What draws me to aikidō is that it is one of the few martial arts honest enough to admit that it would rather not hurt you. That sounds like a slogan, and the cynic in me usually distrusts slogans, but in aikidō's case the intention runs all the way down into the technique. The whole art is built around the idea that you can receive an attack, join with it, and send it somewhere harmless, and whatever I happen to think about how well that works under pressure, I find the ambition itself worth taking seriously.
I have to be honest about the founder, because aikidō's admirers often are not. Ueshiba Morihei was a real and well documented man, which already sets him apart from the half-legendary founders of the older schools, but the figure his students remember as Ōsensei is wrapped in a great deal of religious language that I cannot take as plain history. He was a serious follower of the Ōmoto religion, and in his later years he spoke about his art in terms of kami, cosmology and universal love that meant a great deal to him and mean very little to me. I do not say this to mock him. I say it because the man underneath the mysticism is more interesting than the saint his followers painted, and because the honest way to admire someone is to look at what he actually did.
What he actually did was take the Daitō-ryū aiki-jūjutsu of Takeda Sōkaku, a hard and effective grappling art, and slowly turn it towards a different purpose. That transformation is the part of the story I trust, because it is documented and because it is visibly true in the techniques. You can still see the joint locks and the balance-breaking of the parent art inside aikidō, but they have been bent towards control rather than destruction. I like that you can watch an art change its mind over one man's lifetime, and that nobody pretends it arrived complete and unchanging.
I am also glad that aikidō is honest, almost by accident, about the limits of lineage. The art splintered almost as soon as it had a name. Shioda went one way, Tōhei another, Tomiki built something his own teacher would barely have recognised, and the Ueshiba family kept the centre. People argue about who holds the real thing, and I find I do not much care. The disagreements are not a scandal to be hidden; they are simply what happens when living people inherit something and each take from it the part they most valued.
The hardest question, and the one I cannot dodge, is whether aikidō works. I have watched practitioners flow through attacks with a grace that looks like magic, and I have also watched the same techniques fall apart against someone who genuinely refuses to cooperate. The truthful answer is that it depends entirely on what you are asking the art to do. As a method of defeating a determined, resisting opponent it is, at best, demanding and unreliable. As a discipline for learning to stay calm, to move well, and to meet force without panic, it is quietly excellent. The mistake is to demand that it be both at once and then to feel cheated when it is not.
So I keep a certain affection for aikidō while refusing to be sold the larger claims. I do not believe it makes a small person invincible, and I do not believe its founder tapped some universal energy running through the cosmos. What I do believe is that a gifted man took a brutal art and asked whether it could be turned towards harmony, and then spent the rest of his life trying to answer the question. That is a strange and rather beautiful thing to attempt, and the honest response is neither to worship it nor to sneer at it, but to watch it clearly and give it its due.