All my Japanese language budo books are in my office, so a
fuller reply will have to wait till I go and check, but I can
answer your question to some extent now. 'Ik-ka-jo' simply means
'first item', or 'first point'. In the glossary referred to by
Ubaldo, it is given as the first technique in Daito-ryu, but the
Japanese characters are not given. One possibility is ‰ÓŹđ. As
someone else said, the 'kyo' of 'ik-kyo' means 'teaching' or
'religion'. When applied to aikido techniques, the meaning
becomes somewhat artificial, but 'first teaching' seems a
reasonable translation. It should be understood that the Founder
of aikido did not use any names for techniques. These were
coined by the students in order to remember what they had been
taught. It is plausible that ikkyo was preferred to ikkajo by
members of the Aikikai. There is also a logical progression from
1-kyo to 4-kyo in the sense that the four forms can be done
successively in one movement (from elbow, to base of thumb, to
base of wrist, to nerve point in