“Motomereba Mugendai” (求めれば無限大) is my favorite Kendo book. It is a small, easily readable book composed of 100 short essays on Kendo training and leadership topics. One of the things I like about it (in addition to the uncomplicated, straightforward word choice and sentence structure) is the way the author has divided the book in to chapters based on the themes of the essays. The first two chapters are devoted to the practitioner’s personal technical and spiritual development. The third chapter is focused on advice for the kenshi as an instructor. The last chapter is for parents, both those with children already practicing Kendo, and those considering encouraging their children to start.
Some of the advice is highly Japan-centric (such as one vignette in which the author posits that people with dyed hair shouldn’t be put in leadership positions). But anyone doing Kendo should enjoy this book. I re-read a page or two every few days. The book is beneficial to me because I am wrestling with my own challenges as a student and junior instructor, and hope soon to be a Kendo parent as well. I don’t believe that a translation exists yet, so I have included some of my own translations of my favorite passages below.
From chapter 1, which is entitled “When you start practicing Kendo, so that your efforts will yield results”
Essay 5: If you want to become strong, develop two rivals
One’s approach to keiko is very different depending one whether or not one has a rival. This is particularly true if there is a person to whom one does not want to lose. When your rival is from your own dojo, and is always in sight, you never let you can’t get lax. When your rival is in another dojo, since you can’t see what he is up to, you can’t get lax because you are always concerned that he or she might be working harder than you. So it makes sense to have a rival both inside and outside of your dojo.
Read More Post a comment (9)
My area as some of you know is teaching kendo to young people. In high school I teach kendo as an elective subject to 12 and 13 year olds. One tool I have found very useful for firing their imaginations is telling them stories from Japanese history, stories that most of us have read or heard at some point I’m sure.
The other day I was telling the story about the student who went to learn from a teacher in the mountains but instead of waza, he was made to cook and clean for sensei. Most of my students even today have seen the movie “The Karate Kid” so this was something they recognised. The next part of the story tells how the teacher starts hitting the student out of the blue, to the extent that the student is on edge at all times, never sure when the next blow is coming. The resolution of the story is, of course, the moment when the student spontaneously reacts and protects himself from the unseen blow, the teacher says, “Now we may begin”. I realised as I finished that some students were looking at me puzzled as if to say, “so what is the moral of that story?” Indeed what is it? Is it that there is something inherently abusive in traditional sword pedagogy?
Read More Post a comment (3)
It’s almost the end of my fourth year of teaching high school kendo and time to reflect on the year that’s past.
A bit of background: I teach kendo in an Australian high school, in two classroom settings: years 7 and 8 (12-14 years old), and after school to a wider range of students. I have already written an article that appeared in the last issue of Kendo World which described in detail the process of establishing a kendo culture in a non-Japanese high school. Building on what I’ve learned in the previous three years, this year I trialled some new approaches.
The main one was to introduce the students to shiai sooner. Each class does kendo for a semester, and previously I judged that this was too short a time to get to doing competition. However I realised that many of the least engaged students were also the most physically gifted in class, and I thought hard about how to include them more, how to get them to connect to kendo.
Read More Post a comment (5)
