Skip to main content

PNKF Winter Shinsa 2013 - Nidan

Photo courtesy of D. Pan
This weekend I headed to Seattle with four of my dojo mates and our sensei to participate in the PNKF Winter shinsa.  I was testing for the highest this rank this time around, shooting for nidan.  What happened over the weekend amounted to a lot of good fellowship with my friends, laughing and joking with my Seattle friends that I don't see too often, and a lot of good kendo.

Since I was the highest ranked person on the trip, I felt a little sense of responsibility for our group so I did my best to make sure that everyone had their stuff in order (bogu, uniforms, etc) and that everyone was ready to go when we needed to, and to offer encouragement and advice when needed.  I jokingly wrote to someone that I was handing out pep talks like they were candy over the weekend :).  We all arrived on Saturday morning with plenty of time to get ready and get situated before the test started.  My group wasn't going to be up for a couple of hours so I enjoyed watching my dojo mates during their tests, as well as watching some of my other friends from around the region.  I wasn't feeling nervous at all, but calm and collected.  I was definitely ready to face the judging panel and show them that I was ready for a new rank.

My turn was finally up.  For nidan I had to go through two sparring matches and then kata (nihon kata 1-7).  I stepped in for my first match, bowed in, and once things started I focused solely on my partner.  I wanted to not only get good strikes in, but do so with beautiful technique and work on not only responding to openings but creating my own.  I think I did a great job in the first match, and an even better job in the second.  I have seen many things I still need to work on, but for the most part I think I accomplished what I set out to do during the jigeiko portion of my test.

After all of the ranks (1 dan through 4 dan) finished their jigeiko we moved on to kata.  My partner for kata was a guy that I had tested with last year for shodan, and whom I had fought many times at tournaments.  I was shidachi (student side) for kata, as I have always been, and we ran through each one in succession.  I did my best to keep a connection with my partner, and focus not just on the steps themselves but on the overall feel, keeping in mind distancing and timing and being a shadow to my partner, who was leading the kata.  Again I was calm and collected throughout, which showed.  We bowed out and I was finally able to relax a bit, as my test was officially over.

After all of the various ranks had finished, we waited for the results.  I went to look up my number, 63, and was very pleased to see that I had a perfect score of five out of five on both keiko and kata.  Each judge at the panel believed I was ready for nidan.  I had done it!  I was also pleased to see and hear that my dojo mates had all passed their tests with flying colors, as well, although I was not surprised to see that they had done so well.  They were all ready, that's for sure.

For me, this marks the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one.  As the sun sets, so too does it rise, and the future looks bright indeed! 

Photo courtesy of W. Sinclair

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sutemi

 The Japanese-English Kendo dictionary, located at www.kendo-usa.org, defines sutemi as: " Sute-mi   (n.)  1.  Concentration and effort with all one’s might, even at the risk of death.  2.  Concentration of all one’s effort into one strike, even at the risk of defeat." Ok, so risking everything at the risk of defeat or death.  But how does that apply to our own training?  Fighting to the death is a very foreign concept to many of us, but I believe that we can all understand fighting at the risk of defeat.  This is a concept that we've started examining in more detail at our dojo lately, and one that I believe can be learned at any stage of practice that you're at. To put it simply, Sensei explained that sutemi is putting 100% effort into a strike.  Holding nothing back and leaving all cares and worries behind so that you can give all of yourself over to that strike.  it sounds like a complicated idea, and it is, but just lik...
4 comments
Read more

Harai Waza

Photo courtesy of T. Patana, Kendo Photography Another month down, another new focus for training.  This month we'll be focusing on harai waza.  Here are some of my personal thoughts on it, from my own training and experience. I really had trouble figuring out how to start this entry.  Normally I just open the page and go to work, letting whatever ideas and thoughts I have flow out onto the screen, but this one really had me stumped for a while, mainly because everything I started to write sounded really negative and I didn't mean it to, so I think I'll just go with it and try to get to the point that I was trying to make in the first place. When I first started learning harai waza it was part of kihon kata three.  If you want to be fancy, that would be the Bokuto ni yoru kendo kihon waza keiko ho, kihon san - harai waza .  The idea was simple: strike the motodachi's shinai out of center and deliver a men strike, all in one smooth movement.  It wa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Palouse Kendo Club

This Sunday a few of my dojo mates and I traveled to Moscow, ID to visit the Palouse Kendo Club, a relatively new club to the area that was started by my friend Maina.  The club has been active for a little over a year, if memory serves me right, and we'd always talked about having visitors to the club, but we were finally able to put it together and schedule it.  Six of us traveled over, ranging from 3 kyu up to, well, me!  We pulled up to the dojo about 20 minutes before training was scheduled to start, and after greeting my friend and getting a quick tour, we were suited up and ready to go.  All in all, they had six people that showed up to train with us, and we trained for a good two and a half hours.  We started with warmups and suburi, then moved straight into footwork drills.  I have to make a confession:  I don't particularly like footwork drills.  I don't like running, either, but I do both because I know that they're both good for me a...
2 comments
Read more