Ketchup!

Well, it's been a while again, sorry for not keeping my promise and keeping these posts regular. Work and BKA tripe has been stealing my spare time again. I have been training quite regularly though with some extra sessions at Hilary's dojo on Saturday's as well as some extra sessions afterwards and some iai after Jodo on Sunday's.

It came to my attention this evening that I haven't really done any seitei practice since the European champs last year. Only by Chris Sensei forcing everyone to run through the seitei did I do any this very evening. Thankfully it felt ok and I think that's quite a good testament that Koryu practice alone can spread it's effect over all of one's iai.

In terms of strength and stamina, tonight was a good night. I've had a few bad sessions recently, last Wednesday finding a general lack of energy (turned out I was about to be ill) and then Saturday hurting my shoulder (again) during the extra training).

So where am I with stuff? I am trying to retune my Shoden a bit to make it a bit sharper and less stretched out. This is generally only possible when I have the energy to do so but every time I do it's a repeat of the same old lesson - it's your feet and legs that makes your iai!

Chuden is taking a bit of a back seat and I am still having problems with Iwanami. The few pointers I have had from Sensei have made Toranoissoku more effective though.

I have been working a bit on standing Okuden and gave Somakuri a bit of a thrashing the last few weeks. It is absolutely one of those kata that keeps on developing (i.e. it is bloody hard). I think I have done quite well when I isolate one component cut from another. I believe that the challenge of this form is starting and finishing each cut and each step at exactly the same time. This is a bit different from Sogiri and gives Somakuri it's sharpness. I am gradually working on it but it takes a long time to make improvements.

Anyway on we go....

Hatsunuki: Ryuto, Yokogumo and Iwanami

Well I'm covering a couple of sessions now and still keeping on a koryu theme. I am finding lots of things interesting to work on the more time I spend delving into the various koryu kata but I have been keeping myself busy with Shoden and Chuden recently.

I focused on Ryuto recently, trying to do it by a factor of 10 against other forms as I realise it really is a form that requires some kata mileage in order to be good at it. Like most other forms it's performance is related to leg power as the entire speed is dependant on getting up quickly. The bits I am trying to focus on in particular are:

• Ensuring that the draw is done with a relaxed attitude so that the sword glides out smoothly instead of it being snatched. Snatching the sword tends to cause the action to stop at it's conclusion which then halts the form. By drawing smoothly the draw leads nicely into the block without pause.
• Getting the weight accurately balanced on the knees at the end of the draw so that the left foot can quickly be brought into position and action.
• Trying not to spend too much time posing once the stand has taken place and the blocking sword brought out of the way. At the same time I don't want this to be a rushed moment.
• Ensuring the body is turned to face the opponent before stepping in to cut.
• Being careful not to reach for the sword as the cut takes place but to rather let the left hand catch the sword at the end of the moment.

I have tried to emulate Ishido Sensei's timing of "tatum-tum" but it is very difficult. It might be better for me to do the form less sharply and more gracefully given my size but I still want to be able to do it quickly. I think I have written this all before in a previous post.

I want to jump forwards to Iwanami now. I train in guilt that I always tend to skip this kata a little bit, not doing it more than once or twice compared to the grating I have been giving the other Chuden katas. I'm not sure why I had this reluctance but it's probably to do with the difficulty I have in controlling my weight distribution and being able to slide back cleanly and rapidly. Still, I decided last week to give this one a bit more attention and set to work on it. The first thing I was steered to do (in fact this bit of advice came a long way back) was to try to get the body moving back without the whole body coming up first. After that it is a case of nice timing as there is a propensity to do this form quickly but without much in the way of meaning. It's difficult to write about the mental block I have around doing the sweeping cut but it's probably hesitance about doing something quite strenuous like this cut while both feet spend a bit of time off the floor. Perhaps I don't understand that bit properly...

Jumping back now to Yokogumo. I like this kata and I think it probably has a longer history than Shohatto and would thus be a primal seed of all the seated kata. Chuden, being shorter in distance and timing than Shoden, tends to move quite quickly and I have been aware that Yokogumo may well lend itself to speed training in iaido. To this end, and on the basis that generally my iaido is a bit sluggish due to my size, I have decided to make this form "one of my own". By this I mean, I am putting a little bit of me into the version of this that I want to do. In my opinion (only), the rapidity of the form is created thus:

• The sword is drawn approximately half way out before the hips rise (although they are tensed while the sword is moving to lend themselves to a quick movement forwards).
• The last half of the draw and the nukitsuke is performed at the same time as the hips rising and moving forwards into quite a quick draw.
• At the end of nukitsuke, the feeling in the feet and lower body is to be pushing the body forwards into the kirioroshi. This doesn't have anything more than a very subtle effect on the posture, most of the contrast is felt internally.
• The furikaburi footwork is similar to Seitei mae and should be done simultaneously with the sword-work of furikaburi and the following kirioroshi. It should really be done quickly.

These last two points are the ones I was working on last night in particular. The diagram below sort of shows what I mean in terms of the tension and position after nukitsuke:

In Shohatto, even if nukitsuke is created with a forward feeling of the body into the draw, the final position should be quite well centred and upright. The rear foot is gently pushing back, the knee is gently balanced into the floor and the front foot is gently pushing forwards.

In contrast to this, I feel, the feeling in the body is slightly more forwards. This is more so in the lower body where the rear foot is quite strongly pushing back, the body weight positioned so that the rear knee inclines some force down and back and the front foot being pushed strongly forwards.

At this point in Yokogumo, to create a fast furikaburi-kirioshi action, the tension is released in the lower limbs and hips and the body quickly moves forwards and under the sword as it is raised and quickly brought down. I spend quite a few goes just practicing this intermediate sequence and it can become very fast after a while.

I think this is something I am going to go onto practice a bit more in the next few weeks as it has the propensity to become either something quite nice or at least be good for my development of lower body strength.

The koryu marathon.....not.

Okay I should point out now that this wasn't a marathon, I just set myself the target last Wednesday of doing each shoden form once, chuden twice and seated okuden three times. Not actually that many kata considering what some people put themselves through but I was trying to work on quality rather than quantity.

So WTF does that mean exactly?

Well, my expectations of myself are that I shouldn't have to do shoden forms lots of times before I feel satisfied in any session that I have done one well. That may sound a bit arrogant, I don't mean it to be and I don't claim to have mastered shoden or anything high sounding like that. What I mean is that I try to challenge myself to do shoden forms to the best of my ability with one strike only and not gradually working myself up to pulling a rabbit out of the hat. It's actually quite a nice kind of training, one slows down, one focusses and one's rhythm feels a bit more meaningful....almost like doing an embu but with no one actually watching.

I don't claim to have the same experience in chuden or okuden which is why I give myself 2 and 3 times each kata respectively but I do still have the expectation that the kata should feel fairly stable by the time I get to the final go at each form.

My more recent focus in terms of curriculum has been hayanuki and seated okuden. For those of you who are newish to this iaido malarky, hayanuki is an exercise of going through all the chuden forms continuously. The sequence tends to be specific to different teachers although our dojo (and I think Ishido Sensei as well although I have heard him recite a different order once) is 1, 2, 3, 6, 5, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and as one comes back into iai hiza at the end of one form so this should transition into the beginning of the next.

Many people go through this almost as a kind of athletic exercise and I also do this sometimes if I think I have been physically lazy in any session....but to be honest I don't find it very satisfying to do this kind of throcking other than the satisfaction of making you puffed out. What I much prefer is to do hayanuki with a perceptable ebb and flow so that each form is done just to the same ability as doing them individually but with a kind of critical connection between each one. Practitioners of Gohon no Midare might understand what I am trying to get at here. What I think I mean (although I'm not sure I am explaining it well) is that the quietness of the connection between each form should amplify the action within the form just as the Kan- (of Kankyukyojaku fame) elements of the kata (such as furikaburi and iaigoshi) contrast the -kyu- elements (such as kirioroshi).

I have also become something of a fan of doing hayanuki one handed (err...that is the right hand) as it does force one to become even more sensitive to the course and position of the sword. My sensei commented on Wednesday that my noto was much better when I did hayanuki one handed than with two and I guess the reason for this might be that the left hand has an even more positive grip of the saya than it normally would.

Anyway, that's my chuden practice at the moment, on to seated okuden.

I used to kind of push seated okuden to the back row of my mind, to me they consisted of:

• Three nice opening kata
• Two interesting diagonal kata
• A stupidity sandwich of two ridiculous kata with a good one in between

Plus they were in tatehiza.....again! Just when you though chuden was going to knacker your knees and feet up, here comes okuden! Some of you will shrug and say

"what's the problem?"

but I'm sure more than 50% of people would say

"ugh, I hate it when my toe knuckles are bleeding at seminars"

or

"what is that funny lump growing on the top of my foot?"

These are all valid statements and questions (i.e. I have also suffered them) but I guess I now want to find what is there in okuden which is worth training for. I think I am starting to find that special thing but I first want to share something which has been going through my mind in the last few months which is.......do the inner and primary principles of MSR/MJER iai echo through the various teachings? That is, are there parallels in raw technique between the forms in one set to the other? I don't think it is something that I will be able to answer anytime soon and my money would be on Richard Stonell finding the answer first. But let me demonstrate what I mean by the following simple diagram:

You can probably see what I mean. Let's put standing okuden to one side for a moment but you can see that the first kata of each set is a basic maegiri (front cut) as I would think would be the same for nearly all koryu iai. Rotation followed by a nukitsuke and kirioroshi is common to both shoden and chuden and a block to a cut to the lower leg is common at all three levels. I mentioned this at the Koryu Seminar in Poland recently and tried to show where the commonalities lie. I'm not sure why I am interested in this, it just seems elegant, as a scientist would say. I think it's elegant because it shows possible evidence of a gradual evoluation of the kata. Furthermore (and I know that some people are mad about this but I don't know why) it shows how some kata work as counterattacks for other katas or at least how some katas are counterattacks to the counterattacks to earlier katas (yes, you read that right).

Kasumi, as an easy example, shows clearly what to do if the enemy dodges the nukitsuke in Yokogumo (or Shohatto for that matter). What happens if the enemy does a devastatingly strong cut in Toranoissoku? Then get lower and use the higher point on the sword to block as in Sunegakoi.....it goes on.

Anyway, that's just a diversion but it helps me to keep interested in okuden when my toes are screaming in pain not to be bent back any further.

"It's in the interest of academic study!" I scream back to them.

"Come down here and say that!" they scream back.

I have already developed a keen liking of Tozume, enough for me to pick it as one of my koryu forms for my 6th dan grading and from that anchor point I have worked on the others.

Kasumi I really like and for years haven't been able to do it with any sharpness, due largely to the length of my sword and lack of training of course. Something must have clicked recently and the double cut has become quite sharp. I like the way that this form can be upgraded to reflect one's proficiency which I will explain here:

1. In the elementary stages one performs Yokogumo, rotates the sword and draws the left knee forwards to perform the returning cut. The right foot then moves forwards as furikaburi and kirioroshi are delivered.
2. In the next stage, the sword is almost fully drawn before rising up. At the last moment the body rises into nukitsuke and continues the rest of the form as above.
3. In the later stages, one does it like Ishido Sensei after some 60 years of training.....well anyway, dreams aside, the initial draw and returning cut are all performed within the raising up of the body and the kirioroshi is just poked in with a final shift forwards of the body. Gahhh...

Since the Gothenburg seminar this year where Ishido Sensei taught our group the seated okuden, the other kata have become more interesting and more challenging as the final objectives were revealed. I won't go into them now but will save them for another blog soon and will continue my exploration of the other forms shortly.

In the meantime I wish everyone a very enjoyable Xmas and look forward to seeing and training with you in 2012 (the Chinese year of the chicken kebab!)