Aiki is not a technique to fight or defeat an enemy. It is the way to reconcile the world and make human beings one family.

O-Sensei

Founded by the Japanese master Morihei Ueshiba in the early 1930s, aikido is one of the most subtle and sophisticated, yet devastatingly effective of all martial arts. Ai-ki-do means “the way of harmonizing spiritual force.” It encompasses a large variety of techniques, including throws, pins, locks, falls and strikes. But more than just a martial art—a way of winning a fight—most practitioners prefer to think of aikido as a way of maximizing human potential, both physical and spiritual.

Ueshiba Morihei (1883-1969), known as O-Sensei, or "Venerable Teacher," spent his life training in many martial arts, both armed and unarmed, including the Japanese sword, the spear, the short staff, and Daito ryu aiki-jujutsu. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, he developed his own dynamic synthesis of these arts into a "modern" art that embodied his insight that true budo is about compassion for all life. Morihei’s direct students have developed into great practitioners and teachers in their own right, including Kisaburo Ozawa, Rinjiro Shirata, Morihiro Saito, Hiroshi Tada, Hiroshi Isoyama, Seigo Yamaguchi, Shoji Nishio, Nobuyoshi Tamura, Yoshimitsu Yamada, Kazuo Chiba, Mitsugi Saotome, and Seishiro Endo.

This art was formally named “Aikido” in 1942. Morihei established the Aikikai Foundation (Zaidan Hojin Aikikai) as the art's organizational core on February 9, 1948. He opened the old Hombu Dojo at the present location (17-18 Wakamatsu-cho, Shinjuku, Tokyo) in 1931. In 1968, the single-storied wooden structure was replaced by a large, five-story dojo that is more suited to the needs of the greatly increased number of practitioners.

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