2011-04-11 22:28:00
Kendo is more than just hitting people with bamboo sticks. It entails strategy, philosophy and psychology. And of course plenty of history! Today I contacted our dojo's founder to start learning about our background. Heeren-sensei quickly told me where Furuya-sensei came from, which is a good enough starting point for me to start finding out more.
In the mean time I've finally done something I'd been trying to do for a while: find out the elements that make up the name of our dojo to see how the name is composed and what it means.
On the website it says: "Reshinjuku: Training improves spirit and body". Sadly the Japanese name isn't included anywhere on the site except as a graphic at the top of the site, which makes looking up the relevant kanji quite a pain. But with half an hour of puzzling between Wikipedia, WWWJDIC and the iPhone app Kotoba! I managed to get it all together :)
So here we go!
I'd put that together as: "intensive training tempers the heart", or "school where the heart is trained". In this case "heart" is in the sense of the Japanese word 'kokoro', which describes a concept more than one single word. The "kendo" part at the end of course indicates what skills the school focuses on.
Next up? Trying to figure out the correct kanji for Furuya-sensei's name. Is it 古屋? Or is it 古谷? And which one of the nine spellings for "Isao" (his first name) is the correct one? ^_^ Once I've found that out, the real search for our school's background starts :)
View or add comments (curr. 2)
Posted by Thomas
Hey now, would you happen to be a friend of Christophe? I have no clue what this "eddytov.fr" site is, but that's two kendo-ka with a subpage on that site finding my site within a week's time :)
Either way, our founding sensei hasn't provided me with much details so it's an interesting effort for myself to investigate. However, I -am- thinking of asking him if he has an hour to talk to me in the near future. I'd like to have a longer chat with him in person.
What I do know is that:
* Our founding sensei has been both dutch and european champion a few times
* The dojo was founded in 1988
* The dojo was founded by request of our sensei's own sensei (who is 7th dan "kyoshi" Furuya Isao sensei).
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
2011-04-13 10:52:00
Posted by eddy (website)
how funny, i also contacted our dojo's founder, december 2010, to have a look on our history. Our dojo was created in 1974 by a sport teacher.
Do you know the date for yours ?