At least three times a week Merriam Wamble, a 34-year-old south-side psychotherapist, makes the long drive up to 3249 N. Ashland to work out at the Midwest Aikido Center. After climbing the stairs to the second floor she bows silently toward three Japanese pictographs that mean harmony, spirit, way, or ai, ki, do. Then she quickly changes into a belted robe, or gi, and the wide floor-length black trousers that all holders of a black belt are entitled to wear. After greeting her teacher Akira Tohei, she begins her workout at the youngest–and many say the most refined and artistic–of the Japanese martial arts.
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“My reasons for practicing aikido have changed over the years,” she says. “When I started in 1977, I had just finished undergraduate school, I was going on to graduate school, I didn’t have a car yet, and I had to be in the street a lot. Being a woman, I felt I needed to study a martial art. Today I use it more to get in touch with some very primitive parts of myself–but without aggression.”
Aikido was developed in 1925 by Morihei Ueshiba, a full-time student of the Japanese warrior code of Bushido who held black belts in all the martial arts of his time yet worried about what he was doing. Like the gunfighter who knows sooner or later he’ll meet a younger man with a faster draw, Ueshiba concluded that a defense based solely on power must ultimately be futile.
“I was looking for a martial art, but something that’s not competitive,” says Michael Hickey, a 37-year-old lawyer. “We don’t have tournaments or prizes. There’s an emphasis on keeping your ego under control. You’re constantly adjusting your own movements to the movements of another person.”
