Yamaoka Tesshu wrote this small piece in 1883, while kendo (then variously called gekkiken, kenjutsu, shinai uchikomi, etc) was nowhere near the shape it is now. Although the discussion of shinai length might not seem relavant to some nowadays, its a topic that comes up quite a lot if you read kendo commentary from the […]
As some people who read the kenshi247 Facebook page know, yours truly was in a traffic accident and and hospitalised (initially) for a month: cycling on the way home from work on the 8th of September I was hit from behind by a car, resulting in a compression fracture of the vertebrae, i.e. what’s sometimes […]
(Note this is a guest post from Richard Stonell) In many iaido ryuha, chiburi is a fundamental part of kata. Chiburi, usually written 血振 in Japanese, literally means “shaking off blood,” and the image presented is that of flinging the blood of a defeated enemy off the blade with a deft movement before resheathing. Perhaps […]
When I heard that my friend Eric Aerts had actually hand made a dou from nothing I had to get an article out of him! He kindly wrote the following and supplied pictures. Check out the link at the end of the article to see more pictures of the various steps. Enjoy! I can recall […]
Situated in the second most populous area of Japan, and the heart of the Kansai region lies Osaka. Not as over-the-top busy and stuffed full of people like Tokyo, the city is easily navigable (even by bicycle) and its population friendly. The two main areas in the city – Umeda and Namba – are known […]
The following is a translation of another short article by Takizawa Kozo hanshi. As someone who was never taught tsuki for many years of his kendo career I think I would have liked to have had Takaizawa hanshi’s advice on the matter earlier. I started my own experiment (almost untaught) as a member of the […]
(Note this is a guest post from Jakob Schmidt) This is not meant as a guide for learning jodan, but more a guide of how to implement jodan training in your dojo. I’ll assume that you already have permission from your teacher to practice jodan and skip the whole ‘why train jodan’ issue. I also […]
Nestled in the hills in the north of Okayama prefecture close to the border with Tottori prefecture is the small town of Mimasaka. It is here, around 1584, that the Miyamoto Musashi was said to have been born. From there Musashi embarked on his study of swordsmanship, with a narrative well known to all students […]
In 1906 the Butokukai made its first research into making a set of standardised kata for teaching its students (standardised kata for teaching had already been made in Tokyo shihan-gakko – Takano Sasaburo‘s gogyo-no-kata – and Keishicho – keishi-ryu). 17 members were selected from various ryu-ha, and a set of 3 kata were created called […]
As a followup on the article on the Transition of Kendo, I present another of Takizawa Kozo hanshi’s charts. This is different from the one before and works from the bottom-up and shows you what you need to do to in order to acquire great kendo. Again, I offer no explanation, simply a translation. Please […]