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Thread: Let's keep Batto and Kendo traditional !

  1. #1
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    Default Let's keep Batto and Kendo traditional !

    ..the way they did back in the 30's in Japan

    http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=25989
    Bill Reddock
    Los Angeles IaidoKai

  2. #2
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    Default Yikes!

    Back in the day, they used to do shiai with beans scattered on the floor at the Genbukan.
    Ben Persons

    "Kimi ga yo wa, ama no hagoromo mare ni kite."

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    The last scene is actually showing jukendo, on skates, rather than kendo. Wooden rifle against sword.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Joseph Svinth View Post
    The last scene is actually showing jukendo, on skates, rather than kendo. Wooden rifle against sword.
    ...and the first guy is doing iaido but the title works better without trying to put everything in there. Of course now some 'Budo know it all' is going to split hairs about Batto and Iaido being the same thing.
    Bill Reddock
    Los Angeles IaidoKai

  5. #5
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    Default

    Well now I know what I'll be doing for keiko this winter!
    Christopher Covington

    Daito-ryu aikijujutsu
    Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryu heiho

    All views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily represent the views of the arts I practice, the teachers and people I train with or any dojo I train in.

  6. #6
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    Back when I was a kid we did iaido as we walked ten miles to school and twenty miles home in the snow and uphill both ways.

    Dan
    Dan Keding
    Storyteller - Author - Musician
    Iaidoka MJER

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    Don't forget that we had to use a fence post for a sword since we were too poor to afford a real one!
    Paul Smith
    "Always keep the sharp side and the pointy end between you and your opponent"

  8. #8
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    You guys had it easy. When I was a kid, my parents and sensei made me go and pull nails out of the neighborhood fences and then break into the local high school at night to use their metalshop to make my own sword. I had to steal wood from the woodshop to make my sword furniture too.

    Then I had to break into the sewing shop and steal silk to braid my own cords for wrapping the tsuka.

    And then I had to walk 20 miles to school in 100 degree heat in the morning and walk home through the snow due to global warming problems. All on nothing more then a small bowl of millet since we couldn't afford to eat rice unless we stole it. If it weren't for the whiskey I stole from my sensei I wouldn't have had the nutrition needed to survive.

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    You had it soft. We had to use bales of hay for cutting targets and with wooden swords it was pretty hard to make a clean cut and if we didn't cut well we had to go to bed without any supper with only cold hay for breakfast - no milk. If it rained we had to practice outside and sometimes if the creek flooded we had to do our kata underwater until the flood receded. All this before the age of five.
    Life was hard in the old days.

    Dan
    Dan Keding
    Storyteller - Author - Musician
    Iaidoka MJER

  10. #10
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    Oh, I used to dream of having swords made out of wood and bales for cutting.

    We had to wake up before we went to bed, use our own bodies as tameshigiri targets, using wet, used toilet paper as cutting instruments. I tell you, it was tough to cut through a limb (even as skinny one as ours) with a wet, used toilet paper.

    But that how it was back then. After all, if you didn't cut a limb off, there was no breakfast that morning. And did we complain?

    Well, maybe a little bit, but I think you can sympathise when you think how much a paper cut stings!
    -Mikko Vilenius

  11. #11
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    I remember doing kata before I was born. My first teacher was my youngest brother. We both trained my father after he was born. Sometimes we had to do tameshigiri on ice sculptures of Sylvester Stallone using broken popsicle sticks a swords. We used to get up while we were still asleep and use our old cat as a bokken while we did our drills in a wine vat as we crushed grapes to make wine to sell to winos that lived in the sewers and collected rat droppings to sell in the suburbs as garden fertilizer. Then we woke up and started training in earnest.

    Ah, the good old days if only I could remember them!

    Dan
    Dan Keding
    Storyteller - Author - Musician
    Iaidoka MJER

  12. #12
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    luxury! we used to DREAM of being that lucky....we used to have to fit in some training after working a 26 hour day, being beaten to death by the mill owner, and had to tear off our own arms to use as swords. My orphan brother tore off my face and pulled out my ribs to make some kendo armour. I look back and laugh now at the fun we had...

    Bring back ripping off men and strangling with do, along with the foot sweeps and kneeing in the groin etc. Proper kendo, not that tippy tappy poofter stuff they do nowadays. They don't even put steel bars down the shinai any more to make them a bit more solid! pah! Almost as bad as football....
    Tim Hamilton

    Why are you reading this instead of being out training? No excuses accepted...

  13. #13
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    We used to have to do our training walking on red hot coals until our sensei decided it was too easy and buried us in the coals. We got points for breaking our opponents blisters. We worked in our sleep at the mill and then got our only meal of the month during the third week and it was cold oatmeal watered down with toxic waste that had been rejected by the local prison. Every day the same schedule - work 22 hours, train for 22 hours. Longest days in history. Thank God for child labor laws - we got the sixth Saturday of each month off. We used sheet metal for hakamas and barbed wire for obis.

    I love thinking about the old days.

    Dan

    (sometimes threads can just be fun!)
    Dan Keding
    Storyteller - Author - Musician
    Iaidoka MJER

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