For the past few years I have been travelling back to the wonderful city of Edinburgh, Scotland, to teach a seminar at my home dojo, Edinburgh Kendo Club. This year was the seventh seminar I have run over the past 11 years, and the 3rd in as many years.
In June 2017 I introduced on kenshi 24/7 a project that I had worked on a year-or-so earlier that had finally seen the light of day: “Kamei Toru Sensei’s Kendo Lecture” – an English subtitled DVD from Japanese kendo magazine Kendo Jidai. At the time it was the magazines first foray in to the international […]
十段になれた筈：大島治喜太の物語 About four years ago I briefly introduced a kenshi who I have been interested in for a good while via a couple of small articles: Oshima Jikita. In one of those articles I wrote a brief bio, but today I want to look at his life in more detail. This more detailed article is […]
第四十二回伊勢神宮武芸奉納演武 Last weekend my dojo mates and I visited Ise-jingu in Mie prefecture which is, along with Izumo-taisha in Shimane, one of the most important cultural and historical institutions in the country. There we were honoured to take part in a “dedication demonstration” of budo to the sun goddess Amaterasu with a handful of other […]
あなたの胴打ちはドウですか？ I spend a lot of my dojo time attempting to acquire good kendo. By “good” I don’t mean I practise in order to win shiai or beat people but, but rather I am trying to develop a “solid” style firmly rooted in the basics, one that anybody could look at then nod and say: […]
A few years ago I wrote and published my high successful Kendo Coaching Tips and Drills manual, the first of its kind, and still – afaik – the ONLY publication of its kind in the English language. The idea to write a more advanced manual for instructors first came in 2008. It then took four […]
This year, as normal, I headed to Kyoto to attend/watch the Kyoto Taikai. I have written about it numerous times on kenshi 24/7, so I won’t bore you with a full recap – check out the kyototaikai category to read past posts and get the full rundown. This year was a little bit of a […]
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, […]