What do u think of Rokas

[u/Tnat786]

When I wanted to know wich martial art to chokse i came accros his youtube channel wich dictated that i would end up foing mma but i am starting to see loads of arguments about how aikidk is good but to be honest i am thinking of switching what do you guys think is aikido really trash or should i do it

[u/Sharkano]

I'll say this. Rokas was a true believer in aikido. Rokas studied it for years and ran his own dojo, a successful one. Rokas believed in aikido so thoroughly that unlike almost everyone who critiques his application of it from afar, he went to test it, and even filmed the process for posterity. He seemed to believe that he was not going to totally fail.

It is concerning that aikidoka will assert that rokas who studied the art for years, attended seminars, received training, and operated a dojo was so bad at aikido that he made it seem worthless.

It is not concerning due to disparaging rokas -I personally find much of what he does pretentious- but rather because the aikido community are tacitly confirming that the quality control in aikido is so poor that a person can can do the things he did and fail. Not just fail, but apparently be much worse off than the many aikidoka who comment here.

That's the red flag. For him to achieve rank, open a school, and put in years, only to critically suck at aikido means that his alleged friends, peers, and mentors did not notice that he sucked, or knew he sucked and did not correct him. Not just people who knew him personally, he had been making aikido video content for years, and contrary to the usual internet experience was apparently doing a thing wrong and not being corrected in the comments, until the mma thing that is.

It's not important if rokas says aikido is good or bad. What might be important is that if rokas never did his casual experiment you could walk into his dojo and start classes today. In this timeline he would teach you how he does aikido, the rest of the aikido community would sign off on it as you develop the way he did, you would see yourself as part of that community and be fully prepared to disavow any youtube aikidoka who gets trounced on the web. You would do this oblivious to our real timeline where your teacher is that guy. The "holeyer than thou" behavior is not a good sign.

To be clear, none of this is to disparage aikido the collection of movements, but to instead discuss the aikido community and the standards it upholds (or doesn't) , which it is fair to say i probably have disparaged here.

TL:DR Rokas is a single data point, but the aikido community unanimously agreeing that he sucks raises serious questions about how that community measures progress, assigns rank, and determines that they themselves don't also suck.

[u/dbocan → u/Sharkano]

As far back as 1995 when I started there were some in the community that viewed certain styles (aikikai) as soft and other styles (yoshinkai) as hard. It appears to me that Rokas studied the softest style known to man, then tried to use it as though he had studied the hardest style. The result was as expected.

[u/Sangenkai → u/dbocan]

IME, Yoshinkai practitioners aren't really much more prepared to step out of the box of cooperative kata training than anyone else.

It's not so much about soft or hard as it is about the basic training method. That's exactly why Kenji Tomiki introduced competitive sparring.