Kendo and creativity

by Ana
(Brazil)

First of all, sorry for my bad English. I'm Brazilian. But more importantly, thanks a lot for the site. It's helping me a lot.

Now to the question. When you are doing katas or the normal training, it has everything to do with the exact, perfect movements. That's what we all seek.

But let's say you are going to a championships (no, I'm not going! Far away from it! The doubt is just hypothetical) in which you are going to actually fight.

Not application of techniques, but a "As long as you follow the rules, do whatever you want"-kind of fight. In this kind of situation, you have to use your creativity to defend and attack...

My first question is as stupid as: how do they do that?! Of course, they know a lot about kendo, but still... It seems just too hard!!!

And my second (and most important) question is: back to the samurai time, it was good to have a personal style of fighting and of kendo in general. How does that apply to nowadays?

Thanks a lot and it's really ok if you only answer the 2nd question.

Answer: Thanks for your questions.

Answer to Q1: A lot of practice and also we learn by watching others “how” people are using these techniques.

We should practice movements until they become parts of our movements. Just like driving a car especially with a manual shift.  You have to do many things at the same time but you can still do it because you do it a lot of times.

After you learned the movements, you can spice them up! Add your own tastes to your kendō.

Answer to Q.2:  In order to survive a fight, they probably had to come up with their own style. They developed different kinds of weapons as well.

I want you to explain more about this. I do not want to carry on guessing what you meant in the question.

We can be creative in kendō too. So if you can explain more about your question, that would be helpful for me to answer your question.

Hope this helps.

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