George is the founder and chief editor of kenshi247.net.
For more information check out the About page.
On April 29th every year the All Japan Prefectural Championships (Todofuken taikai) are held here in Osaka. I have been attending the shiai as a spectator for well over a decade now, and have seen it change in format from a mixed male/female competition, into a separate male (the one I was at today) and […]
For the past maybe five years or so, at the start of April every year, I’ve been attending a large godo-geiko session at the famed Butokuden in Kyoto. I think last year was the first time I wrote a small article and shared info on the event. I don’t really have much to add on […]
Whew, what a month. March has always been a busy month for me, both work-wise and kendo-wise, but this year has been… too much. Kendo-wise my club took part in four shiai (three university invitationals and a local competition) plus we hosted a five-school renshujiai. Work-wise, things started with the usual high-school entrance exam craziness, […]
The window for applying for this years Kyoto Taikai has finished. I have been attending now for over 15 years, taking pictures and cataloguing my experiences here on kenshi 24/7. Unexpectedly, my first experience of actual participation was in the koryu section, not the kendo one… way back in 2009 I think it was.
The following is a short translation of part of a lecture by Ogawa Chutaro (hanshi, kyudan) in which he discusses the the shugyo process of one of his main teachers, Mochida Seiji (hanshi, judan). Ogawa sensei’s serious pursuit of kendo began when he moved to Tokyo and entered Takano Sasaburo’s Shudogakuin. There he met the […]
Updated: to read my opinion about how the kote performed six months after writing this article please see the updated comments after the gallery below. A couple of months ago, completely out of the blue, I was contacted by a representative of Bushizo, a relatively new online kendo equipment reseller based in Tokyo, and asked […]
About 10 years ago a student of mine – a tall 15 year old girl who had only started kendo seven months earlier – approached me in the dojo and suddenly said “please teach me jodan.” Not having thought too deeply about it before but knowing that I wanted to learn myself at some point […]
Happy new year! As is the norm here in Japan, the year-end/year-start season is a busy kendo one. Amazingly I actually did end up having a handful of non-kendo days over the period (family time), but I managed to make up for the missed keiko days by cramming multiple sessions in a very short time […]
Another year is done. 100s of keiko sessions, thousands of kirikaeshi, countless suburi, and a couple of beers. Unlike most years, however, this one seemed to fly by. Probably because this it ushered in some rather significant changes/advances to both my personal and budo life. The main reason for starting kenshi 24/7 a decade ago […]
As is the norm here in Japan, kendo doesn’t stop over the holiday period (what little holiday period we have anyway), still, I shouldn’t complain! Luckily, as kendo is part of my job, if there is a shiai on a normal workday then that shiai becomes a “business trip” for me. Such was the case […]