Tomiki Aikido is the creation of Professor Keni Tomiki, the first person to achieve the rank of 8th degree black belt in Aikido and Judo. Professor Tomiki studied directly with both Morihei Ueshiba, who created Aikido and Jigaro Kano, who created Judo. This combination of influences gave rise to Professor Tomiki’s Aikido. He applied to traditional aikido Jigaro Kano’s basic concept used in developing Judo: for a martial art to be effective it must test itself against unrehearsed resistance. For this reason Tomiki Aikido practices competition within tournament formats.
The Mansfield Tomiki Aikido Club has always believed in the benefit of resistance based competition: it promotes student growth by testing physical, mental and emotional skills in a controlled combat format. And in the sport aikido arena our little Mansfield club is currently the premiere club in the United States, having multiple national tournament event wins in it’s history. And now it is home to the first American competitor to win the men’s individual tanto (knife) competition in a sanctioned international tournament. However, we are also firm believers in the need for our martial art to be functional and real world effective. For that reason we continually study and research the origins of our sport techniques in order to teach our students how to protect themselves by applying the techniques in their original ferocious, simple and highly effective manner.