Aikido and the Harmony of Nature by Saotome: A Review

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What This Book Is

Aikido and the Harmony of Nature appeared first in French in the mid-1980s and in English from Shambhala in 1993. It is by Mitsugi Saotome, and it is not a technical manual.

There are no sequences of photographs showing how to perform a throw. What there is instead is an attempt to state the philosophy behind the art: what aikido is for, what its founder thought he was doing, how the movements relate to a view of the universe, and what a lifetime of the practice is supposed to produce in a person.

Saotome illustrated it himself. The drawings, of spirals, of celestial motion, of figures in movement, of calligraphic forms, are a substantial part of the book and they are his own hand.

Who Saotome Is

Born in 1937, Saotome became an uchideshi under Morihei Ueshiba and remained with him for roughly fifteen years, until Ueshiba died in 1969.

That is the credential and it should be weighed properly. The uchideshi system is not attending classes. It means living in the dojo, cleaning it, serving as the teacher's training partner, being available continuously, and absorbing by proximity over years. The number of people who did this with Ueshiba in his final period is small, and the number who then wrote reflectively about what the man actually taught is smaller still.

In 1975 Saotome moved to the United States, taught there for the rest of his career, and founded Aikido Schools of Ueshiba, one of the significant American aikido organisations.

He is therefore doing something specific in this book: transmitting a philosophy from a teacher who mostly did not explain himself, to an audience with no access to the religious world that teacher inhabited.

The Founder

Morihei Ueshiba lived from 1883 to 1969, and his path to aikido went through several older systems.

His decisive technical training was in Daito-ryu aiki-jujutsu under Sokaku Takeda, a formidable and difficult teacher who travelled Japan giving seminars in an old jujutsu tradition. A great deal of aikido's technical vocabulary comes directly from Daito-ryu, and the relationship between the two arts has been the subject of considerable and occasionally heated historical work.

He also studied sword and spear traditions, was physically extraordinary by every account, and by the 1930s had a reputation among the Japanese martial establishment as one of the most capable practitioners alive.

What he did with that reputation is the interesting part, and it does not have a technical explanation. He gradually reworked a system for defeating people into a system explicitly aimed at not harming them, and he said the reason was religious.

Omoto and the Mongolia Expedition

From 1919 Ueshiba became a devoted follower of Onisaburo Deguchi, the charismatic leader of Omoto-kyo, a new Japanese religious movement combining Shinto elements with prophecy, spirit possession, art and a programme of world renewal.

This is not background colour. Omoto is where Ueshiba's entire vocabulary comes from. When he talks about the kami, about purification, about the sounds that structure creation, about the bridge between heaven and earth, he is speaking Omoto, and readers who do not know that find his statements arbitrary.

In 1924 he accompanied Deguchi on an expedition into Mongolia, an enterprise with religious ambitions and unmistakable political ones, which ended with the party arrested by Chinese authorities and, by the surviving accounts, very close to execution.

Ueshiba returned from that. Whatever else the episode was, it was a man in his early forties facing his own death in a foreign country as a consequence of following a religious leader into a political adventure.

The 1925 Experience

The following year came the event that every aikido lineage treats as foundational.

A naval officer, a swordsman, challenged him. Ueshiba took no weapon and simply avoided every cut, reportedly without difficulty, until the officer stopped. He then went out into the garden to wash at a well.

What he described afterwards was an experience of the ground shaking, of golden light bathing him, of his body becoming light, and of understanding that the source of budo is the love of the universe, that its purpose is the protection of all beings rather than the defeat of an enemy, and that an opponent is not something to be destroyed.

Aikido as a distinct thing dates from after this. Before it, he was a superlative exponent of a jujutsu system. After it, he was building something with a different aim, and the technical changes over the following decades follow the shift in purpose.

Kototama and the Incomprehensible Lectures

Ueshiba talked a great deal and almost nobody understood him.

His discourses, some of which were recorded and later published, are dense with Shinto deities, Omoto doctrine, and above all kototama, the doctrine that particular sounds carry creative power and that the structure of reality can be read through them. He would explain a technique by reference to the interaction of specific syllables.

His own senior students have said openly that they did not follow this material, that they listened respectfully and then went and practised the movement. That is a remarkable admission and it is widely attested rather than a slur.

The consequence for a book like Saotome's is significant. He is trying to render a philosophy that its author expressed in a private religious idiom his students could not decode. What emerges is necessarily an interpretation, filtered through fifteen years of proximity and forty years of teaching, and it is more coherent than the source. That coherence is a service and it is also a distance from the original.

Enter or Turn

Where the philosophy becomes concrete is in two words, and this is the part of the book that a non-practitioner can genuinely use.

Faced with an incoming attack, the ordinary options are to block it, to meet it with a stronger force, or to retreat. Aikido rejects all three and offers two others.

Irimi means entering. You move into the attack, along and through its line, arriving at a position inside it before it arrives at you. Counterintuitively, moving toward a strike can take you out of its effective range while retreating keeps you inside it.

Tenkan means turning. You pivot on the spot so that you end up beside the attacker, facing the same direction they are facing, seeing what they see. The force continues past you rather than into you, and you are now positioned to guide it.

Saotome's philosophical claim is that these are not merely tactics. Tenkan in particular, the pivot that puts you shoulder to shoulder with the person attacking you and gives you their view of the situation, is treated as a physical form of a general principle about conflict. The person who steps around to stand where the other person is standing has done something structurally different from the person who resists or the person who flees.

It is a lovely idea, it is present in the physical technique rather than imposed on it, and it is the strongest thing in the book.

The Nature Analogy

The title's promise is that aikido and the natural world operate on one principle, and this is where Saotome is most expansive and least rigorous.

Spirals appear in galaxies, in shells, in water going down a drain, in the growth of plants, and in aikido movement. Circular motion governs planets and it governs technique. The structure of matter, the behaviour of energy, the cycles of weather and season are all invoked as expressions of the same order the art expresses.

These are analogies. A galaxy's spiral arms and a body's turning motion are similar in shape and have nothing else in common, and presenting the resemblance as identity is not an argument. The physics language in particular is loose, in the manner of a good deal of writing from the period that reached for scientific vocabulary as decoration.

Read as poetry, and as a description of how the founder and his students actually thought about what they were doing, it is worth having. Read as a claim about the world, it does not survive.

Does It Work

An honest review has to address this because the book does not, and because it is the first question most readers have.

Aikido's practical combat effectiveness has been seriously and repeatedly challenged, and the criticism is substantial rather than malicious.

The core problem is the training method. In standard aikido practice, one partner attacks in a prescribed manner and the other applies a technique, and the attacker's role includes taking the fall safely. Resistance is minimal by design. Attacks are often stylised, including strikes that no modern fighter would throw. There is generally no live sparring against an uncooperative opponent, no pressure testing, and in most lineages no competition.

Whatever the merits of that approach for other purposes, it does not develop the ability to apply technique against someone actively trying to stop you, and since competitive mixed martial arts became a public benchmark in the 1990s, aikido has performed poorly whenever it has been tested that way.

Practitioners have argued this openly among themselves for thirty years and there are honest positions on several sides: that the art is not for fighting and never was after 1925, that the training method needs reform, that the effectiveness question is a category error, and that some lineages preserved a harder practice than others.

What is not defensible is a book about aikido's philosophy that leaves a reader with the impression that the technical claims are settled. They are not.

The Part Aikido Books Omit

The other thing missing here, and from most of the literature, is Ueshiba's political context before 1945.

He operated within networks connected to Japanese nationalist and continental expansionist circles during the 1920s and 1930s. He taught at military and police institutions and had significant patronage from figures in that world. The Mongolia expedition with Deguchi had political objectives alongside religious ones. Omoto itself was suppressed by the Japanese state, twice and violently, which complicates the picture in the other direction, but does not remove it.

The presentation of aikido as an art of peace, and of Ueshiba as a prophet of universal reconciliation, is a real strand of his thought and it is also a post-war framing, developed in an occupied Japan where martial arts were initially banned and where an art that could present itself as spiritual and non-violent had an obvious path to survival and export.

None of this shows the philosophy is insincere. The 1925 experience predates the war by two decades and the direction of travel is consistent. It does mean that the clean story, of a warrior who saw the light and turned entirely to peace, is a simplification of a man who lived through a complicated period and was not outside it.

Serious historical work on this exists and is not hard to find. That it appears almost nowhere in the devotional literature is itself worth noticing.

The Students Who Disagreed

Ueshiba's senior students went in markedly different directions after his death, and the disagreements are substantive.

Some emphasised a hard, practical, martially oriented practice. Some built systems around the cultivation and testing of ki as the central content. One introduced competition, which many others regard as a fundamental betrayal of the founder's intent. Others preserved a weapons-centred approach they held to be closer to what he actually taught in his later years.

Each of these lineages is led by people who trained directly with Ueshiba and each holds its own version to be faithful. They cannot all be right, and the most economical explanation is that Ueshiba taught differently at different periods, to different students, in an idiom nobody fully understood, and each took away what they could use.

Saotome's book is one such account. It is a good one from a well-placed source and it is not the position of an art that does not have one.

What the Book Is Actually For

Given all of the above, why read it.

Because the philosophical content of aikido is genuinely unusual among martial arts and almost nobody wrote it down. Most of what exists is technique, and the technique without the intention behind it is a set of arbitrary movements.

Because Saotome was there. The passages describing Ueshiba directly, how he moved, what he was like to be near, the atmosphere of the dojo, are first-hand and there will never be more of them.

And because the central proposition is worth encountering whatever you conclude about the art. Ueshiba's claim was that a system built for destroying people could be turned, without ceasing to be a physical discipline with real technique, into one aimed at protecting them, and that this is not a softening but the harder version. Whether the training method he left behind achieves that is contested. That someone tried it, seriously, for forty-four years, is a fact worth having.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you practise aikido and want the philosophy from someone who was in the room, rather than from a website.

Read it if you are interested in how martial systems become spiritual disciplines. Set beside the tai chi classics, which make a comparable move in a Chinese idiom, and Zen in the Art of Archery, which is the most famous Western encounter with the idea, it fills out a real pattern.

Read it alongside Musashi and the bushido literature for the contrast, because the Japanese warrior tradition contains positions very far from Ueshiba's and it is worth knowing that his was a break rather than a summary.

Do not read it to learn aikido. Do not read it for the physics. Do not read it as the aikido philosophy, because the founder's own students could not agree on one. And do not read it as history, because the parts of the history that are awkward are not in it.

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