Senshusei course (専修生コース, senshūsei-kōsu)[1] is an intensive, 11-month aikido training program conducted at Yoshinkan Aikido's honbu dojo (headquarters and main training hall) in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.[2][3][4] The course has received attention through Robert Twigger's book, Angry White Pyjamas (1997).[4][5]
Course participants, themselves referred to as senshūsei, train from April 1 each year to March 1 in the following year.[3] Training takes place from 7:30 AM to 2:00 PM, five days per week, for the duration of the course.[3] The course starts from fundamentals, assuming very little about participants' initial knowledge of aikido, but a high level of physical ability is expected.[6] Participants learn from the instructors of the honbu dojo.[4] The first two months of the course are considered a trial period,[2] and it is common for participants to drop out.[2] In the year that Twigger participated, the number of foreign participants remained constant at 10 participants throughout the entire course. This is a rare occurrence, most courses have a higher drop out rate.
The senshusei course was originally created in 1957 by Gozo Shioda, founder of Yoshinkan Aikido, to train the Tokyo riot police.[3][7] The course has been available to non-police candidates since the 1980s, but was developed primarily for foreign students interested in becoming instructors starting in 1991.[8] There are now two other versions of the course: a less-intensive version for participants aged 40 years or older, and a part-time version taking two years to complete.[8]
Then-9th dan Kyoichi Inoue, shihan, stopped teaching in the senshusei course when he resigned from the Yoshinkan in March 2006 following an internal dispute,[9] later establishing his own branch, Aikido Shinwakan (合氣道親和館).[10] Following Inoue's departure, Tsutomu Chida, 8th dan,[11] and then-chief instructor of the Yoshinkan honbu-dōjō,[12] also broke away, establishing Aikido Renshinkai (合気道錬身会) in 2008,[13] thus ending his teaching in the course.
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