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During his years at the Hombu, Suenaka noticed one major difference between the way O’Sensei taught and the way Koichi Tohei taught, a difference that prophesied Tohei’s later split with the Aikikai:

“O’Sensei never really emphasized ki. He talked about ki, but more than, you could say, ‘instructing’ ki, he demonstrated ki in his waza, whereas Tohei Sensei really stressed ki development and using ki in aikido techniques. O’Sensei would give lectures on ki, but not while he was demonstrating aikido. He would mention specific techniques during his lectures, and demonstrated using ki in techniques as part of the lecture, in a lot of different ways. But Tohei Sensei stressed ki a lot more while he was teaching waza than O’Sensei did.”

Though he needed no further convincing after his private experiences with O’Sensei in Hawaii, it was during one of O’Sensei’s lectures that Suenaka received a forceful demonstration of the power of ki:

“O’Sensei was demonstrating what true ki was supposed to be like or feel like, and he used me as uke. He was holding a chopstick in his hand, but he didn’t say what he was going to do. I was kind of skeptical, but I trusted him. I never hesitated to attack him. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me or really hurt me badly. He didn’t tell me how to attack him, he just said, you know, ‘Come get me.’ As I attacked him, he struck me in the forehead with the chopstick and knocked me down. He knocked the heck out of me! I almost lost consciousness, very close to it. Everything went white for a few seconds, then I got up and went back to my place and sat down, and I asked someone there ‘What happened?’ They said, ‘Man, he knocked you down with a chopstick!’ I had a big welt in the middle of my forehead from where he’d hit me with this chopstick! He knocked me silly!”