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. Day [...]
Volume, quality, transcendence 量・質・超越
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 [...]
Kote review (Bushizo) 小手
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 whether I would like to review their own brand of kote, called ARM. I had seen the press release about the kote before, and had [...]
Learning jodan through teaching it 教うるは学ぶの半ば
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 [...]
Osaka Kangeiko 2019 寒稽古
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 [...]