Update November 2023; lots of people are coming to Japan post-pandemic so I decided to update this article. I hope it is helpful. This post was originally published in March 2015. Recently – perhaps because of the impending world kendo championships – I’ve been receiving an increased amount of inquires about doing kendo over here […]
After the popularity of the last post I’ve decided to translate something else along the same theme. It comes from around the same time frame and is the work of another academic, though this time a sort of – whats the right word? – maverick of the Japanese kendo community: Baba Kinji sensei (kyoshi nanadan, […]
Today’s Eikenkai practise – the first of 2015 – was absolutely packed. 40 kenshi from shodan to nanadan representing five prefectures (Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Mie, Nagoya) and five countries (Japan, the UK, Spain, Thailand, America) got together for over two hours of intense keiko. In amongst the participants there those that have competed at the […]
The following is a highly abridged and loosely translated excerpt from a book entitled Gendai Kendo (“Modern kendo”) published in 1992. The book consists of articles (based on lectures) by academics discussing kendo in it’s then current situation and was sponsored by the Ministry of Education, All Japan Kendo Association (ZNKR), and the All Japan […]
There is a Japanese phrase from zen teachings that reads: 啐啄同時 – Sotaku-doji The image it suggests is this: Imagine a chicken and her egg. When the chick is about to hatch it makes a scratching noise inside the shell. Hearing it, the mother chicken comes along and gently taps on the outside of the […]
The first half of this article is a short translation. Enjoy! Up until I was a third year junior high school student (14/15yrs old) I lived in Tottori prefecture. I started kendo in first year but was very weak and lost many competitions. I was so weak that sometimes people would even taiatari me out […]
Happy new year !!!! I hope all kenshi 24/7 readers had a great xmas and Hogmanay/new-year period. Japan, being a non-Christian country, basically doesn’t stop for a holiday break until December the 29th or 30th depending, and even then many shops will remain open throughout the whole period, perhaps closing only on January the 1st. […]
I promised myself and kenshi 24/7 readers that I’d write at least one or maybe two new articles before the years end but, hands up, I’ve run out of time. Mainly this has been because kendo doesn’t slow down for the end of the year, it speeds up !! So for the last post of […]
December is generally a relaxed time of year for me work-wise, but kendo – as usually – continues unabated right up until the end of the year (and re-starts again only after a short break). This gives me a little bit of extra time to reflect back over the last past 12 months and see […]
We held the 6th and last Eikenkai session of 2014 yesterday at our usual dojo at Sumiyoshi Budokan. 27 people participated with kenshi coming from as far afield as Kumamoto (Andy from All Japan Budogu), Nagoya, and Okayama, as well as from around the Kansai region (Osaka, Nara, Hyogo, Kyoto). We did our trademark 45-30-45 […]