We had a very good seminar here recently with Holger Kunzmann, I really encourage everyone to go to his seminars! On the extra training on Friday we had asked him to teach Kihon Happo, and he did. He went through all eight techniques on Friday extra training and Saturday morning. Sunday morning he did Sanshin no kata for warm up training.

But the main theme for the seminar was Togakure-ryu Santo Tonko no Kata.
– Three unarmed techniques against an unarmed opponent
– Three unarmed techniques against a sword attack
– Three armed techniques against several opponents

He taught many very good applications and said many interesting things. One thing related to all the past years of training themes is that if you take each theme and make a map of each theme you can clearly see each theme’s structure. Then make them all semi transparent and put them on top of each other and look through them all, this is what we are doing now in training.

Let’s take it even further, take all maps and put them together, press them together really hard (under heat and pressure) until it become a raw diamond. What we try to do next is to cut the diamond, so that we can look through each prism. This I would like to think is the Jewel of Bujinkan.

An interesting thought, right? Remember when Soke said 10 years ago or so that he was going away like a rocket from now on, and if people did not train with him frequently they would be left behind. If you honestly look in the mirror and ask yourself, only you know the true answer. What other people think of you is really not important, as long as you can stand in front of the mirror and see your own weaknesses and try to strengthen them, then it is ok. If you do that I say “ganbatte kudasai”, if not I’m sorry to say that you have completely misunderstood the Bujinkan training completely. Our training is about “masai” constantly polishing our art.

If you just started training or was left behind, don’t worry, just follow the rockets that is following the main rocket. Not all rockets is following the main rocket, so be careful 😀

Well, enough rambling for today… Keep on going!