(Of course, had Ueshiba done this, the future history of aikido would certainly have been much more straightforward, if considerably less interesting.) He could have closed the Tokyo dojo entirely and removed the entire Ueshiba / Kobukai operation to Iwama. In any case, Morihei Ueshiba hedged his bets about the war and ordered Kisshomaru, then a university student, to stay in the Tokyo battle zone and run the Kobukan dojo. Ueshiba's statements about killing would also suggest that he had become a secret pacifist, but Kisshomaru Ueshiba always denied quite strongly that his father was ever a pacifist. As evidence of his father's general unhappiness with the course of the war and his intense desire for peace, Kisshomaru writes of a secret mission undertaken by Ueshiba to China in 1941, on behalf of Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. On the other hand, in Kisshomaru Ueshiba's biography and in his own discourses, Morihei Ueshiba appears to show serious concerns about the war, even going so far as to assert that there was a serious mismatch between aikido and killing-especially killing in the kind of war being fought by the Japanese military. However, all this changed in 1942 and the published writings suggest that this change was extremely abrupt. These actions strongly suggest that Morihei Ueshiba supported both the war itself and also the way it was being fought by the Japanese military. There is evidence that he taught a very rough and ready form of jujutsu: the kind that would allow Japanese soldiers to finish off an enemy at close quarters, when the weapons had failed to do so. After the second suppression of Omoto in 1935, Ueshiba continued his association with a wide spectrum of Japanese military leaders and taught at various military schools. On the one hand, in the previous column (Column 9), we saw that from around 1930 onwards, Morihei Ueshiba had very close links with ultra-nationalists like Okawa Shumei and showed no sign of distress at allowing the members of the Sakura-kai (Cherry Blossom Society) to meet in the Kobukan dojo and plan their revolts and assassinations for yo-naoshi (renewing the world: a constant theme in Japan from the late Tokugawa period right up until the closing years of the Pacific War). There are a number of problems relating to Morihei Ueshiba's move to Iwama and one way of putting these problems into focus is to consider Morihei Ueshiba's words and actions in relation to the war that was fought by Japan from 1937 till 1945.
An earlier column (Column 5) finished with O Sensei retreating to his Aiki-en (Aiki Farm) in Iwama, leaving his son Kisshomaru in charge of the Tokyo dojo.
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