Emotional Aikido:
Conflict is nothing new to the world. People have been figuring out new and better ways to win conflicts ever since the invention of the club. In east Asia there has been a lot of conflict throughout history. Considering that 2/3 of the world’s population lives in Asia and that China was the second center of agricultural civilization, the greatest number of people has been able to devote one of the greatest amounts of time to figuring out how to fight conflicts and how to win conflicts. In sheer numbers of man-hours devoted to the study of conflict, 2/3 of the world’s population times 9,000 years far exceeds anything any other culture could come up with. Because 2/3 of the world’s population lives in Asia, they’ve also had the greatest reason to figure out how to stop conflict.
It only stands to reason, therefore, that the most highly developed forms of martial arts should’ve originated in Asia. Prior to World War II, American soldiers and sailors stationed in the Pacific who met up with Japanese soldiers were routinely infuriated by the fact that they could never out-fight these tiny little guys in bar-room brawls. That was because the Americans were trying to box, wrestle, and brawl against soldiers from a land where peasants had to learn how to use their bare hands and simple farming tools to out-fight heavily armed Samurai! The Americans and all their superior muscle mass couldn’t even begin to fathom what they’d run up against!
If an opponent charges at you with a knife, the karate solution would be to block the knife and then kick and punch the attacker into oblivion. The ju-jitsu solution would be to block the knife, grab your opponent, and then contort his body in all kinds of directions that it wasn’t meant to bend until he had too many dislocated joints and broken bones to be able to kill you any more. Either of those solutions requires you to exert enough violent force against your attacker to stop his violent force, and then to exert additional violent force against him to defeat him.
Aikido is more creative, because it doesn’t depend on initiating or stopping violent force, but on re-directing it. The aikido solution begins with an objective re-definition of the situation. In this case, the attacker is not charging at you with a knife. He is charging in a certain direction at a certain speed, and he expects you to still be standing in the path of his knife by the time he reaches you. It is not your responsibility to still be there when he arrives. If you step out of the way, your enemy can go right on charging in that direction and at that speed forever if he wants to. However, since it is more likely that he will stop running in that direction and come running at you again, it is usually within your interests to prevent him from doing that.
If you step out of the way but stick your foot out to trip him as he runs past, or grab his wrist and push on his shoulder just right to make him fall on his face, that’s his own damn fault for running at you with a knife in the first place! So, with a minimal amount of effort on your part, you simply get out of the way and let your enemy defeat himself with his own violence!