Memorial Seminar for Kanai Sensei at MIT Aikido Club

Mitch Hansberry (MIT Aikido Club)
mhansberry@draper.com

It was a modest seminar on Sunday April 3, but well attended. Classes were lead by Dick Stroud, one of Kanai Sensei's earliest Cambridge students, and also by Sioux Hall, Bob Toabe, and myself. We all shared memories of Mitsunari Kanai as a person, as a teacher, and as a friend. We miss him. For myself, I was reflecting on Sensei's philosophical side, remembering that he had once said: In order to really practice Aikido, one must "feel very deeply." I'm not usually taken to speaking in front of a group, but I was moved to say a few things at the end of my class. In the days following, I heard that a number of people appreciated what I had said, so here I attempt to reconstruct those thoughts.

I started out with background that I am an engineer, so scientific analogies sometimes occur to me. There is no such thing as "cold," I said, rather what we experience as cold is really the absence of heat energy, which does exist. Similarly, there is no such thing as "evil," rather what we experience as evil is the absence of something important to us in our life. We all know that people do evil things, just as surely as there are very cold days, but the focus should be on what is missing in a person that acts that way.

Further, I convey that we are all the same inside, connected, so that the separations between us are really an illusion to which we adhere. And any one of us is capable of doing evil things, given certain circumstances, programming, or maladies. It is important that we recognize this in ourselves to better understand the actions of those around us. Each of us must reach a point where we realize for ourselves what is missing in such a confused mind. The Aikido mindset should be to use that understanding to treat those that would do evil with compassion. And that compassion should be reflected in the way that we practice each day. [Feel very deeply]

In loving memory of Mitsunari Kanai...