A bit of context first; I live in a country with a huge kendo population and been practicing kendo for about 5-6 years (just passed 3-dan in Feb), first in a school club and now that I’m almost done with schools, I’m currently roaming clubs looking for a nice dojo to settle.
Recently I began to be a little dissatisfied when I’m watching other peoples’ matches (or jigeiko) that I can’t really make sense out of it, thus making me unable to learn something out of it.
A lot of my kendo friends – especially the ones that started from a very young age – seem to understand the intentions and the feelings of the shiaisha. They tell me that oh the red is getting a little anxious and wants to score an ippon quickly, it’s probably aiming for a debana-kote, that was a feint men to see the opponent’s response, blah blah blah. As opposed to that, when I’m watching, all I can think of is “hey that was a nice hit… oh and another one!” and that’s about it. I hate to admit, but in the end I kind of get bored of watching matches.
Maybe I am just really clueless about kendo, generally. I shudder to think that in these 5-6 years I haven’t even started scraping the surfaces, and that makes me feel a little left behind, and sad.
Next week I’m going to watch All Japans, and I want to get something out of watching some of the best kendoka, and I want to be able to learn from and to understand shiai, so I can go to my next practice ready to try out the things I learnt. Also, I hate to be that clueless person who can’t give comment or advices to my friends and kohai after a jigeiko with me.
So my question is; is this match-reading skill intuitive? do you have some sort of a flowchart that picks up certain signs and bring reason to it? how can I learn this skill, or can you suggest any shiai videos that are fairly easy to follow?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: If anyone’s reading now, i went to see all japans last week and had a great time observing and trying to connect with the shiaishas’ thoughts. It was a great experience. Wanted a little more drama in the finals, next year, hopefully!