There are various Japanese terms that we use in Aikido, or more accurately, there are various Japanese terms that use Americans butcher in Aikido. Aikido techniques use Japanese names and we have tried to keep them consistent across styles at a very general level. Granted, we all do them differently. We also pronounce them terribly. It was so bad that a Japanese major from UT Austin we had couldn’t recognize any of the stuff we were saying when we said these words during their test. Among everything are little slogans and phrases that have come into training. One of these is “gogo-no-shugyo.”
Gogo-no-shugyo is translated as “training after realization” in our materials. It’s something to say after figuring something out. Basically, “shut up and try it more now to work off all that bad motor memory you had.” Except that gogo-no-shugyo as written like that doesn’t translate directly. This is partially thanks to the lack of any Japanese vowel specifiers in the original text we’ve had from Seidokan materials. If you try to Google Translate it, you’d probably get “afternoon seed fish.” Sounds wholesome and delicious!
In particular, the “gogo” is screwy. As a word, it’s 午後, which means “afternoon.” As a homophone, it’s 悟後 which means “after enlightenment.” That’s probably from where that phrase originated. Anyways, what we don’t want to emphasize is “training after realization.” Those epiphanies are quite rare and come from hard work! Our dojo is all about “training BEFORE realization.” Fortunately, Japanese is full of pun magic that makes a well-refined American father pun factory look like he’s just doing nursery rhymes. We thought we could do something with the phrase, and started to ask around . . . and got something!
A naive Japanese translation of gogo-no-shugyo would be “training in the afternoon” but we want “training before realization.” Well, if gogo is “afternoon” (午後) then gozen is “morning” (悟前). So “gozen-no-shugyo” would mean “training in the morning” (午前). And hence we got to gozen-no-shugyo as our name.
Fun note: we don’t even train in the morning.
I mean, if we screwed up, we haven’t put it on any t-shirts yet. If the joke doesn’t work, then I suppose we could change to mo-no-shugyo (training in mourning). Or failing that, the “Afternoon Seed Fish Dojo.” Or “Adam’s Pizza and Aikido Palace.”