Yoshimitsu Yamada Sensei of New York Aikikai Has Passed Away

Yoshimitsu Yamada Sensei, the head of New York Aikikai and someone we often talk about at the dojo, passed away on January 15.

Yamada Sensei looked after me throughout my time studying in New York.
Right after I arrived in the United States, besides teaching me aikido, he let me live in the dojo while I was looking for a place to stay, and I owe him a great deal.
To lose a teacher to whom I owe not just a night’s lodging and a meal, but well over a hundred nights and a hundred meals, is an enormous loss.

When I visited the dojo last May, Sensei was the picture of health despite being 84, and was teaching at the dojo as always.
As we parted he told me, “Come again,” and I fully intended to.
I still cannot believe that someone so robust could be gone nine months later.
What stuck with me was seeing him at the end of practice, off to the side, grimacing as a student helped him stretch.
Perhaps his body was in a harder state than it appeared on the surface.

Yamada Sensei trained as an uchideshi at the Aikikai Hombu Dojo and then, on the instruction of O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba, moved to the United States in 1964, where he taught at New York Aikikai for 59 years.
He founded the United States Aikido Federation and held seminars all over the country; it is no exaggeration to say that he devoted his life to spreading aikido there.
He contributed to the spread of aikido not only in the United States but widely throughout the West, and was a leading figure in aikido’s spread around the world.
If I may say so, thanks to his skill and his character, people who love aikido came from all over the world to train at New York Aikikai.
Training at New York Aikikai was tremendously stimulating, and the exchanges with people from so many countries were a joy.

Yamada Sensei was a treasure of the aikido world.
Every time I go abroad or work with people from other countries, I often feel that it has become easier for Japanese people to work there thanks to those who planted Japanese culture in those places.
The teachers of the “first postwar generation,” who carried Japanese budo to the world from the reconstruction years through the era of economic growth, are passing away one after another.
I cannot help but feel grateful that Japanese budo spread around the world in its proper form because of people like Yamada Sensei.

May he rest in peace.
*Article image courtesy of Shukan New York Seikatsu