A Beginner's Point of View 182-183

Day 182:

Sensei didn’t show up to practice today. Maybe he got held up at work. One of the senior students was teaching the beginner class and getting everyone to practice their footwork. When it was time for advanced class, he took over as the one calling out drills and giving the occasional inspiration from a seminar he recently attended. We did mostly kiri-kaeshi, one-step men, and one-step kote today. When it was time for one-step men, the senior student told us to practice oji-waza for men, such as debana-kote, men-suriage-men, and debana-men. For one-step kote it was debana-men and kote-suriage-men.

After several drills, I was out of breath and had to stop. I wonder if I’ve been sleeping too much over the weekend. I stopped and watched the others drill for a bit. Once they moved into keiko, I put on men and went onto the floor. At first, once of the free students had me drill on kote. He felt my strikes were constantly hitting on tsuba because they were too straight. I think he’s right. After that, he had a short keiko.

Then it was time for kata. I love kata. It was a free period, so to speak, so you worked on whatever you wanted to work on. My partner and I chose to practice the first three kata a couple of times for each role. Then we had one of the senior students help us with the fourth kata. I couldn’t recall which side went into hasso. It turns out it is the uchidachi, while the shidachi moves into waki. You need to stay far apart or else the uchidachi needs to smoothly take a step back to fix it. It helps if the shidachi breaks up his avoidance step into two parts: the backing away and the stepping forward. This helps get the rhythm down.

Day 183:

Today was all about tournaments. Fitting, seeing as how we’re about to put on our own tournament in about four weeks. We did several rounds of kiri-kaeshi and one-step men. After that, it was a series of lectures about tournaments for the benefit of those who have not yet participated. Much stress was places upon performing rei-hou properly. The sequence of step-in, bow, taito, three sliding steps, sonkyo, and obeying the shinpan-cho was required. After the match, you sonkyo, osame-to, stand, five small steps backwards, heels together, lower sword, bow, step backwards out. This is very critical for any kendoka as the inability to do good rei-hou reflects bad upon the dojo who sponsors them. Always keep good manners and upright posture, even if you lose. Whining and slamming your shinai upon the ground is very rude.

We fought several practice matches. My first was against a student with no rank. I tried to leave him openings to attack but it just made us both look clumsy. Maybe I shouldn’t do that anymore. My last match of the evening was against a ni-dan, one of our best. I decided to just ‘bring it’! For whatever reason, I was flying on the court! Men, kote, debana-kote, men-suriage-men, oh-men, and other strikes just came naturally while I threw my spirit forward and let my body catch up. My opponent still won 2-0, but it was a very hard-fought match. It was my best effort yet! After that match, I volunteered to practice being a shinpan. It’s a lot harder than it looks because you have to watch all targets on both kendoka and listen to everything. It can get confusing really quick.