Kendo

Having in my last post talked about Yosakoi now is probably a good time to talk about one of the other ways in which I have been spending my free time; Kendo. For the lost, Kendo is Japans answer to fencing. Much like how fencing is a distant, defanged descendant of European style duelling with rapiers, Kendo is a sporting version of Ken-jutsu, the art of using the Katana; more commonly known as "Samurai sword". As in fencing the weapons are heavily modified to reduce their lethality and all participants wear armour, because even if you take the edge off a sword it still bloody hurts to be hit with one.

How Kendo is supposed to look.

We had heard that several of the volunteers who came before us had trained in Kendo and had enjoyed it very much so we figured we would try it. Very fortunately for us a man called Matsubara-San (or as we refer to him Matsubara-Sensei) had recently enough moved to Toya. If you are somewhat well acquainted with Japan then you may have guessed by his title that yes, he is a Kendo teacher but more than that he is a 7th Dan instructor which suffice it to say is extremely high up (although technically 10th Dan is the highest possible grade the best practitioners alive today are all 8th Dan). In addition to having an extremely well qualified instructor we we're fortunate enough to be some of the only people in the area interested in training, so we received private tuition at a heavily discounted price, so heavily discounted in fact that it for all intensive purposes it could be considered free.

James learns about the importance of a head guard.

So with free, private tuition from a highly regarded teacher you'd think I'd be some sort of Kendo prodigy by now juggling Katanas and hunting down ninjas, or whatever it is that talented Kendo practitioners do. Well as it turns out, Kendo is incredibly difficult. My roommate James had also started training in Kendo and took to it a lot better than I did. Oftentimes while he would be breezing through the exercises receiving praise from the teacher I would be left  stumbling through them leaving my body in pain and the teacher with a look of bemusement. I have to concede that on several occasions I was left with a bitter feeling of jealousy and frustration at my inability to do what others made look so easy. Now you'll have to take my word that I am not normally a jealous person but in this case private tuition began to have some drawbacks that I had not foreseen. In a group class you work with a range of abilities spanning from gracefully talented to the outright spastic, leaving most of us somewhere in the middle to make our own way up the ladder. However in a private/semi private class it's only you and the other person and whether or not you intend it to be that way you are constantly being compared to each other. As well as in a group class you can hide away in the crowd and slowly practice and perfect your craft in a relaxed setting with your peers before you bring it to the teacher. In a private lesson though, you don't have this option and you are constantly under the watchful scrutiny of the teacher before you've had any time at all to become acquainted with your craft let alone perfect it. Despite these drawbacks though, I overcame these challenges and slowly but surely the gap in between myself and James began to close.

How I felt for the first several months of practice.

Finally here are a few things I have noticed about practicing martial arts in Japan. Unlike some of the western dojo's I have practiced Karate and Judo in, the Japanese don't seem to be as obsessed about grading and examinations at least for what they view to be the lower grades. From what I can discern they view them as being unimportant and have no problem with letting you skip them to get straight to the grades that actually matter. In addition to this I've noticed a slightly more relaxed attitude to the tradition behind the martial art. While in western Dojo's there may be a big emphasis on how you speak and carry yourself you don't find the same tenseness in a Japanese Dojo. While the traditions and customs are observed it feels much more natural. This is probably because in Japan the customs which may seem so alien and unusual to a foreigner are just the done thing for the Japanese and therefore they dont have to make any effort to adhere to the rules. Although there are many differences these were just the two that stuck out to me the most.

Practice