No, not as practised today! Aikido is not effective self-defense. And that goes for the other budo-arts too, for the following reasons.
- Dangerous (effective) techniques have been removed = a castration of the art.
- Unrealistic attacks are trained.
- Duels are practiced - both are prepared and have a common understanding of what is going to happen.
- The necessary mental attitude is not taught.
- The scope of techniques has been reduced.
But Aikido can be turned into an effective self-defense/attack system for he who searches thoughtfully and with insight. If you consider that aikido was developed from aikijutsu, an effective combat system and on the above points, you realize while training aikido that:
- Small variations, small changes of some techniques turn them back into their cruel origin. Some techniques regularly trained in aikido (Iwama ryu) have been removed from other budo-arts because they are too dangerous.
- One must train with the right attitude. Unfortunately attacks in common aikido training is not complete, that is there are realistic attacks that are not practiced. However it can be argued that many attacks and situations practiced in self-defense courses are unrealistic for anyone trained in and applying aiki. You make a great mistake if you forget that the attack forms present in aikido training is a training in itself, not only a way to offer something for your partner to train a defense against.
- Duel situations are trained. My experience is that hard arduous training for a long time (every day, many years) greatly enhances ones sensitivity and yields so many automatic action patterns that you vastly increase you capability to handle a sudden attack.
- The mental attitude is something one must train by oneself. Visualizations, meditation, autosuggestion, stress relief training and other methods help. It might be a good idea to study NLP, neurolinguistic programming which is a psychology theory.
- In aikido today, atemi, strikes and kicks against vulnerable points, have been almost completely removed. This is not only to lobotomize but also to castrate aikido. Atemi-waza is the basis of effective self-defense. Osensei is verified to have said that in a real fight aikido is 70% atemi. And also, today there are no chokes or strangulations, which can be effective for subduing an adversary or terminating the fight.
Aikido also lacks ground-fighting techniques as in judo, which is a shortcoming.
They have a saying in the US Air Force that we train as we fight and we fight as we train. This has been found to be a sound philosophy also in other armed forces and I think it can serve us well in aikido.
Then Aikido would become an effective self-defense system or martial art in the true sense of the word, as it once was, for those who so wished.
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