← Back to blog

June 8, 2026

Masatomi Ikeda was demanding. A graduate of physical education, fifth dan in sumo and fourth dan in judo, an Aikido teacher who held to precision for decades without giving an inch. When someone with that background builds quiet seated and lying sequences — breath work, relaxation, careful attention to the body — into the centre of his teaching system, the question is worth asking: why?

Not as a curiosity. As a question about the logic of the whole method.

Genkikai (元気会) is that question. And the answer changes how one can understand training for years.

Three parts of one method

In the system called Sanshinkai, practice has three legs. Aikido: standing work, the dynamics of attack, contact, the shared responsibility of uke and tori for the quality of every entry. Hojo: kata from the tradition of Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū — rhythm, structure, distance, concentration, kiai, and breath in pure form, no partner, no improvisation. Genkikai: quiet sequences in sitting and lying, work with one's own body, with breath, with release.

These are not three separate disciplines collected into one catalogue by coincidence. They are three forms of work with the same material: a body that must be simultaneously strong, precise, and capable of recovery. Aikido gives the body effort and contact. Hojo clears its structure, rhythm, and focus. Genkikai gives it a method of return — after intense training, after a day's work, after any effort that leaves residual tension rather than readiness.

Ikeda Sensei had this logic embedded in the daily work of his dojo. According to accounts from his students, at Aikido Ikeda Dojo in Zurich there were regular classes in both Hojo and Genkikai — not as optional additions for those who were interested, but as part of the teaching rhythm. The third leg was not decorative. It was functional. That same logic is easy to see at Sesshinkan Dojo: elements of Genkikai are present in every warm-up. Work with breath, release, and preparation of the body is not treated as an optional extra or something reserved for seminars. It is part of ordinary training from the first minutes on the mat.

Michele Quaranta Shihan: a living bridge

Genkikai does not reach us as a term from a textbook or footage from an archive. The close working relationship between Germanov Shihan and Michele Quaranta Shihan — one of Masatomi Ikeda's closest students — means that the Aikido of this line is within reach. Not through description, but through living contact.

Michele Quaranta Shihan was born in 1953 in Forlimpopoli, Italy. He began Aikido in 1972 at Aikikai Basel. Before Aikido became the centre of his life, he played football professionally with FC Nordstern Basel and worked as a coach. That sporting background is not a biographical footnote to be filed away — it shapes how Quaranta reads Aikido: through the body, through movement education, through fitness that must make functional sense. He opened his own dojo in Basel in 1983.

From the mid-1980s onward he worked directly with Masatomi Ikeda Sensei as his uke and assistant at seminars across Europe. For years, for seminar participants, he was the closest visible example of what Aikido looked like from inside Ikeda's system — with its precision, with its demands on uke, and with the posture that can be felt in contact. After Ikeda Sensei withdrew from public teaching for health reasons in the early 2000s, Quaranta Shihan continued. Today, following Ikeda Sensei's death in 2021, he is one of those who carries the method forward — including on the mat alongside Germanov Shihan at regular joint seminars.

When Quaranta Shihan talks about Genkikai, he speaks not as an outside observer or a historian. He speaks as someone who saw this practice in action, trained in it, and taught it.

In interviews, Quaranta has said that before meeting Ikeda, Aikido often felt internally inconsistent to him: the philosophy said one thing, the practice did another. Ikeda changed that because his explanations were physical, comprehensible, and verifiable in the body. Movement under Ikeda was — in Quaranta's own words — true. The same entry point applies to Genkikai: not through belief, but through what can be felt and checked.

What the body needs in order to return

The clearest description of Genkikai's function comes from Quaranta himself. He says it simply: Aikido and Hojo are demanding on the body. Genkikai allows the body to come back into place.

This is not about rest in the sense of doing nothing. It is methodical recovery: sequences in sitting and lying, slow, focused on breath and on the felt sense of one's own body. Some exercises are solo, others with a partner. Ikeda Sensei incorporated elements associated with the teaching of Haruchika Noguchi — the creator of the Seitai method, which includes Katsugen exercises that activate the body's natural capacity for self-regulation. The background here is not wellness but physiological: how the body after effort rebuilds readiness if it is not blocked by residual tension.

For someone who has been training Aikido for years, the meaning is concrete: less residual tension after an intense session, better breath quality in quiet conditions, a more refined felt sense of one's own body in situations that do not require speed. A person who has a method for returning after effort trains differently the next day than someone who has accumulated the previous session as stiffness and fatigue in the tissues.

This has consequences for Aikido. An uke who can breathe and release after effort returns to centre faster. A nage who carries no old tension in the shoulders or chest has a different quality of contact in technique. This is not miraculous. It is the difference between a body that knows how to return and a body that has accumulated without a method.

Breath without magic

Quaranta Shihan said something worth keeping: "It is a very simple thing, not magic."

He said it in the context of breath — a central element of Genkikai. Breath can be discovered on one's own, under pressure, when the body forces greater awareness. Or it can be learned in advance, methodically, in quiet conditions. The difference is the same as learning a technique in chaos versus learning it under control.

When breath stops in a technique, the effects are concrete and visible: peripheral vision narrows, the body tightens instead of reading contact, movement becomes a fight with the situation rather than its guidance. This is not metaphor or mystical observation. It is physiology: breath regulates the tone of the autonomic nervous system, which determines whether the body is in an alarm state or ready for subtle action.

Genkikai works with the same material as Aikido — body, breath, self-contact — but in conditions that allow work without the pressure of speed and outcome. It builds the habit of returning to breath in quiet, which in dynamic training shortens the path from panic to presence. Fewer moments when the body reacts too early. More moments when it is genuinely ready.

For long-term practice this is not ornament. It is one of the mechanisms by which Aikido can be trained for decades without systematically destroying the body — which was always one of Ikeda Sensei's central questions, coming as he did from a physical education background that took the physiology of training seriously.

Sanshinkai is not a historical artefact. It is an answer to the question every serious practitioner eventually asks: how do you maintain intensity for years without destroying the body or abandoning standards?

Three practices, three forms of work. Aikido: pressure, contact, technique, responsibility. Hojo: structure, rhythm, focus. Genkikai: return. Without that third leg the system is incomplete — all the effort, no method for recovery.

That knowledge of this system is still alive is the result of specific people and specific relationships. Quaranta Shihan works. Germanov Shihan works. Seminars take place. There is no museum on those mats. There is continuation.

That is why Genkikai does not remain here at the level of description alone. It can still be tested against regular practice on the mat and checked in the body during ordinary training.