Shintaido, the “new body way.”

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