This post is part of the First Year of Budo series

I wasn’t as healthy as I thought I was(I didn’t realise how little I improved over night until I arrived at class) but anyway I went to class today. It was quite a full on class, as usual I was wasted by the end of it and was pouring sweat during it. The one thing that came out of today was that once again, I still suck at everything!

Jodo

I’m happy that I know all 12 of the basics techniques, atleast by motion but not by name. But then again there is a wealth of points where I do things incorrectly. I enjoy particularly some of the slightly more intricate techniques but offcourse these are more difficult to do right and nigh on impossible to use in their application of actual hitting the sword down with the staff. Most of my time was spent trying to figure out how to hit the sword correctly.

I should clarify that when I say hit, it’s more like a throw and generally works better than if you were just to hit the sword down. So when you swing down quite a lot happens which I’ll describe in slow motion.

First the jo(staff) comes into contact with the back of the sword and to one side. It’s important to have your body weight centered and low. If you are off balance you have no chance of hitting it right and may as well die. If you don’t have a low center of gravity set up then it is difficult to get the power to push through the sword.

When the jo comes into contact with the sword it has a kinda of sticky feeling. What you want to happen is to have the jo slide along the sword and then fling it away. If you were to just to hit it with a ‘clanging’ sort of feel the sword would only be moved a little offline. This is the same principle that applies to throwing stones. Due to the way you move your arm you can fling a rock much further than if you were trying to punch it.

With this sticky feeling the motion of the jo slides along the top and side of the sword as you continue your strike. The jo is quite a heavy weapon so most of the move comes from it’s own weight and you only need to apply directional force to guide it where to go and oppose the swordsman own resistance.

You build up the speed that the sword moves as you push it down and around. The sword generally goes down and slightly sideways to end up slamming into the opponents leg with the tip pointing behind them. We don’t want to hit the sword sideways as this just results in the swordsman being in a position to do a horizontal cut.

While some of the directional control comes from the angle you move the jo at, sometimes the critical factor is how you rotate your hips as you strike. This often provides the small amount of sideways movement required to throw the sword freeing up the rest of your upper body to push the sword.

It’s a shame it’s hard to know if you are doing it right without having someone patiently sticking a sword an inch away from your face waiting for you to move and strike.

It’s probably worth me making a bit list of techniques and all the pointers that I get so I can have them  somewhere to refer to when I forget.

Iaido

Where do I start? So much was wrong and I didn’t even try to do the 2 new katas I’m learning. The class as a whole spent something like 30-45 mins just doing chiburi(shaking off of blood) and noto (sheathing the sword) practice.

Now with noto I have to make sure that I keep the saya(sheath) mouth very close to my body. Apparently my little finger should always be touching me. This does seem to help in getting the sword back in the saya. The other thing I have to do is keep my index and thumb touching in front of the saya mouth (next to the sliding blade unprotected by the saya). I was tending to open my index and thumb to let the sword easily pass through (the blade slides along the knuckle and first joint when being sheathed) but I’m not supposed to evidently (It does look strange I agree).

The thing is it is so dangerous. It puts the skin of your hand within probably 5-10 mm of the cutting edge when you sheath it. I should also mention that at the same time as sheathing the blade you are doing a 90 degree rotation of the blade and moving the saya away from your body towards the sword. Offcourse all without looking at the sword at all (after all, what if your enemy comes back to life, watch him!!!).

This is alright for me as I’m only using a bokken but for people with skinken(sharp swords) this is scary at times. Particularly when demonstrating the correct way to do certain things. You can see how close the hand is to the blade and yet they seem to do things so casually. One person in particular in demonstrating a certain fault pinches the sword blade in one hand between his index and thumb approaching it from the sharp side, then proceeding to draw the blade the rest of the way out of the saya. Certainly requires a lot of confidence.

Anyway my cold was hampering my ability to really get into the katas. Looking forward to the holidays when I can get some serious practice time. Might need to find some more carpet so I can practice with some more space outside (you can’t slide or kneel on concrete).

There are just so many things that I just need to practice 10000 or so times to get any sort of basic fluency with.

It’s such a beautiful art, just so darn hard. I was talking to one of the older students (probably getting on 50 or 70 (I guess)) who is going for a grading soon and he was telling me how he has so much that he has to correct from todays class. Guess it never ends.