Steven Seagal

Aikido in Japan

Steven Seagal was born on 10 April 1952 in Lansing, Michigan, and grew up in California. He took up karate and aikido as a teenager, then moved to Japan in the 1970s to teach English and continue his aikido. He settled in Osaka and joined the Tenshin dojo, affiliated to the Aikikai, which he came to run by the end of the decade. Among his students there was Haruo Matsuoka, who would follow him to the United States.

In December 1981 he gave a farewell demonstration in Osaka in front of Seiseki Abe (10th dan) and Hiroshi Isoyama (8th dan), before opening the Tenshin Bugei Gakuen in Taos, New Mexico, and then a dojo in Los Angeles in 1983, which Matsuoka ran until 1997. Published biographies credit him with the rank of 7th dan and the title of shihan; an older Aikido Journal entry lists him as 6th dan. Before his film career he staged fights and stunts on The Challenge (1982), with Toshiro Mifune, and on Never Say Never Again (1983), Sean Connery's return as James Bond.

Above the Law, Under Siege and the Warner years

Michael Ovitz, head of the CAA agency and a student at his dojo, arranged a screen test at Warner Bros. Above the Law (1988), directed by Andrew Davis, took 18.9 million dollars in the United States and is regarded as the first American film built around aikido. Seagal plays Nico Toscani, a Chicago police officer with a CIA past, the template for almost every character he played afterwards.

Hard to Kill (1990), Marked for Death (1990) and Out for Justice (1991) fixed the formula. Under Siege (1992), again with Andrew Davis, is his biggest hit: he plays Casey Ryback, a battleship cook and former Navy SEAL, in a plot often summed up as Die Hard on a warship. He moved into directing with On Deadly Ground (1994), poorly received by critics, then followed with Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), Executive Decision (1996), in which his character dies halfway through, The Glimmer Man (1996) and Fire Down Below (1997).

Video and television

The Patriot (1998) went straight to video in the United States. Exit Wounds (2001) brought Seagal back to cinemas with close to 80 million dollars worldwide, but Half Past Dead (2002) flopped, and the rest of his career has played out on video at a rate of one to three films a year: Belly of the Beast (2003), Out of Reach (2004), Submerged (2005), Pistol Whipped (2008), Kill Switch (2008). Robert Rodriguez cast him as the drug lord Torrez in Machete (2010), his one notable theatrical release of the period. On television, Steven Seagal: Lawman (2009) followed him as a reserve deputy sheriff in Louisiana and True Justice (2011-2012) put him in charge of a police unit in Seattle. He has also released two blues albums, Songs from the Crystal Cave (2004) and Mojo Priest (2006).

The Seagal style

On screen Seagal does not jump and almost never throws a high kick. He enters the opponent's guard (irimi), deflects the armed limb, then finishes with a wrist lock (kote gaeshi, nikyo) or a throw, often topped off with an atemi to the face or an elbow. The techniques are shot close up at real speed, and the opponent is on the floor within a second or two. A practitioner will recognise the principles of aikido, delivered with a harshness and an intent to injure that Morihei Ueshiba's art does not cultivate.

His characters, former CIA agents or special forces operators, are close to invulnerable, which has made him as much a target of parody as a reference. The critic Vern devoted a book to him, Seagalogy (2008), which reads his filmography as the work of an auteur. With Jean-Claude Van Damme he remains one of the two great martial arts stars of American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, and the first to turn aikido into screen spectacle.