This post is part of the First Year of Budo series

It was a smaller crowd today, so all the more pressure and scrutiny.

Jodo

Just 4 of us today and I was instructed to do the commands for the jodo warmup. Surprisingly I managed to remember them all. My Makiotoshi and Kuri-hanashe don’t feel right but everything else wasn’t too bad.

After warm-ups we worked on the application of hickiotoshi. The jo person was placed between two opponents with bokken. Each would take it in turns to place it out in front and have the jo strike it away. I have to make sure I keep the jo coming through vertical and finish further to the outside of my body rather than the middle.

We finished by working on paired katas. I went through kata 1 and 2 with one of (not all that new) students. I’m not confident with 3 yet so I decided to stay away from it for the time being. Considering I don’t need to perform any kata for my Jodo grading I’ll let them wait a bit.

Iaido

Here is where all my problems are.

First, my noto is terrible. I’m going to try relaxing my right hand more and see if getting my thumb a little more under the handle enables me to do better. But I’m really struggling to get it to work properly.

For the upcoming grading I need to perform opening and closing ceremony and katas 1 and 2. There are several hundred things that I need to touch up on in the katas (in particular noto). But my reiho really needs work. In particular I’m unsure of exactly where things go and I have very little full dress practice. It all has to be so perfect and correct it is painful. As the saying goes here, ‘It’s what you don’t do that will make you pass’. All extraneous movements need to be removed and the list goes on and on.

After warmups we broke into 2 groups, our group went through some scrutiny on our kata and then did a mock grading (which I knew I screwed up many times over). I’ll have to practice the ceremonies every day along with noto from now until the grading I think (Late October), otherwise I will be very lucky not to fail.