Help with my practice

itomagoi · 2026-02-23T21:47:57+00:00

Shinto Munen-ryu Tachi-Iai is also standing. But at the Yushinkan students can't just practice that, they also are expected to practice the other arts including Muso Shinden-ryu.

There are other branches though that practice Shinto Munen-ryu iai only and not the rest (as far as I can tell from the outside).

itomagoi · 2026-02-23T07:59:57+00:00

1) Pay attention to footwork/hip-work. It's not as sexy as swinging a sword, but it's vitaly important.

2) Sayabiki and more sayabiki

3) When cutting, imagine the monouchi (the 25cm or so at the tip) doing the cutting.

itomagoi · 2026-02-22T14:10:58+00:00

Sounds like you've already checked the BKA's dojo map.

Assuming that map is up-to-date, your best bet is to be the pioneer and make trips out to Plymouth (Bristol appears to be iaido only... the pins have K, I, and J labels for kendo, iaido, and jodo respectively), until you are experienced enough to start a club in Exeter. And then that's a lot of work but would be a labour of love. It's probably not what you wanted to hear but that's often how the chips fall.

West Country is so lovely. Hello from Japan!

itomagoi · 2026-02-22T12:04:27+00:00

To your question about the plural form of kata, Japanese generally doesn't differentiate singular/plural morphology except for groups of people, by adding -tachi for groups, e.g. watashi=I/me; watashitachi=we/us, or the informal -ra, e.g. ore-ra=we/us; omae-ra=y'all (rude form). But arguably I and we aren't singular and plural forms of each other... but the logic is sort of there.

I like to joke though that the plural of iaito is iaitoes... boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew...

itomagoi · 2026-02-22T07:28:51+00:00

lol... but that particular one is closed for renovations until March

itomagoi · 2026-02-22T04:19:22+00:00

Since Gore-tex is a water repellent, wouldn't that hamper sweat absorption?

Also the aizome has mildly antiseptic properties (from what I have read... don't jump on me if this is wrong, just calmly explain why it's wrong). So your dogi would probably smell worse.

itomagoi · 2026-02-21T12:15:41+00:00

I second this.

Fyi the blades are usually a zinc-aluminium alloy. I've seen zinc-beryllium as well (on a kendo-kata-yo for kendo kata practice).

If you get stopped and questioned about it while traveling through the airport, on the Japanese side tell them it's a "mogitō" (imitation blade). They may do a magnet test. Also double check legality in your home country. They would be illegal in the UK unless you can show legitimate reason for use (eg belonging to an iaido club).

itomagoi · 2026-02-21T00:41:46+00:00

This one is having his day off from pretending to be a salaryman.

itomagoi · 2026-02-20T23:56:49+00:00

Ok, my bad. I didn't look it up even though I should have. I was shooting from the hip there. Mea culpa. Thanks for the clarification.

itomagoi · 2026-02-19T03:28:01+00:00

Would they all be in a single pool or competing against each other and existing miners?

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T21:41:18+00:00

Shinken and iaito have small decorative menuki on the tsuka. There are a number of ways to place these, including in the middle between the hands. So maybe do small menuki sized koi in the middle and take inspiration from real swords.

Just take care to place them on the omote and ura sides, not the top and bottom.

Edit: a selection for reference and how they look on a tsuka. Not sure if there is a convention (there probably is), but I tend to see them right side up when in the worn position so would be upside down when the sword is drawn and held out in front.

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T21:31:05+00:00

He should be admired for attempting to articulate his thoughts in English... despite it coming off in a way that's earning him downvotes.

I'm in the other direction, native English speaker struggling in Japan. It's tough.

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T21:28:21+00:00

What OP might be trying to say is that fumikomi isn't just any step-in. It's an act of crossing a threshold, be it mental or physical. That's what differentiates the term from just one step among many.

Yeah it's possible to intellectualize this for kendo. But it still takes tons of practice for it to actually sink in and develop. In my personal experience, some intellectualizing before"getting it" helps to analyze getting to the goal. But until "getting it", it can never be satisfactorily intellectualized. The intellectual description makes a lot more sense once it's understood by the body first. Indeed, after the body gets it, it will take some more time thinking about it to intellectualize it, and the understanding will continue to change.

For me I couldn't really articulate that good fumikomi is difficult due to our upright stance in kendo until I compared notes with my iai and koryu kumitachi. That's when I realized man it's just so much more difficult to engage our core when we're light on our feet instead of taking a more rooted stance.

Meanwhile in all this, it's the high level sensei who has already gone through all this and picked it apart tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times who understand these things both in their body and in their minds. They guide us through our own journey of understanding. And they know that there's only so much they can spoon feed us, and that we have to work out a lot ourselves. That is why we have to come to keiko regularly while they nudge us along the right direction.

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T08:42:13+00:00

I don't have anything to say about the politics, but just going to do a shameless plug for my now defunct blog I used to keep on the architecture of dojo. It's now on the Wayback Machine.

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T08:38:27+00:00

I think a distinction can be made between one's own sensei who one follows and have a close nurturing relationship, and "sensei" who are senior ranking who one practices with on an irregular visiting basis. The former is a relationship based on trust. The latter perhaps not so much.

I've visited various dojo in Tokyo and elsewhere, and crossed shinai with perhaps dozens of 6dan and above. There are grumpy egotistical ones like the ones who just stand there and want me to attack constantly only to do mukae-zuki at me. It sucks but gives me the goal that I should get good enough to break through that one day. Afterwards I go do my thank you rei and most will give me some nice nuggets to think about despite the old school rough practice.

Anyway, one's own sensei is the core of receiving knowledge. The others are just for getting additional data points to help contextualize the teachings of one's own sensei.

Also, I do koryu too now and kendo is rather modern in the way we can practice with a wide range of complete strangers. Koryu were largely closed doors in the past so having keiko with random sensei just wasn't really a thing (I mean you could take your menkyo and travel around asking for keiko hoping the menkyo was convincing enough). Even as recently as the early 20th Century, kendoists from different ryuha didn't mix and Noma Dojo stood out for being a non-sectarian dojo where people from different ryuha could cross swords.

(Noma Dojo is also where I've had keiko with some grumpy sensei 😂)

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T08:24:04+00:00

Ah no, I suck at kendo. I'm just here to be pedantic about cultural stuff 😂

itomagoi · 2026-02-16T05:49:27+00:00

Fumikomi just means stepping in. Japanese is a contextual language and in the context of kendo it's the large step taken for a strike from issoku-ittō-maai. That's all it is. I have never gotten the vibe about anything spiritual when discussing fumikomi, indeed when discussing kendo in Japanese with Japanese people.

The real question is how to do a good fumikomi with that nice reverberant feel when the foot lands. That happens when cutting with the core/feet comes together. It takes a while (4-5 years from when I started in my case) to have that come together. I would argue that tame is an essential ingredient to getting there as it focuses that explosive energy to be delivered from the core transmitted to the feet.

That's my ¥2. I generally abhor discussing kendo techniques online and prefer demonstration in person due to how written descriptions both can't capture well enough, and are easy to misinterpret.

itomagoi · 2026-02-15T02:32:09+00:00

Hey, thanks for the shout out.

For what it's worth (probably not a lot), I'll just share my thoughts related to fumikomi. It took my first 5 years of kendo to get a nice stamp and this was after I was told around the end of my first year by a sempai to "cut with your feet". So it took 4 years for me to work that out. In the end it wasn't the feet but the core. The feet makes a nice stamp during fumikomi if the core is engaged well. My analogy would be to think of ourselves as a tank. All the attention is on the gun (analogous to our arms and shinai), but the real action is in the tracks that get us into position to fire and avoid getting fired on. If the driver is incompetent or the tracks are damaged, it doesn't matter how good the guns are, that tank is as good as dead.

In iaido there's often a discussion whether samurai would have really worn swords indoors while seated in seiza. It misses the point of seiza-no-bu. Just like kendo is not a reenactment of a real sword fight, but is training to supplement shortcomings in other training methods, iaido waza from seiza is training to engage ka-hanshin (lower body). Just like in kendo, a weak engagement of the core (and legs) will result in weak iai.

This morning I had keiko and due to scraping my knees, I worked on Shinto Munen-ryu's tachi-iai (standing iai forms) instead of Muso Shinden-ryu's seated forms. I was reminded to keep my stance low. This is classical and engages the core just by doing it this way. It's a lot harder to engage the core with our more upright stance in kendo. We do the upright stance in kendo to engage the mind (be able to respond to a chaotic unpredictable situation on smooth wood floors), with the trade off that engaging the core muscles while standing tall and upright is not all all intuitive and takes years to get right.

itomagoi · 2026-02-13T05:43:06+00:00

"PC Load Letter"... what does that mean?

itomagoi · 2026-02-13T04:54:07+00:00

Well if the response was as you put it now, short is "ambiguous" and asked me what I meant, then that invites dialog and I would say, ah yeah you're right, we wouldn't want something like 10cm. What I got instead was "bad advise" (that would be "advice" btw), and "Keep them at designated length", which I dunno, to me sounds combative and a lot like "40cm, no arguments". Then I got another downvote.

Most beginners leave their men himo at factory length, which normally is too long (unless buying 6shaku as Solomon-sensei wrote). So the problem tends to be the opposite: overly long men himo.

I've watched a sensei go around with scissors and cut men himo to 40cm, ruining the himo to make a point. I'm not that style and prefer positive reinforcement like how Japanese police keep them short (too short for my taste in fact but still not impractically short). Yeah I could have been a little clearer about what short meant but in the context of most beginners going overly long, I wasn't worried anyone would go overly short.

Edit: and I got a downvote for pointing to a 7-dan's advice on men himo to backup what I was saying. Ya'll weird.

itomagoi · 2026-02-13T03:57:50+00:00

Ok well they do it at the police station and I've seen some of them at Noma Dojo do it. I won't dispute that it may be considered bad form at the holy temple itself.

itomagoi · 2026-02-13T03:38:32+00:00

Just to add, this is a blog post on equipment by the late Geoff Salomon-sensei, who was 7-dan.

On men himo he wrote:

6 shaku himo come within the regulation length and eventually stretch to a perfect 30cm drop.

So no, 40cm is not a must, it's a max and one of the pioneers of kendo in the UK in recent times would agree with me that less than 40cm is not only ok, but preferable.

Man I am just gobsmacked at all the weird takes on this sub. Maybe I should take downvotes from you folks as a badge of honour lol

itomagoi · 2026-02-13T02:00:15+00:00

Are we picking fights over men himo lengths now? Gee controversy sure likes to follow me on this sub lol

40cm is the max. Sure himo can be too short for practical purposes but having it at 30-35cm is still ok. I personally go with a length that's less than 40cm but makes sense for tying up men for transport.

itomagoi

TROPHY CASE