Shinai Epitaph
Sep. 24th, 2004 10:38 pmToday, I killed my first shinai. In the middle of practice, the nakayui suddenly tore.
Sensei lent me his replacement shinai (mine, of course, lay safely at home), so I could go on practicing. It was heavier than my own shinai, which took me a while to get used to (and which caused me to fail horrendously at the tsuki techniques).
The nakayui is one of the more easily replacable parts of the shinai - it's just a strip of leather holding the bamboo pieces together in the upper third - so it's a tolerable loss, but it's sort of a strange feeling to have killed the first shinai. [Well, technically, it was the second. But the first shinai I killed belonged to Jörg; at my very first attempt at kendô, I broke one of the bamboo spars on someone's helmet. That was, to fulfill my movie quoting quota, the beginning of a wonderful friendship.] Like some sort of baptisement. I'm no absolute beginner anymore - from now on, I'll be working with a repaired, self-assembled shinai.
Woot.
I might name it Andúril.
Also, QotD:
Roland (my sensei): Alright, now the advanced ones do ji-geiko* and those without armour have to satisfy, um, occupy themselves.
Interesting Freudian slip...
ji-geiko= free sparring
- - -
( Abschiedsrede an mein Shinai )
- - -
Sensei lent me his replacement shinai (mine, of course, lay safely at home), so I could go on practicing. It was heavier than my own shinai, which took me a while to get used to (and which caused me to fail horrendously at the tsuki techniques).
The nakayui is one of the more easily replacable parts of the shinai - it's just a strip of leather holding the bamboo pieces together in the upper third - so it's a tolerable loss, but it's sort of a strange feeling to have killed the first shinai. [Well, technically, it was the second. But the first shinai I killed belonged to Jörg; at my very first attempt at kendô, I broke one of the bamboo spars on someone's helmet. That was, to fulfill my movie quoting quota, the beginning of a wonderful friendship.] Like some sort of baptisement. I'm no absolute beginner anymore - from now on, I'll be working with a repaired, self-assembled shinai.
Woot.
I might name it Andúril.
Also, QotD:
Roland (my sensei): Alright, now the advanced ones do ji-geiko* and those without armour have to satisfy, um, occupy themselves.
Interesting Freudian slip...
ji-geiko= free sparring
- - -
( Abschiedsrede an mein Shinai )
- - -