Shodan (1-dan) Shinsa

I had my shodan (1-dan) shinsa the other day at the city gym, which was the same place I had my 1-kyuu shinsa at. The city gym has a fairly large dojo for kendo, which was good, because there were a TON of people there this time.

This shinsa was only for 1- and 2-dan grading, but there was quite a crowd nonetheless. There were probably almost three times as many people trying for 1-dan than 2-dan. The people trying for 1-dan were largely second-year junior high students, but there were also a few late beginners from high school and five or six adults (four of us being men).

Since I couldn't find a ride, I biked to the gym -- it was about five kilometers. Since I had my shinai/bogu with me, it took a little longer than it normally would have. I arrived before registration, but well after a lot of other people, it seemed. Sensei saw me and took me to a corner in front of the emergency exit to change, since the locker room was filled with bags from everyone else who'd arrived a lot earlier than I did.

There was a bit of registration panic because I didn't have everything on my form filled out that I should have, despite having checked with sensei earlier this week about it. Oops. So he filled those places out for me (with amazing handwriting), then we ran into a second bump... Registration was 12,300 yen, I brought 13,000 yen because I didn't want coins falling out of my pocket while I biked or something. Well, apparently they wanted exact change... so sensei ended up fishing out some coins. I felt really bad.

I was actually quite nervous on the spot; a lot of it was procedural nervousness. Not only is my Japanese listening comprehension not that great, but the dojo also had absolutely terrible acoustics, with quite a bit of echo. I stuck with two students from my junior high who'd come and relied on them a bit to tell me what was going on.

The first half of the day was kata practice. I found the girl I'd practiced with for the 1-kyuu shinsa, so we practiced together this time as well. The 1-kyuu shinsa required kata 1-3, this one required 1-5. I technically know 1-7, but it was nice to have the refresher. The hardest parts of the kata practice were when we were forced to stay in sonkyo or jodan while the sensei walked around talking and checking people. My arms were definitely sore after the jodan bit!

It was also hard to tell who was supposed to lead, since the words (uchidachi and shidachi) tend to sound about the same to me with the echo. Again, I ended up relying on the two junior high students I knew.

After the kata practice wrapped up, we split up into our respective groups (guys and girls testing for 1-dan, then all of the 2-dan people together) to get our numbers. This was a fairly tedious process; there were four adult men, and I was number 1. I'd really hoped someone ELSE would be number 1 so that I'd be able to watch the procedure, but it worked out okay.

We had a 50-minute break for lunch; I ate some meat and rice, then went back to get my armor on and prepare all of the cords so that I could put the men on quickly when it was my turn. It turned out not to matter since I was going after all of the junior high kids, all 76 of them. I had a lot of time to sit and watch; I watched how they did kendo and I watched the judging panel's expressions to see how my thoughts matched up with theirs. I noticed that the judges weren't at all shy about laughing; I wasn't sure if this was because someone made a joke, or because someone's kendo was just that bad. Sometimes it happens.

There were quite a few times when the process stopped so that the judges could explain the correct way to do something to a hapless kenshi who had the misfortune to do it completely wrong. I have a feeling those people didn't pass.

One of the major problems was that in uchikaeshi, people were doing massive side-to-side swings rather than angled up-and-down swings. I guess the need for speed and nervousness really got to a lot of people. Kiai and kakegoe often seemed weak or like they were used as an afterthought -- especially in uchikaeshi.

I have to admit, I had an underlying nervousness throughout the entire process because of the idea of the written exam. My keiko and uchikaeshi portions flew by (30 seconds for each, two bouts of keiko) and before I knew it, we were doing kata. All of the kata went fine up til the end (I was uchidachi) when my partner messed up really, really badly and I found myself kind of clueless about what to do and kind of stood there. They had us redo it and it went fine.

After the kata portion, they announced the people who had passed so far and told all of us to get our stuff for the written exam. We all sat down and they passed out large, blank sheets of B4 paper for the written exam. The sensei went out of their way to help me, knowing that as an American, my Japanese isn't anywhere near perfect. The sensei in charge read the three questions in Japanese; my sensei wrote them down in Japanese and gave me the paper, then another sensei came by to read them out loud and make sure I understood them. I was very, very grateful for everything they did to make it easier for me.

I wrote and wrote; my handwriting isn't that great and I really didn't care, since I wanted to make sure I got out everything I could in the time allotted. I filled an entire large sheet of B4 paper and rushed up to the panel. It turned out that I had plenty of time left, about 5-10 minutes, actually... but time seems to pass faster when you don't have a clock and you're writing in a foreign language.

There were five people on the panel checking papers; I went straight for my sensei since I figured he's used to "my kind" of Japanese. He read it over, hmm'd approvingly a few times, and laughed at how much I wrote -- he even passed it to the other judges so they could laugh, too. I looked at the junior high kids' papers and a lot of them hadn't even written half of what I had. Oops.

I don't think anyone actually failed the written portion.

After that, we all finished up, said our thanks, cleaned, and went home.

I still feel sore the day after -- sitting on a hard, wooden floor the entire day while trying to keep my back straight didn't do my lower back any favors. My foot hurts where a callus peeled off, too. But I'm 1-dan!

Here's to 2-dan in a year!