I was asked this week about the qualities I look for in kendo students and the answer is persistence. I seriously believe that without this quality, nobody would get to the end of the average 6 or 8 week beginner course without throwing in the towel.
I would hate to be a beginner again. With hindsight, I only managed to progress through that stage myself because of an inflated sense of my own ability and bloody mindedness. Unlike other martial arts where you learn a basic technique on day one and can sort of manage to throw or punch someone immediately, with kendo you have to do months of drills, (years in some dojo), before you can put on bogu and have a decent scrap.
Of course I understand the reasons why. To start gigeiko without good basics will hamper a kendoka’s future development and it would be just plain dangerous for his or her training partners. Still I take my hat off to anyone who can survive months of suburi and footwork practice, without having looked through the bars of a men.
You have probably gathered that I do not often teach beginners. I much prefer working with people who have developed the basics and want to move on. On the occasions when I have taught new students, I have been astounded to learn that not only have most of them not tried kendo before, they have never actually seen it. Instead their inspiration has come from manga or samurai movies or even the light saber moves in Star Wars. No surprise then, that after a few weeks of “mae, ato, migi, hidari”, when the realization dawns that they are not going to turn into Tom Cruise or Luke Skywalker, they hand back their shinai and join the Salsa class.
Whatever the motivation to start, there are a small percentage of like minded lunatics who survive the initial tedium and keep going long enough to be bitten by the kendo bug. If you are one of them, you can now be officially classed as kendo kichigai , (kendo crazy) – congratulations!
I agree with you, it is very tedious to start kendo, anime and manga aren’t the better way to want to try kendo. But, sometimes one of the manga lunatics became kendo lunatics.
In my dojo the initial training last for more than a year, it is a very long time since someone start to use bogu.
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I think that the vast majority of people that have spent some time in bogu doing all the advanced drills, tournaments and testings wouldn’t want to go back to being a beginner. Despite that, we also mustn’t forget what it felt like for us to be a beginner and still understand that it can be a very long, uphill battle to get to the good stuff and not get too disillusioned to the fact there’s a good chance they won’t remain for very long.
For me, I sort of had this unconscious necessity to go to each practice. While it was nothing but 2 hours of footwork and arm-numbing suburi, there was some random desire in me that kept me going to each class. But the one thing that sealed the deal for me was going to watch one of the tournaments. At that time, I got to see what my future was going to be like if I stick with it long enough and I really liked what I saw, and I wanted to do what they were doing.
Whenever I teach beginners, I like to show them the robotic movement and then explain why they are doing what they are doing. Being an engineer, I don’t really like being left in the dark nor do I want to impose that notion on others. Then, I also really encourage people to watch the jigeiko stuff at the end of practice and ask questions to any person that’s free or wait till afterwards.
Then, there is the whole inclusion aspect of the club. As long as they seem like decent people, then they can get in the Kendo circle, which has been working out pretty well thus far.
Obviously, if someone isn’t interested, then they just aren’t interested. But then, that’s really no excuse to just give beginners the cold shoulder because we feel that they won’t last beyond those initial hurdles of Kendo.