In 1935, a Japanese newsreel crew from Asahi Shinbun captured the earliest surviving footage of Morihei Ueshiba demonstrating his art. This black-and-white film (along with his Budo, published in 1938, and his earlier private training documents such as Budo Renshu (1933), compiled with student Kenji Tomiki) comprise the few unambiguous records of what Aikido looked like before it was called “Aikido.” The film and manuals are witness to the functional, combative origins of the art, before it was softened by myth, and framed as the Art of Peace.
With the rising sun prominently in the background, nationalism is center-stage.
In the footage, Ueshiba is 52 years old. He moves with precision and economy (and a fair bit of hopping). The techniques are deliberate and executed within a structured demonstration. There is no harmony here: only superiority. The art is Aiki-jūjutsu by another name: centered on atemi, joint destruction, decisive throws, martial dominance. This video, more than any postwar aphorism, shows us what Ueshiba believed in during his physical prime.
In 1938, at the height of Japan’s imperial expansion, Morihei Ueshiba published a manual titled Budo, produced with the assistance of Admiral Isamu Takeshita and distributed through military channels. It was never made available to the general public during the war; it was a restricted text intended for elite insiders; officers, specialists, and close disciples. This book shows Ueshiba in military uniform, demonstrating techniques similar to those in the Asahi video: linear, control-oriented, and meant for battlefield application. The language is devoid of cosmic mysticism or abstract pacifism. The intent is practical, the context martial. [Compare the jukendo in Budo and 9:27 – juken take away, The jyo is a post-war transformation.]
These manuals and film reflect a worldview in which martial skill was a form of spiritual purification, but a purification distinctly aligned with Ueshiba’s belief in Japan’s national destiny. The terminology includes phrases like shinken shobu (“a real fight to the death”) and aiki no jutsu, terms aimed squarely at combative usage, not transformation. To read Budo in its original context is to see Ueshiba not as a pacifist but as a man fully integrated into the spiritual-military vision of prewar Japan—a vision that sought not merely victory but transcendence through conquest.
At this time, Ueshiba’s closest patrons were senior military figures. He taught at elite military academies. He served as bodyguard on an imperialist expedition to Mongolia under the banner of Omoto-kyo, a sect whose vision of world peace conveniently began with Japanese domination. To ignore this context is to indulge in cultural illiteracy.
The war came, and Japan lost. Its vision of divine empire was crushed, its leadership tried or disgraced, its cities burned, its people humbled. And Ueshiba, like many of his generation, had to adapt. By then in his sixties, his physical capacities waned. And his words changed, too. He began to speak not of victory, but of harmony; not of technique, but of ki.
This transformation is often described as spiritual growth. Perhaps it was. But it was also a response to defeat. The Japan that could support a warrior-sage had vanished. In its place stood a defeated nation under foreign occupation. Martial arts were banned, then licensed back only if they served peaceful civic purpose. Ueshiba could no longer teach the art of domination, he had to reframe it as the art of peace.
Many carried this new gospel forward, never knowing (or ignoring) what came before.
But we know.
We have the Asahi film. We have his writings from the 1930s. We have the battlefield context of the techniques. We have the names of the men he trained, many of whom died as soldiers of empire. We have echoes (kuden) – “The purpose of Aikido is to kill.” We know the spiritual gloss came later, and we should not forget that it did.
The physical refinements that post-war Aikido has made are wonderful and I fully embrace them as making the art aesthetically (and sometimes, functionally) better. But, fide sed cui vide, thus I dig down into the layered strata of Aikido’s history, and train from the bedrock. To teach Aikido with integrity is not to recite slogans about blending or to dream of harmony abstracted from struggle. It is to understand the art as it was.
Further Reading:
Budo Renshu (1933): available as a PDF in Japanese – but the English publication appears to be out of print based on pricing.
Budo (1938): Available in translation.
Protective Arts 