This post is part of the First Year of Budo series

For something different, one of the students did a Kenbu demonstration today (see end of post)

Jodo

Today we were given a big speech about needing to learn the japanese commands for the warm-ups. Soon it could be my turn to run the warm-ups so I think I better print off the command list, stick it in my uni book and get memorising.

The other thing I was really beaten up about was not looking intent enough. This one I have no idea how to easily correct. Particularly for kata I don’t really know. Somehow I need to keep ‘pressure’ on my opponent even when I am being pushed back and defeated. So bizarre, not sure how I will figure that one out.

An interesting side event happened when we were standing around waiting for Sensei though. I was standing waiting and then out of nowhere I felt this kind of ‘click’ or ‘knock’ in my head which kind of set my body to turn and move my hand. Then before I knew what was happening my hand had parried a playful attack from behind with a jo (about 120 degrees from my front). I still can’t figure out how I knew an attack was coming as I’m pretty sure I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was something like the whole ’sensing a murderous intent’ thing that basically forms the basis of all our Iaido kata. Whatever it was it was unexpected but cool :).

Iaido

We spent our time on kata 1 and kata 3 in class today. In kata 3 sensei particularly wanted us to try and get the entire movement smooth and flowing. It is quite amazing to watch him doing it as he does it with an incredible amount of Jo-Ha-Kyu(speeding up). You see him slowly moving up from a kneeling position and then by the time he is executing the block and cut everything is moving through so fast. I don’t have anything else I particularly want to mention. Except I had a friend come over later and we watched 100 minutes of silent old footage of Einshin Ryu Iaido which was quite interesting.

On finishing up, one of the senior students gave us a demonstration of Kenbu (Basically sword and fan dance). She was very impressive, but it is a much different use of the sword to Iaido in general. Ironically a search for Kenbu on youtube brought up a video of her doing it a year ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqjJOqO3Y9Q). I thought she did it a bit better than on the video, it doesn’t do her Iaido skills credit, but it’s not supposed to, after all it is Kenbu not Iaido. Just the same it was nice to be able to see it performed in person as opposed to just on the internet.