A Weekend of Weapons

What a great weekend! The dojo held a gashuku, a weekend training retreat, in a mountain side dojo about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo. The location was quite remote and much quieter than Tokyo. However, it being February, it was exceedingly cold. Dealing with the cold was the "spirit" part of the training, and while there was a fair amount of complaining about the temperature, it was all good natured, and no one was really bitter about it.

We left on Friday night and started training first thing in the morning on Saturday. In the first class we covered all the basic movements, did some shikko-ho practice, and worked up a good appetite for breakfast. The rest of the weekend, until noon Sunday , we spent on weapons training, bokken (wooden sword), jo (a short staff) and tanto (a wooden knife). This was a rare treat as the ceilings in our home dojo are too low to allow us to train with the bokken and jo.

So much of Aikido was developed from sword movements, that when you actually train with a sword, your kamae (stance) and movements become much more natural. Also, since four out of the five students were white belts, you could see that people's kamae and basic movements dramatically improved over the weekend, mine included. I especially found that my hiriki no yosei II movement improved from training with the bokken. I found it easier to keep my back straight and not lean too much while shifting my weight, a common problem of mine.

So to list what we actually did work on, with the bokken, we did all six kihon dosa and happo kiri, or eight direction cut. With the tanto, we did the tanto dosa six through ten. Because the mats were so cold, we skipped one through five because they're sitting techniques. We also did 3 techniques with the tanto, shomen tsuki hijishime osae, shomen uchi ikkajo osae, and shomen uchi udegarami osae. Finally, with the jo, we learned and practiced the 31 jo kata.

R Sensei recorded a video of us performing all the above in enbu (exhibition) style, and the plan is to do this during the our dojo's enbu in April. After looking at the video, I must say we looked pretty good for a bunch of shiro obi, and a brown belt.