Zach's experience with Ono Ha Itto Ryu taught be Carl Long sensei

I was fortunate to have had the chance to take a seminar with Sasamori Soke and Shimabukuro sensei long time ago in Ono Ha Itto Ryu. Many of the parries and strikes that were taught to me by Hataya sensei was Itto Ryu techniques he learned. My kendo teacher, Ken Kishino sensei came from a line of Naganishi Ha Itto Ryu, which he displayed through his kendo in many ways. So even though I got to learn techniques and applications, it was a great experience to learn the root and setup of these techniques from Sasamori Soke and try to apply these to my gekken.

This is why when I heard Carl Long sensei was teaching these at a seminar, I encouraged my senior guys to attend.

Here are Zach's thoughts from the seminar....

Ono-ha Itto Ryu seminar with Carl Long sensei

In January I had the pleasure of attending Carl Long sensei's seminar on Muso Jikden Eishin Ryu iaijutsu and Ono-ha Itto ryu kenjutsu. Charles already wrote about MJER, so I'll focus on the OHIR part of the seminar.

We started with kiri-otoshi drills. Kiri-otoshi is a cut through an opponent's cut. That is, they cut straight down and you also cut (more or less) straight down, applying extra tenouchi at the last second to deflect their cut and take the center for yourself. If done correctly, their sword misses you by inches and your sword ends up in the middle of their head. It's frightening.

Once we had gone through some of the drills and gotten "comfortable" with kiri-otoshi, Long sensei showed us the first of four kumitachi kata for the day. The senior students played the role of uchikata (the participant who "loses," which we call uchidachi) and we newcomers took the role of shikata (the participant who "wins," which we call shidachi).

The kata was fairly simple in terms of the steps. Uchikata starts from a hasso-like position and shikata starts from seigan. They take three steps toward each other and raise their bokken, then on the third step uchikata cuts and shikata cuts kiri-otoshi. Upon being pressured by shikata, uchikata backs up a step to raise into jodan, but shikata follows in and cuts kote before uchidachi can strike again. Then, like in our kumitachi, the two participants move back to a specific maai, lower their swords, and walk back to their starting positions.

Simple, right? Close distance, cut, cut again, finish. Long sensei said that students usually practice this kata for an entire year before moving on.

This seminar was on a somewhat accelerated track, so we proceeded to three more kata. Basically all of them follow the basic premise of closing distance, clashing, pressuring the uchikata into coming up to jodan so you can follow and cut his wrist, then resetting.

The clashes are nervy. You basically just walk right into range and hold your ground, trying to take center as someone swings a bokken at your head. Your distance, timing, centering, footwork, and seme all need to be really tight if you don't want to get clobbered. It is no wonder they spend an entire year on that first kata.

There were lots of finer points that I won't describe in detail here, but that gave me a lot to think about for my own practice, particularly for gekken. The way Long sensei talked about suriashi, taking center, seme, and reading cues from an opponent's tsuba provided me with a lot of new concepts to experiment with. Let me work on them for a year and get back to you.

p.s. You can see video of these kata here http://youtu.be/lwndpV2cnzU?list=PLCCA12F91651C811D - watch the two guys on the right in the first half of the video), but I don't feel like this demonstration quite captures the intensity or timing of the kata as we practiced them. Also, we didn't have those burly kote protectors, so we just stopped the cuts a little short.