I am Not a Black Belt – Rodolpho Arruda

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I am Not a Black Belt

May 2026

I am a black belt. I am a second dan (nidan 二段) Aikido black belt with the original school of Aikido, the Aikikai foundation.

I started Aikido practice in early 1997 after a holiday trip to the US.

When Aikido was introduced in Brazil, it had inherited local rules from the Judo federation back then, so pre-black belt students (mudansha 無段者) have colored-belt ranking system from yellow to brown.

Everyone starts with a white belt, which usually comes in the same package with the dogi, the practice uniform, when you buy it.

It took me some time to learn that the white belt is a kind of "self assigned" symbol. To get one, you just need to buy the uniform.

One you go through you first evaluation or "exam", you may or may not advance to 5th rank (gokyū 五級:ごきゅう).

photo by: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Chrkl

Later in my experience I also learned that kyū progession through different colors wasn’t really practice or understood as practice by black belt dan practitioners.

It was learning. Learning in the sense of discovery. As you were so early in your practice that you could only discover things that exist. Like sitting in the cockpit of an airliner for the first time. You don’t even know where to look at, let alone to touch. You need time just to find things and learn what they are.

There are between 2500 and 3500 different techniques in Aikido depending on the naming used to explain the variations.

A 5th kyū student with less than 6 months of practice may have tried, with luck, 100 or so different techniques.

Ever since early practice, students learn to associate parts of techniques to their names. Then they memorize complete technique names and learn how to execute them with training partners.

Advanced western students or Japanese students can be called a name of new technique, a technique they might have never trained before (like technique number #2311) and build it on-demand in their heads before putting it to practice. Something like looking at a fragmented image on the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, right guessing what it is, and fixing the puzzle almost instantly at the speed of thought.

In this video, legendary Aikido master instructor (shihan 師範) Christian Tissier demonstrates a ushiro ryo kata dori naname kokyu nage (or sokomen irimi nage).

Tissier shihan can not only execute this movement with technical perfection, but with his own particular style.

Aikido masters are known and differentiated by their styles. Their styles become so unique sometimes that practitioners use as reference to describe other students’ styles like: "Oh, that instructor is more like Ueshiba style, whereas his new student has Yamada’s style."

Styles are signatures.

So this journey begins when we buy a piece of clothing with a white belt, then goes through thousands of techniques, moving into a black belt realm years after, learning a lot more of the non-physical philosophical and even spiritual side of Aikido, develop style, develop leadership inside your federation and out, and never stops refining the technique, even when the body is too old for break falls or kneeling practice (suwari waza 座り技), some refinement can be done in the sense of avoiding some techniques while developing others.

Such an experience-rich journey to go to. I truly recommend Aikido no anyone.

I am a white belt

I have finished the manuscript of my first book this week.

I wrote it using a combination of tools anyone can buy: a computer and word processing software. Just like the dogi and its package companion white belt.

I started writing it in such a rudimentary way with narratives, dialogues and chapter structures I still don’t have a complete idea if they are right or wrong.

The first time I reviewed the initial chapters — the first 30 pages, I guess — I saw typos and grammar mistakes that would put any adult to shame. By the way, I wrote it using my mother tongue Brazilian Portuguese, which looks sensibly better than this text here you are reading in English, and which I rarely review before posting online.

Even so, some parts of the book were badly written and had to be revised several times.

Once I decided to ask an AI model for a specific narrative I was building. I just wanted to know if it was OK to have it in a book like mine with such and such story and such and such characters. The answer came with a description of an entire literary school devoted to that form of narrative.

My silly literary doubt was, in fact, a century old research line which has people with entire careers dedicated to it. There are PhD in this area.

I’m so white belt. I haven’t even stepped into the mat yet. I’m at the locker room trying to figure out how to tie a knot to that belt.

My book aims at teenage readers and young adults. I had questions about past and present time narrations. I wrote it all in past narration. Then I started reading...