The spread of aikidô has been remarkable. In the short span of half a century, it has come to be practiced in over 80 countries. In countries that aikidô reached early on, there are already practitioners who have attained 7th dan, with more and more people attaining 5th and 6th dan with each coming year. Those who started practicing aikidô when they were young are now in their 40s and 50s.

When aikidô began to spread, every dôjô's instructor was young and inexperienced. It was a time when one could head an aikido club or dôjô with only shodan or 2-dan level of experience. Especially abroad, if someone became a "blackbelt", they were respected as a person with complete experience; there was no resistance to such a person teaching or to learning from such a person. However, the fact that a person of shodan or 2-dan level of experience has only just memorized the forms and is thus finally ready to learn, this was the same back then as it is now. The reality is that most of what they taught was stagnant repetition of the elementary forms, with minor individual differences. Their authority as instructors largely consisted of the greater amount of experience they had over their students who had simply started practicing at a later time.

In the present, where there are many experienced students, I have come to notice that it is not sufficiently appealing for instructors as well as students to simply mechanically repeat the forms, relying on physical strength.