Spring sunshine, but bitterly cold evenings, in both the UK and the Netherlands. But Ryanair and Dutch immigration held a couple of surprises for me, nothing big, just minor curiosities. To start with, the airline has gone totally digital now, no great shakes, but then the Eindhoven passport officials surprised me by needing biometrics, including fingerprints, but I wasn’t going to let it ruin my weekend.
The training.
It was indeed a packed itinerary. My teaching schedule was nine hours of Dojo time. Course organiser Martijn Schelen de Vries and I had got our heads together and set a loose agenda for the various workshops. Everything went pretty much to plan.
Friday.
As expected, the late Friday training was very much an in-house event. Many regular faces, veterans now of courses in the Netherlands and visits to the UK. All of this establishes continuity and growth.
Shikukai in the Netherlands has picked up even more new members and it was lovely to meet up with Ronald Rennes again and the seniors from his Dojo. Ronald goes back many years with Sugasawa Sensei and is keen to embrace the Shikukai methodology.
Friday featured very active working on depth of attack and instant reaction. Timing coming out of judging distance and rhythm of attack through sharply attuned senses. That way a simple drill can become really charged with powerful intent.
Saturday.
I had factored in a number of threads that were woven into the training and picked up at various points. Very recently Sugasawa Sensei had highlighted, if not a missing element, but maybe something that is too lightly skipped over. This was his insistence on the acknowledgment of ‘interval’ as related to timing in both solo kata and fighting.
We visited this on Saturday and Sunday where the solo kata focus across the two days was Pinan Sandan, which, in my mind, is an excellent vehicle, with its spaced intervals and continual changes of emphasis.
As is frequently the case, we inevitably went into the paired kata. The kumite gata needed a forensic dissection, because it is too easy to cut corners and fail to acknowledge what is really going on. (This came out of Martijn and I engineering it so that we were able to give further detailed feedback to the two recently successful Nidan candidates. We did this through reviewing a video of the grading and collected sets of notes – all really useful stuff).
Lecture PowerPoint.
At the end of Saturday training, it had been organised for me to present a PowerPoint lecture explaining how the paired kata of Wado were structured, with the idea that students would gain greater insights into how it is supposed to work. This was well received and opened up a dialogue which hopefully dispelled some of the myths and assumptions floating around.
Throughout the training, I always work to present suitable challenges to the junior grades (I am aware that often this course get a little ‘top heavy’ with Dan grades). But on the Saturday they were able to experiment with the various options contained within the single flowing combination in the middle of Pinan Sandan.
Sunday training.
Sunday, the final day kicked off with a gentle lead into something that unfolded into a paired, coordinated drill that meshed the demands of simultaneous attack and defence. Difficult to describe, but it put the individuals in a position of safety then imperceptivity strayed into an area of jeopardy. All very safe but I like to think that some valuable lessons were picked up. Also, it was one of those drills that could be adapted to create other equally valuable variants.
Extra-curricular.
The weekend was not all about the sweat and toil of the Dojo.
There was the opportunity for everyone to get together in a very well selected Asian Fusion restaurant, called Mido, in central Hilversum. The menu was a real surprise, made up of a continual roll out of rather excellent dishes.
As usual, across the weekend, everything was super-efficient, all put together by hosts Martijn and Astrid Schelen de Vries, to whom I am always immensely grateful. We have plans in place for another course for October later this year. Please keep and eye on the Shikukai website.
I have produced a set of support notes intended for the people who attended, and the mildly curious. These are to be published soon on, www.budojourneyman.substack.com
Tim Shaw
Shikukai Karate-Do International 