When practicing and teaching Iaido, sometimes the need to explain the story, or riai, behind a specific form appears. In fact, this is one of the most important aspects in learning how to handle a Japanese sword: without a clear understanding and vision of what is happening around us and why we are doing certain movements, all would be reduced to just randomly waving a blade in thin air. From some of these riai emerges one of the most important realities of Iaido, that life or death are really only a breath's away in each and every kata we practice. Distances which might appear to us very small, they are huge in swordplay, especially when one's life - and losing it - was on the table. A famous, historical, duel, happened on Tokugawa's court while the legendary Yagyu Jubei Muneyoshi was official teacher of both Yeyasu and Hidetada: during a mock fight between Yagyu and another swordsman, the latter and most of the witnesses believed that the exchange resulted in a tie. But the famous master insisted that in a real fight, happening in the same way, with the same attack and the same response, he would have won, because of the minute differences between a practice wooden sword and a real live katana. After these words everybody, including his opponent, started then to insist to replicate the fight with real swords, to which Yagyu Jubei was strongly opposing, not wanting to waste needlessly his opponent's life. But after the insistence became almost an order of the Shogun, he decided to reluctantly comply: each of the opponents set himself up in the same way and executed the same attacks, and after a moment that seemed infinite Yagyu's opponent fell to the floor in a pool of blood. In the ominous silence that followed, Jubei's is recorded to have said: "For your ignorance, today I had to uselessly take an innocent life. The art of the sword is matter of a sun." To better understand, a "sun" is a unit of measurement used at the time and, indeed, still today for describing the lenght of a katana. In fact there are three units: shaku, sun and bu. Ten bu make a sun, and ten sun make a shaku. The smallest unit or bu is roughly equivalent to 3 mm, which makes a sun about 3 cm or slightly more than an inch. Within such a small difference lies living or being cut down. This episode was so peculiar and famous that the famous director Akira Kurosawa partially replicated it in his classic The Seven Samurai, this is the clip of it, courtesy of Robert Dickman, a leadership consultant who uses these concepts in a modern economical setting: So those "small" differences in your practice, that seem to you like nothing changed, can be as huge as being a matter of Life and Death. Please keep this in mind whenever you practice Iaido or Kendo and always be respectful of the generations that came before you and learned about these differences the hard way.
In the same way, treasure (like Mr. Dickman does) the lessons that Iaido and the study of the Japanese Sword can bring to your everyday life, to your work and to yourself as human being, beyond just waving a blade through thin air. We currently hold Japanese Sword courses and we accept beginners of any level, age or gender. For more info please click here.
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