British Kendo Association

Stewart Daniels and Frank Fung – ‘junior’ section/team competition winners

The annual BKA Kata Taikai took place at Hizen Dojo in London on the weekend of 20/21 June 2009. The competition results were:

2nd Dan & Below Section (Team Competition)

• First: Stewart Daniels and Frank Fung
• Second: Geradus Rukas and Mourad Ben Taher
• Third: David Jordon and Dillon Lin

3rd Dan & Above Section (Individuals Competition)

• First: Paul Gray
• Second: Jeff Martin
• Third: Yukiko Miyamura

For a report on the accompanying seminar, see….

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Kata Seminar Report

Sensei John Howell and Sensei Jeff Humm

Forty or so kendoka attended the new BKA kata seminar hosted by Hizen Dojo in London on the weekend of 20/21 June 2009.

Day one started in the early afternoon with a welcome by John Howell Sensei and Jeff Humm Sensei – short speeches outlining the purpose of kata practice and then straight down to work. The group split up into broad levels depending on the number of kata that each person was familiar with. Rather than interrupt too often with individual comments, each kendoka was numbered and Sensei noted feedback and comments which could later be emailed to each attendee.

Naturally, fundamentals were stressed at this early stage – posture, distance, cutting technique and so on. But the emphasis was on an intense ‘getting up to speed’ session, warming people up and reminding those who may not have done much kata for a while of the basic moves.

However, the seminar aimed to do much more than simply line everyone up and repeat forms one-to-seven for a day and a half. So, after two hours of what one might call ‘normal’ kata practice, Sensei introduced the group to a number of different ways of teaching and practicing the kata. If you are a Sensei, looking for methods to engage your students, whether in a large or small club, this session offered a number of ideas: practing with lines of students queing for a single motodachi; sharing bokuto; practicing with a motodachi in the centre of a circle and so on. The session also included a number of ideas for solo practice, including uchidachi / shidachi suburi with the kata forms pared down simply to a rapid succession of cuts.

At this point one of the themes of the seminar began to emerge – moving kata away from what many people see as a rather formal set of choreographed moves and bringing to it the reality of ‘real’ swordsmanship. By stripping away the reiho (bow, change hands, three steps in, sonkyu, stand, gedan kamai, five steps out, chudan) and running through each succession of cuts, the ‘suburised’ kata became a much dynamic set of movements and cuts freed from their surrounding ‘theatre’.

Day one also featured the BKA’s annual kendo kata taikai, and this year the event was divided into two catagories – a team competition of pairs under second dan and an individuals competition for participants san dan and above. Results for the competition catagories were:

2nd Dan & Below Section (Team Competition)
First: Stewart Daniels and Frank Fung
Second: Geradus Rukas and Mourad Ben Taher
Third: David Jordon and Dillon

Paul Gray (1st place) and Jeff Martin (2nd place) – battle it out in the final of the Kata Taikai Senior (3rd Dan plus) catagory

3rd Dan & Above Section (Individuals Competition)
First: Paul Gray
Second: Jeff Martin
Third: Yukiko Miyamura

Day Two

Shinza Renshu (Examination Training) was first on the agenda and the seminar explored a progression of ideas and concepts that were relevant to different grading levels. Of course, at the most basic, one must understand the correct sequence of movements and be able to perform these, but that is only a surface level of understanding – seeing the ‘Omote’ external/front side of the kata and not the ‘Ura’ internal/hidden/rear side.

Exploring these deeper levels, the seminar began by trying to understand the cause and effect within each kata. Why does uchidachi cut in form number one and how does that motivation differ in subsequent forms? How is it that shidachi, while ‘following’ the movement of uchidachi non-the-less may be initiating the action through the use of pressure/seme?

After a number of practical exercises bringing these concepts into sharper focus, Howell Sensei gave a talk on the benefits of kata within the kendo practice. In a wide ranging overview, Howell Sensei touched both on the practical benefits of kata, such as promoting a more correct posture and a more refined sense of distance, and also suggested that kata could enhance importance psychological skills, such as the ability to understand and ‘read’ an opponent. For kendoka who are primarily interested in shiai, there was a price to pay for ignoring the kata until just before a grading… by focusing only on winning in shiai, a kendoka can miss out on a powerful tool for developing their own kendo.

Len Bean Sensei demonstrating iai – a key link in the chain from shinai kendo and kata to true samurai swordsmanship

The seminar was privelidged to have an Iai-do demonstration from Len Bean Sensei, (Hagakure Dojo) on the first day with detailed explanation this tied in nicely with some remarks from Humm Sensei on Day 2.  He pointed out that we are lucky indeed even to still have the kata forms. Once upon a time, there had been hundreds of iai and kenjutsu schools (ryuha) in Japan but many of these have been lost in the past two or three hundred years. Asking what brought most westerners to kendo in the first place, Humm Sensei speculated that the romance of many of the samurai movies probably had a lot to do with it. Yet kendo has little to link it to real samurai sword fighting – we use a light, round, relatively long, bamboo stick and it matters little if we are hit. Kata at least gives you the feeling of a curved, short weapon that will certainly hurt if you miss your timing or fail to block correctly – and as such it can begin to help us understand the reality of sword fighting. The kata are an important link back to the old schools and methods. It would be easy to loose them if a single generation gave up trying – and the tradition could never be recovered.

The final session of the seminar was entitled “Practical not Fantasy” and this again took the kata forms as a starting point but aimed to use them as a gateway to understanding further their practical use as fencing technique. Humm Sensei demonstrated the sequence of cuts from forms one to seven as a continuous ‘Tachiuchi’ with the shidachi role performed by Jeff Martin. The sequence flowed from one cut to another, with two extra kamai added to enable the continuous transition through the forms. The first run through drew applause for it’s smooth and flowing transition, but the second, done as a aggressive and intense fight between the two kendoka, really surprised the audience by showing the kata forms in a startling and dramatic light. All those present felt a real sense of threat and risk as the ‘combatants’ exchanged cuts and parries in a performance that had the feeling of a real and length duel.

Humm Sensei and Jeff Martin try something a little different….

Following the demonstration, Humm Sensei emphasized that this was not an attempted to develop his own Kata forms and was not to be seen as a new teaching technique – but that the idea had been to show as graphically as possible that the Kata can be practiced as alive and vibrant fencing techniques, rather than the sometime staid, formal and dead exchanges that over-familiarity can sometime reduce them too. Seminar participants then enjoyed a vigorous session practicing a few selected elements from Humm Sensei’s demonstration and some additional fundamentals from some more classical Ryuha.

The final session of the seminar was a last run through, for every one, of the standard kata forms in their full glory, with correct reiho. There was a real transformation from the opening session of the previous day, with a new depth of understanding clearly visible across all grades of participant, from Go-Kyu to Go-Dan. Most noticeable, was the greater intensity in attack and defense and a stronger feeling of purpose and mutual understanding among the pairs.

So, in conclusion, the seminar was a real eye opener for participants. Having perhaps expected two days of drilling in a worthy and workman like way through the kata forms, participants found that they had instead been taken on a journey.  Howell and Humm Sensei had shown people how to improve their own kata and their teaching of kata within their own dojos. They had opened new horizons to participants, showing both the deeper philosophical ideas that can be understood through kata but also the hard practical lessons for fighting both with a sword and a shinai.

Paul Gray
BKA PRO – 23 June 2009

PS – for those of you, who missed the kata seminar and taikai, Hizen Dojo has agreed to host this event for a number of years and both Humm and Howell Sensei suggested that there was much to build on from this year. So keep you eyes peeled for next summer’s event as it is likely to grow in reputation following this year’s inaugural success.

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