Back to School

This weekend I took a trip back to my old university in Kansai. This is where I first discovered iai, when I was introduced to the university club by a friend. I remember the training being hard, focused, and excellent. I managed to arrive in time for the very start of keiko, which was at around 16:45. The keiko continued until 21:30, making it nearly five hours of iai. In these five hours we had three breaks of about a minute each.

I have missed this kind of training so much.

We started with suburi, then suriashi up and down the dojo while cutting. We also did lunges whilst cutting (similar to the step through in Yaegaki/Inyōshintai). We then put our swords to one side for push-ups and sit-ups, before picking them up again for nukitsuke, chiburui and nōtō practice. The drills were followed by three repetitions of seitei and two of koryu waza. This finished the warmup. The rest of the session involved intense koryu and seitei practice, with input from the sensei. Finally everyone did a couple of enbu to round off the keiko.

When I wrote my article Student Iai for kenshi247.net, I mentioned the importance of koryu at my university club. This was reiterated during my visit – more than 50% of the time was spent focused on koryu waza. What is most significant about this, though, is that this was a week before a major shiai. The students were training for the shiai, practising sahō and preparing their (mostly seitei) enbu, and yet still everyone was determined to spend a significant portion of the keiko on koryu. I love this attitude – which, needless to say, comes from my sensei – and having trained at some dojo where shiai is pretty much the only focus of training, it was refreshing to be exposed to it again.

Recently I’ve been trying to apply a squarer hip and wider stance to my iai, as I mentioned in this post. It is definitely beneficial to my iai, and since I started adapting my stance I have become much more able to do Ushiro (seitei and koryu). I don’t lose balance any more and I can apply power properly throughout the waza. I slipped up a few times, unfortunately, falling back on old habits. When this happened, though, I received some reinforcement from my sensei, who told me to widen my stance. So I’m definitely pursuing the right path with this.

In Yaegaki, I got some good feedback on what I find the hardest part of the waza – the sunegakoi action to protect the knee. Recently, since I started getting a chance to practise koryu again regularly, I’ve been trying to make this more dynamic. I felt I was getting somewhere but was still lacking something. I was told what this was during keiko – I needed to keep pressure forwards into the opponent. Suddenly my sunegakoi improved. I’m looking forward to working on this more.

I loved visiting my old university and practising iai there again. The training is fantastic, and if I move back to the area it would be great to attend these keiko regularly. The healthy balance between seitei and koryu – which many dojo do not have – is excellent, and I feel it really benefits my iai. The visit has given me plenty to work on, and the iai of some of the students is inspiring. I’m looking forward to making further visits in the future.