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After his discharge from the army in 1904, Ueshiba was contracted to lead a group of settlers to Hokkaido. While in Hokkaido, Ueshiba encountered Sokaku Takeda who taught Diato-ryu aiki-jutsu. Ueshiba studied under Takeda for about ten years while still practicing the kenjutsu and sojutsu he had studied in Tokyo. Around 1915, Ueshiba was making his way back home to see his ailing father when he met Oni Subaro Deguchi the leader of the Omoto-kyo religion, a form of Shintoism. Having grown up in an environment of strict religious discipline and tradition, Ueshiba was impressed by Deguchi and subsequently became one of his followers. Throughout the rest of Ueshiba's life, he sought to unite his spiritual beliefs with his physical martial arts skills. He believed that man's critical struggle was not physical combat, but rather one's internal confrontation with the forces that lead a person out of harmony with the spirit of the universe.
Many of Ueshiba's disciples were highly influential martial artists and they spread Aikido throughout the world. While many different styles evolved, the differences were almost entirely technical.
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Morihei
Ueshiba was born near Osaka in 1883 and left home in his late teens to pursue
martial arts instruction in Tokyo. He investigated many different martial arts
but concentrated mostly on three:
None
of the martial arts that Ueshiba had studied conformed to his vision of
spiritual and physical unity, so he organized his own system and called it
Aikido (way of the spirit meeting). Ueshiba's system laid down the principle of
nonresistance, the non-violent way of self-defense. Once he had developed his
system, he started to train selected pupils and attempted to encourage the
rebirth of the spirit through the medium of Aikido. Ueshiba's principles and
philosophies are presented through '