June 9, 2010

A gambling man?

Tuesday night, Soke tossed attackers like dice. And once the dice were thrown, he sat on their faces, twisted their arms behind their backs, and generally made a mess of them. And he's not even trying. When he does try he winds up making Duncan Stewart do a front flip to keep his finger from breaking. "Hold them, without holding them," Soke was saying. Let them do the work. And he did, over and over again. Jutte, knives, swords, multiple attackers, it all came out. We even did some ground work from Fudoza and tied up our attacker, only to practice reversing the attack as well. The energy could not have been higher - it's 90 minutes of GO! By the end of the night I was beat.

I trained with Steve Olsen, long-time resident of Japan and another of Nagato's guys. Steve and I had great fun training, and not just because Steve is really good, but because training in Ayase with Soke actually allows us to move. Hombu is powerful to train at because, well, because it's Hombu. But with 100 people in the room, it gets tight. Ayase allows us all to breathe.

Earlier in the day we had the pleasure of training at Hombu with Someya sensei, the Bujinkan's resident sword master. Someya is particularly good at the form of just about everything. He took us through some sword basics and paired us with yari and naginata doing tachi techniques. Apparently, however, there are few, if any, actual techniques for tachi, because it's so old. Nevertheless, the training was great. He even set out some real swords and took us through a short history from the ken, straight sword, through tachi, han-tachi, and eventually katana, noting the differences between them.

One shinken he laid out was a tachi of very old design - the back of the blade was sharpened as well. He said it was a copy of the sword Japan's emperor has. I said, it must be expensive. He looked at me wryly. "Yeah ... it's expensive."

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