The hakama is not meant to hide the footwork
The hakama: simple clothing of the nobility
The hakama serves to hide the movement of the feet in the practice of martial arts, and in Aikido in particular?
It is such a common explanation that it has almost become a truth for practically all practitioners. Unfortunately, it is false, and this is very easily demonstrated when we look at the history of this garment, how it was and how it still is worn in Japan.
The hakama, affair of the samurai?
The hakama is seen in the West as the typical clothing of the samurai. Now, the hakama is originally a ceremonial garment, worn by the nobility but also by the clergy.
In Japan, still today, the hakama is more emblematic of graduation, marriage and other religious ceremonies than samurai and martial arts, although it remains omnipresent, particularly in the practice of Kendo.
The hakama being found in China, at a period prior to its appearance in Japan, it is very likely that it was imported to Japan within Buddhism, making this outfit a formal ceremonial garment.
It is true that the samurai wore hakama. It was not always the case and it seems that one of its debuts in this environment was a thicker garment, even leather, worn on horseback to protect oneself from branches and brambles.
This is also the point where the two types of hakama “andon” and “umanori” can be explained. Andon features the traditional “lantern” shape (or skirt-like cut), and umanori literally means “ride a horse” and is hence, cut in the shape of trousers.
Indeed, although the monks and women had no reason to ride horses, the samurai and nobles did. They needed a garment that allowed them to spread their legs and thus, that was most likely the origin of the umanori shaped hakama. It is difficult to find prove the further we travel back in time, however, it is therefore also very likely that the andon hakama preceded the umanori hakama.
The meaning of the hakama for the samurai
To summarize, the Hakama is not specifically an affair of the samurai, but it rather was a commonly used garment. Let us pass on to its use in horse riding, very far from the hakama that we know today, and move on from there to the reasons why the samurai wore a hakama made from cloth.
The hakama actually was a formal garment. It was worn with a traditional kimono whose ensemble forms the Kamishimo and it used to demonstrate rather a social status than the status of a warrior. This uniform was indeed worn by the vast majority of the nobility as well as by the wealthy merchants.
There were also other types of hakama worn depending on the ceremonies, in particular a very long hakama called “nagabakama”, hampering severely the movement. It is very likely that in the warlike society of the time, the demand on visitors (samurai) to wear that type of hakama by some seigneurs and Shogun was a precautionary measure to prevent them to move (and attack) easily.
As far as everyday wear was concerned, there are two types of use
The one that one sees very often in samurai movies, setting in scene a ronin (samurai without master), confronted with unexpected attacks or duels. In such sequences, the samurai is often in his daily clothes and ties the legs of his hakama and the sleeves of his kimono to facilitate his movements.
And the second is the war. The upper echelons who did not concede at the front eventually wore the hakama, but most warriors were wearing armors and the hakama made no longer sense.
Bokken duel in one of the most beautiful samurai color films: Ame Agaru. Notice that the hakama worn by both protagonists are rather short.
That being said, you will find quite interesting that Samourais in old movies such as Akira Kurosawa’s movies are wearing their Hakama very short, while in modern Jidai geki (movies) shot the past 10 or 20 years, the Hakama are much longer. Obviously, fashion has also taken over the historical movie industry !
The way of wearing the hakama – and showing the feet
On prints of that time, but also via the traditions preserved in certain schools, it is very clear that the hakama is worn above the ankle on one hand, and that it sometimes even is attached during duels and fights.
At this point, it gets very difficult to justify the fact that a hakama serves to hide the footwork. Would you hide your feet at the risk of hindering your movement, slowing you down and thus dying? Would you show your feet during a duel, witnessed by spectators, but hide them during training in the dojo? This is very unlikely.
It is not impossible that there were samurai who wore the hakama to hide the movement of the feet and not to reveal their techniques. However, if this was the case, they had to be certain that this would not cause a significant disadvantage in terms of freedom of movement and it also presupposed that they indeed had a “secret” technique not to be disclosed.
And particularly in that context, it has to be mentioned that in general, the samurai were actually not all very good at fighting.
Representing 7% of the population during the Edo period, they were part of the caste of the nobles and managed mainly administrative affairs or military strategy.
What about these days? Is it to hide the movement?
Hiding the feet movements from ones students being there to learn, or hiding ones footwork from the teacher being there to correct us – wouldn’t that be a funny choice?
There is certainly an aesthetic side to wearing the hakama relatively long, and it has become a fashion, but it is not a tradition that historically makes sense.
In this video, Tada Shihan wears the hakama relatively short, wedging it into his belt at 1:06 approximately, to facilitate his movements and to show what he demonstrates. What is the interest in having a long hakama for aesthetic reasons if it is to pull it up especially during demonstrations?
Of course, this is not to advise you to wear the hakama short. It is a personal choice. However, if you make this choice, do it knowingly and not based on false beliefs.
Good practice to all!
Thank you for a great article.
Jordy Delage
French aikido practitioner and founder of Seido, Jordy has a a formal education in Japanese culture, history and religion. Settled in Japan since 2005, he has been practicing Aikido for almost 2 decades and has experiences in Kendo and Judo
From Bujutsu to Budo:
How Martial Arts Practice Has Shaped My Life
By Irene Cena
Ten years ago, I was struggling. I felt inadequate and afraid — afraid of participating in society, of earning a living, of my own abilities. I was caught in cycles of self-doubt and inner conflict, searching for something more purposeful but unsure of how to find it. What I found, over time, was a path — shaped by the teachings of Paul Sensei and the senior teachers I encountered through ISBA and Shiseikan. Alongside the study of Body-Mind Centering® and practice within the Triratna Buddhist community, martial arts training became one of the most reliable frameworks for my growth as a human being. This essay is my attempt to articulate what that practice has given me — not as a finished account, but as a honest reflection on a continuing journey.
Learning to Stay Open and Responsive One of the first things I noticed as I began to practise was how profoundly we affect one another. In the presence of certain people — teachers and friends I admired — my capacity for openness and presence would expand. In the presence of others, it would contract. This observation gave me a double motivation for practice: to become more like the people I admired, and to become less destabilised by the emotional states of those around me. These two goals turn out to be deeply connected. Becoming more grounded in myself allows me to offer that groundedness to others. What I mean by “open and responsive” is worth clarifying. An open mind is the ability to take in information about the present situation beyond our expectations — to perceive what is actually happening rather than what we assume should be happening. Responsiveness follows from this: the ability to gauge circumstances clearly and choose the most appropriate action.
Developing these qualities has been a central thread in my Bujutsu practice, and I believe they are essential to learning in any domain. Sensitivity in the Teaching Space I practise and have begun to teach Body-Mind Centering®, a somatic movement approach that has no prescribed forms or fixed protocols. It works through the transmission of felt experience — helping students connect to their own body systems such as organs, bones, and the nervous system, primarily through movement and touch. Without a rigid structure to follow, a teacher must rely on constant, sensitive feedback.
During my training, I assisted experienced teachers in their classes. This gave me a unique vantage point: I could observe both teacher and student, and begin to understand how to support each. The central question I grappled with was when to intervene and when to stay quiet. Sometimes I moved too slowly and missed the moment. Sometimes I moved too quickly and felt intrusive. Occasionally, the timing was just right and the person felt genuinely met. What helped most was what I came to think of as “dancing with attention”: moving fluidly between different levels of perception — my own physical sensations, my reading of an individual student’s needs, and the broader atmosphere of the group. This ability to hold multiple perspectives at once without becoming fixed on any one of them is, I believe, a direct expression of the open mind cultivated in martial arts training. The failures in this process have been as instructive as the successes.
Recognising when I have been too rigid, too reactive, or too absent is itself a form of learning — and it is the martial arts context that has taught me to see failure not as defeat, but as information. Stability in the Face of Conflict My involvement with the Triratna Buddhist community has taken many forms: study groups, support teams for meditation classes, retreat participation, community living. It has also been the context where I have most often encountered conflict — and where I have most clearly seen the benefit of martial arts training. There is a particular kind of situation that looks like a simple conversation but feels, internally, like a battlefield. Maintaining clarity of mind when someone nearby is overwhelmed by anger or grief — remaining grounded without closing off — is exactly the skill that Bujutsu trains. It is not about suppressing one’s emotions, but about remaining present with them without being swept away. I have not always managed this. There have been many moments when my own emotional reactions have overtaken me, and relationships that have not survived those failures. But what martial arts practice has given me is a way to understand those moments of “defeat” without being defined by them — and the aspiration to do better.
My confidence in navigating difficult conversations, in contributing meaningfully to them and in supporting quieter voices to be heard, has grown steadily. This is not abstract progress. It shows up in the texture of daily life: in how I listen, how I hold tension without letting it harden, how I return to steadiness after being unsettled. Overcoming Fear — and Understanding Why It Matters All the openness, sensitivity, and stability in the world amounts to little if, in the decisive moment, fear prevents action. In my notes from the first seminar I attended with Inaba Sensei in Heidelberg in 2011, I recorded this phrase: “the central point of budo is to achieve peace of mind towards death.” I have returned to this sentence many times since. It is both simple and almost impossibly demanding. If fear of death lies at the root of all our fears, then cultivating genuine equanimity in its face means, progressively, dissolving every other fear too.
The result is clarity — the ability to see a situation truly and to act in accordance with one’s deepest values, without hesitation or distortion. This understanding transforms Bujutsu from a system of physical techniques into a complete method of human development. The body is the training ground, but what is being refined is character itself. A Practice, Not a Destination My highest aspiration is simple to state and difficult to embody: to be useful in all circumstances, to serve peace, and to bring harmony wherever I can. Bujutsu training has given me a method for moving toward this — not by removing difficulty, but by building the capacity to meet it. The work is far from complete.
What I am grateful for is the awareness of my limitations, the desire to overcome them, a method for practice, and the teachers and community who continue to make that practice possible. The path from Bujutsu to Budo is not a transition that happens once. It is something lived again and again, in every challenging conversation, every difficult class, every moment when fear arises and we choose to stay present anyway.
Learning from the Inside:
How Aikido Changed the Way I Move and Think
By Irene Cena
I came to Aikido after more than fifteen years of dance training. I knew how to move. Or so I thought. From the very beginning, Aikido confronted me with the limitations of my own learning habits. I would watch a technique demonstrated, follow the movements carefully, feel confident I had grasped something — and then stand up and find I was starting from scratch. The image in my mind and the movement in my body seemed to belong to different worlds. This essay is about the long process of closing that gap. It is also about what I discovered along the way: a different understanding of how learning happens, and how the body itself can become the seat of knowledge.
The Moment of Surrender
I remember very clearly a moment during the first Aikido seminar I attended with Inaba Sensei. The same pattern I had experienced in every class was unfolding: I watched, I thought I understood, and then my turn came. But something different happened. When I finally met my training partner, the technique simply flowed out of my body — almost, I would say, in spite of my conscious effort to understand it. That experience planted a seed. I began to suspect that a certain kind of understanding could not be reached through analysis alone. That there had to be a degree of surrender and trust if I was going to learn effectively. For someone with my background — trained in dance forms where careful study of shape and placement was central — this was a genuine disruption. In dance, I could “wear” a technique like a costume: reproduce the body arrangement in space, capture elements of the dynamic, and refine from the outside in. But Aikido resisted this approach entirely.
The Presence of Another Person
Part of what made Aikido so different was something that sounds obvious but took time to truly absorb: I was not the only person involved. A technique is not a solo form. The other person — their body, their weight, their intention — is co-author of the movement. No amount of internal preparation could account for that variable in advance. More striking still: the mere presence of an opponent changed my experience of reality before any physical contact occurred. Even before the first movement, my sense of space, time, and my own body would shift. I could be thrown off balance by that alone. My capacity to think clearly — by which I mean to organise my body intelligently in response to changing circumstances — was already affected. This revealed something important about the relationship between thinking and moving. They can happen independently. I can think about dinner while sitting still. I can move a chair across a room and find myself on the other side with no memory of how I got there. In Aikido, this disconnect becomes a problem you cannot ignore.
Learning from the Outside In — and Its Limits
For a long time, my approach to learning a technique was to retain it as a mental image. I would watch the demonstration, hold the form in my mind like a picture, and then try to match my body to that image when I stood up. Sometimes I tried different “keys” — a detail of footwork, a line through the arm — hoping one of them would unlock the rest. The problem was that the physical experience of actually practising the technique would crowd and alter the mental image. Information absorbed before moving seemed to occupy the same space as information gathered during movement, and the two would conflict. I would find myself still “projecting the movie” in my mind while in the middle of an encounter — and then a fist would appear a few inches from my face, breaking through the screen. When I finally let go of the initial image entirely and simply began to register my own experience of the meeting — from beginning to end, without trying to fix it in advance — something changed. Moments in the sequence became clear, like snapshots. And by joining those snapshots, the technique began to flow more smoothly.
Thinking from the Body
This was the beginning of what I can only describe as a shift from learning outside my body to learning from within it. Once I had gathered enough lived experience — sensations registered in movement, not ideas about movement — I found I could relate a demonstration directly to my body rather than my mind. I could break down and store new information in a way that was available to me in motion. Instead of thinking about the technique as something separate from me, I began to think it from my body, from the perspective of my body. The process shifted from memorising form to understanding an event — and sometimes that understanding bypassed images altogether. There was a physical parallel to this shift: my centre of attention moved from my head down to the tanden. When my focus was caught in my head — which I believe corresponds to a literal physiological state, blood moving upward, tension gathering there — my reactions became slow and cluttered. When my attention settled in the tanden, I could see more clearly, respond more quickly, and move with greater accuracy.
The Tanden That Sees
Vision still matters — it contributes to timing and accuracy. But in the most effective meetings I have experienced, the sharpness of response does not come from the eyes. It is as if the tanden can perceive something the eyes cannot: a shift in the space between myself and the opponent, a tension that is almost tangible, before any physical movement registers. In those moments, my body has already moved before I am consciously aware of responding. This quality of immediate, unmediated response is something I have also felt on the uke side — in the experience of being touched, or thrown, or of receiving a technique that simply arrives before any thought of it forms. I noticed this vividly during practice with my training partner Tony, working on kesagiri. In the moment of the strike, I felt my centre literally rise a few inches — the weight in my belly lifting and then settling again. As I recollect it, it seemed my feet may have briefly left the ground. The sensation was unmistakable: the tanden was not merely a concept but a felt reality, and its movement was leading mine.
Including the Other Person
A further shift began as I became more settled in my own centre: I could extend my awareness to include the other person. Before, glimpses of this would arrive unpredictably — moments of genuine connection in the midst of practice that seemed to appear and disappear of their own accord. Gradually, it became possible to tune into it more actively. For example: when grasped at the wrist, I found I could immediately register the weight, balance, and body arrangement of the opponent — without losing my own centre. This awareness of the other did not come at the expense of self-awareness. It seemed to arise from it.
Practice Permeating Life
Alongside my time at Tetsushinkan, I have been deepening other practices: movement improvisation and performance, Body-Mind Centering®, sitting meditation and Buddhist philosophy. For the first few years, these disciplines fed each other. Progress in one area would show up as insight in another; the dojo and the rest of my life were in conversation, but remained somewhat separate. More recently, something has changed. The practice has begun to move in the other direction: out from the dojo and into the texture of daily life. I first noticed this clearly during a seminar with Aoki Sensei — intense both in hours and in content. By the end of it, the quality of attention I had found on the mat was staying with me off it. It was no longer something I entered and exited; it was becoming a way of perceiving. I began applying this consciously: at work as a bookshop assistant, paying closer attention to interactions with customers. More significantly, in conversations within the Buddhist community — situations I had previously found overwhelming. There were times I was able to hold my ground, express my view, and receive a strong response without flinching, while registering a very powerful feeling inside. The steadiness I was learning in the face of physical pressure had transferred to the face of emotional pressure. This connection is, for me, one of the most important fruits of practice. Not a technique applied outside the dojo, but a quality of presence that has gradually become less contingent on where I am.
Towards Integration
Where I am heading, I think, is towards an increasing integration of all the practices I am engaged in — not by blending them into something homogeneous, but by embodying each of them more fully, so that understanding unfolds from within rather than being applied from without. Reflection is useful only when it remains in honest dialogue with lived experience. The questions I continue to carry are not abstract ones. What is the nature of joining? What makes the opponent fall? How do I act without attachment to a particular outcome? How do I smooth out the gap between doing and registering? I believe that thinking directed into the body — rather than about the body — eventually creates new sensation. And new sensation creates new understanding. The process is slow, non-linear, and never quite finished. But it is, I find, unmistakably real.
