The New York City Kendo Club operates in a small space on the fifth floor of a church building. The space is a small basketball court size, about one-fifth the size of the size of HK Ward Gym, or about one court from the two and a half courts we use for our regular training. Apparently it is one of the largest dojo spaces in New York, which makes me wonder exactly how small they do get for the smallest ones. The number of people at the training is quite large, I’d say about thirty to forty people.
They have training broken into beginner/basics and then advanced afterwards. For beginner/basics, they wear bogu but no Men, and concentrate on footwork and suburi. We did a little suriyashi up and back forwards, then backwards, then some fumikomi footwork with a five count footwork (crossing over footwork 1, 2, 3,4 and then kihon fumikomi on 5), and then the same with non-crossing over footwork on the five count, Then some suburi with shinai, focussed on Men cuts (both kihon and small) with changing footwork and distance. We finished off with hayasuburi in thirty cut lots, with the cuts hitting against a held up shinai. This pretty much concluded the basics training.
At this point, I should mention that it was insanely hot in there and very dry. I was sweating heaps and losing water very quickly and I must have drank about three litres of water in the space of the training, which is much more than I usually have at training back at home.
With bogu training, they had a side of motodachi seniors who did not rotate but the others did. There was more non-motodachi than motodachi so you had to line up at the end of the line for your turn to enter the rotations again. For bogu training, it was five cuts each of men-uchi (kihon/small cuts, entirely up to you) for a few rotations, then kote-men cuts, then kote-dou cuts. Then it finished off waza training with Jodan Men/Katate Men cuts. The club seems very orientated towards the Jodan style of play, with a lot of players using katate men and kote. The exercise for the jodan men cut was to hold it up in Jodan and then cut the kihon men with both hands if you were a beginner, or to do the proper katate men cut if you weren’t. For me, I went with the both hands option.
After that, there was keiko. I played four people and was pretty buggered by the time it started, so was even more tired by the time it finished. Two people came and sought me out to play, because at the start of bogu training, the leading Sensei (David Hiromura, Kataoka Sensei was away in Japan for an exam or something) made an announcement that I was visiting their dojo. I then played someone who was really tall, before I had a short jigeiko against the leading Sensei.
They are a really nice group of people. They were going to a bar afterwards for beers and to celebrate the birth of someone’s child apparently. They offered for me to come along but I was pretty buggered and didn’t feel like drinking so I went home instead. One of them, Becky, also asked for my contact details as they were going to do some kind of cherry blossom thing on the weekend and wanted to invite me along if I was available for it, which was very nice of her.
They seem to be quite competitive and strongly competition orientated, with their usual Tuesday training having a shiai focus or something like that. They also have storage space above their training area for their shinai and bogu, which sit on a rack of sorts, so I guess it’s quite secure to some extent that no-one goes up there to steal the stuff since it isn’t locked down or anything. From the session, I didn’t really get that much feedback on my own Kendo, except for one person who I played against, Don Suh, who told me to follow through on my cuts, which isn’t really new to me either. But it was good that he told me regardless.
I think that if fate lands me the area, I probably wouldn’t mind being part of their club. It seems like a rather close knit community, and while their kendo doesn’t seem particularly instructive, I guess it’s good practice anyway for yourself to develop your own play. So after that, I went back to 77th Street station on the 6 line and then went home. A tiring evening.
They have training broken into beginner/basics and then advanced afterwards. For beginner/basics, they wear bogu but no Men, and concentrate on footwork and suburi. We did a little suriyashi up and back forwards, then backwards, then some fumikomi footwork with a five count footwork (crossing over footwork 1, 2, 3,4 and then kihon fumikomi on 5), and then the same with non-crossing over footwork on the five count, Then some suburi with shinai, focussed on Men cuts (both kihon and small) with changing footwork and distance. We finished off with hayasuburi in thirty cut lots, with the cuts hitting against a held up shinai. This pretty much concluded the basics training.
At this point, I should mention that it was insanely hot in there and very dry. I was sweating heaps and losing water very quickly and I must have drank about three litres of water in the space of the training, which is much more than I usually have at training back at home.
With bogu training, they had a side of motodachi seniors who did not rotate but the others did. There was more non-motodachi than motodachi so you had to line up at the end of the line for your turn to enter the rotations again. For bogu training, it was five cuts each of men-uchi (kihon/small cuts, entirely up to you) for a few rotations, then kote-men cuts, then kote-dou cuts. Then it finished off waza training with Jodan Men/Katate Men cuts. The club seems very orientated towards the Jodan style of play, with a lot of players using katate men and kote. The exercise for the jodan men cut was to hold it up in Jodan and then cut the kihon men with both hands if you were a beginner, or to do the proper katate men cut if you weren’t. For me, I went with the both hands option.
After that, there was keiko. I played four people and was pretty buggered by the time it started, so was even more tired by the time it finished. Two people came and sought me out to play, because at the start of bogu training, the leading Sensei (David Hiromura, Kataoka Sensei was away in Japan for an exam or something) made an announcement that I was visiting their dojo. I then played someone who was really tall, before I had a short jigeiko against the leading Sensei.
They are a really nice group of people. They were going to a bar afterwards for beers and to celebrate the birth of someone’s child apparently. They offered for me to come along but I was pretty buggered and didn’t feel like drinking so I went home instead. One of them, Becky, also asked for my contact details as they were going to do some kind of cherry blossom thing on the weekend and wanted to invite me along if I was available for it, which was very nice of her.
They seem to be quite competitive and strongly competition orientated, with their usual Tuesday training having a shiai focus or something like that. They also have storage space above their training area for their shinai and bogu, which sit on a rack of sorts, so I guess it’s quite secure to some extent that no-one goes up there to steal the stuff since it isn’t locked down or anything. From the session, I didn’t really get that much feedback on my own Kendo, except for one person who I played against, Don Suh, who told me to follow through on my cuts, which isn’t really new to me either. But it was good that he told me regardless.
I think that if fate lands me the area, I probably wouldn’t mind being part of their club. It seems like a rather close knit community, and while their kendo doesn’t seem particularly instructive, I guess it’s good practice anyway for yourself to develop your own play. So after that, I went back to 77th Street station on the 6 line and then went home. A tiring evening.
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