The departure of Frédéric and his family back to France occasioned the need for a party and a sayonara-nikkyo. David Alexander Sensei tells the story of this practice from the Ibaraki Iwama Dojo at his Iwama Monogatari website:
Introduction To Iwama
I first went to Iwama and met Saito-sensei in the spring of 1972. I was training at the Aikikai Hombu Dojo in Tokyo at the time, and heard stories about this “outdoor dojo” in Iwama and a legendary sensei named Saito who was teaching the classes there.
Saito-sensei was scheduled to teach Sunday morning classes at Hombu, and I went every Sunday in hopes of meeting him. But he never came.
So, it seemed that I had to go to him. My wife and I went to Iwama and ended up in the six mat room at the entrance to the dojo. Saito-sensei and a few other people were training.
After a while Saito-sensei came over to us and asked if I wanted to train. I said yes. He asked if I had a uniform. I said no. He said “Wait a minute”.
He went to his house and brought back an old uniform. I put it on and bowed into the class.
My first training partner turned out to be the resident monster whose name was Shigemi Inagaki. The first technique was shiho-nage. The first time he threw me, he did it so hard that I hit my head on the mat and was knocked out for several seconds.
When I woke up, I thought to myself, “This is what I’ve been looking for”.
We stayed for several days in Iwama, and slept in O-Sensei’s old storeroom next to the dojo (which was subsequently demolished to build the current “red room”). It was a very interesting place, filled with books and old charts of Kotodama symbols that O-Sensei used in his lectures.
We wanted to move to Iwama as soon as possible, but there was no housing for us. I commuted to Iwama from Tokyo a number of times over the summer and participated in numerous gasshuku (seminars) with university students and other groups. Particularly challenging was one with Isoyama-sensei and his students from the Air Self-Defense Force base at Iruma.
Saito-sensei finally arranged to have a house built for us, and we moved to Iwama in the Fall. We ended up staying for about 10 years.
Sayonara Nikkyo
There is a tradition in Iwama that whenever someone who trained there for any significant length of time goes back home, a sayonara party is held for him (or her).
A part of the tradition is to treat the person to a sayonara nikkyo, in which two people apply nikkyo to his wrists so that he can’t tap out. Of course, care is taken to make sure that he is not actually injured.
Some people say that I invented the sayonara nikkyo. I don’t clearly remember, but it’s probable that in its basic form it existed before I set foot in Iwama.
But I did invent a humorous twist to it. At one party I was observing someone enjoying their sayonara nikkyo and, on impulse, picked up a bottle of Suntory Red whisky (the official dojo drink which we called “Iwama nectar”), and poured some into the recipient’s mouth. Everyone thought it was very funny, and it caught on and became part of the ritual.
How much better can it get; receiving refreshing stimulation to both wrists while enjoying delicious Iwama nectar?
My own experience parallels this
I first went to Iwama to study in 1980. It was at my own sayonara party at the function centre on Mt. Otago that Saito Sensei personally selected David to be one of the executors of my “double-nikkyo” – I still remember it – fondly!
Here is a later photo (from 2000) recoding the practice in Iwama with Hitohiro Saito Sensei (right), Kenichi Shibata Shihan (left) and with Miles Kessler skilfully handling the genuine Suntory Red whisky bottle.
The practice of nikkyo still holds an important place in my dojo.