Last Saturday (10th of November), I held an Eikenkai session at my workplace. 17 kenshi got together for some keiko: about 40 mins of kihon, one hour of jigeiko, and about three hours (or four… I can’t remember!) in the second dojo. Seven countries were represented: Scotland, England, America, Australia, Brazil, Italy, and Japan.
Yesterday, for the first time in half-a-year I held an Eikenkai session. For the last 10 years or so we’ve been going at a pace of one session every couple of months, but with work and baby making life hectic, it has been difficult to get the time.
The summer holidays are over here in Japan, and it’s back to school for yours truly after a very busy few weeks of kendo. I am always running around doing kendo during this period, and so am quite used to it, but this year was slightly different in that I combined two events in to a single week… which normally wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that the dojo were about 5,700 miles apart as the crow flies. I’ll give a brief explanation about the two teaching environments I was in, and do a simple teaching-observation at the …
After the flurry of kendo activity that was the Kyoto Taikai, it was nice to have a relaxed keiko with a bunch of friends. Whereas the last session was jam-packed, today’s was a more reasonably sized group of 15 people. Still, we had six countries represented (Scotland, England, Italy, France, America, and Japan), and people from grades nidan to nanadan.
Yesterday was the first kenshi 24/7 run Eikenkai session of the new year, and it was a packed one! 34 kenshi from six prefectures (Okayama, Hyogo, Osaka, Nara, Kyoto, Mie… plus Rhett from America) squeezed into the kendojo at Sumiyoshi Budokan, which is located in the precincts of the beautiful Sumiyoshi shrine. Although there was a cold breeze outside, the dojo was boiling. We did about 40 minutes of kihon (including uchikomi and kakarigeiko), 20 minutes of waza practise, and about 45 minutes of jigeiko before heading to the nearby local restaurant for okonomiyaki and a couple of refreshing beers. …