Upcoming kendo exam

2011-03-29 07:53:00

All kendoka from our dojo recently received an email from our instructors to partake in the upcoming exam rounds. Seeing how I only started kendo two months ago I asked our sensei about his expectations for us newbies. His reply: "Just take the exam. Like everything in life all beginnings are easy." So there we go :)

Now, seeing how I'm still a mukyu ("no rank") the test will simply be to see if I've been learning properly for the past few months and with any luck I'll be getting closer and closer to the lowest rank there is, rokkyu (sixth rank). The funny thing about the ranking below ikkyu (first rank) is that there are no standardized requirements for them. Starting from ikkyu and proceeding to shodan, nidan and so forth everything has been standardized by the IKF, but below those everyone's free to decide on their own requirements. Thus sometimes you'll have national federations deciding on the conditions (like Germany, South Africa and Australia), often it's a regional thing (like US states) and sometimes even at the dojo level (like this one from Belgium). Apparently in Japan the kyu grades below ikkyu are even only given out to children, with adults not getting anything until they are deemed worthy of ikkyu. As you can see, there are many different approaches to the kyu grades.

Reading through all those descriptions there's a thread that runs through all of them:

We'll see :) I'm looking forward to the ninth of April, simply because it'll be a special day at the dojo. I don't particularly care about the outcome of the exam since I'm not there for achievements/ranking, but to learn kendo.


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