Saburo TakayasuSensei

Saburo Takayasu was born in April 1948 in Chiba Prefecture, in the Kanto region — the ground on which many of Japan’s oldest martial traditions were founded.

He studied engineering at Ibaraki University, and from 1967 to 1973 trained both at the university’s dojo and at the Iwama Dojo under Morihiro Saito Sensei, 9th Dan. Those six years placed him in Iwama during the Founder’s final period there. He was present at the last class O-Sensei taught in Iwama, in 1969.

In February 1974, after travelling in the United States, he settled in Sydney. He opened his first dojo in April 1976 at the North Sydney Police Boys’ Club, and in 1977 formed the Takemusu Aiki Association, incorporated as a non-profit association in New South Wales in 1991, of which he remains President and Chief Instructor.

He is one of very few Japanese students of Saito Sensei to have spent his teaching life abroad, and he kept that relationship alive across the distance. He was instrumental in bringing Saito Sensei to Australia for seminars in 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2000 — the last drawing more than three hundred aikidoka from around the world — and accompanied him to Denver, Colorado, in 1999. In 2001 he took a group of his own students back to Iwama, to train with Saito Sensei and to teach at the dojo where he had learned.

Graded 7th Dan and Shihan, he is a member of the Aikikai and is authorised to grade students on its behalf. He has taught in Sydney for more than fifty years, and has led seminars in Europe and Japan.

Training should be strong and martially effective, should strengthen body and mind together, and should at the same time develop the underlying principles of aiki.

Takayasu Sensei follows Morihiro Saito Sensei’s wish to preserve Aikido as O-Sensei taught it, and asks of his students and senior instructors what he asks of himself: purity of technique, and martial spirit.