Endo sensei in Hamburg: kata & waza

Last weekend I was in Hamburg for a very interesting seminar with one of my favourite sensei, Seishiro Endo, 遠藤征四郎,, 8.dan Aikikai. My first visit in Hamburg and I really enjoyed the city, a lot of green areas and great architecture, even if I had not really much time to spend for tourism. The first session on friday was at Aikido Schule and the rest of the seminar was in a larger dojo, at MoMo Budo Zentrum, a place where they teach martial art to policemen.

Even being an unexpected large attendance and quite a few high graded on the mats (a couple of 6.dan and many 5.dan!!!) the organizers did not fall in the temptation to split in smaller groups: all the people there was for Endo sensei!!

And sensei, even admitting that the space was not too good for doing what he would have liked, focused more on “basic” movements and exercises than kata, 型 (form) ie. the “sequence of movements” that we are used to perform during graduation, for example. He repeated several times that when practice at our own dojos it is ok doing kata but when we attend his seminars it is more interesting working on waza, 技 (technique) to understand the art itself, to feel what in the kata partly disappears because of the “silent agreement” between tori and uke.

I needed to look a bit more into kata / waza distinction: very interesting comments always find origin in discussions among practitioners, with a result of a nice post mentioning different major senseis. The tori/uketopic led to another important (and difficult) concept: awase, 合わせ, “blending not clashing“.. More to think about, in the future

Among the 5.dan present, there was a well known Aikidoka for the Norwegians: Frank Ostoff from Aikido Dojo Düsseldorf. I had a couple of chances to practice with him and it was a very good feeling! Same feelings I got from many other people on the mats.. I wonder if any of them got good feelings from me!!

It was also interesting the graduation: one guy graded to 3.dan and sensei was directing the exam and deciding the outcome (in Germany it is either Endo sensei or Tissier sensei responsible for grading over 2.dan, in the federation following these two instructors).

As a bonus related to this post, an interview with Endo sensei from Aikido Journal and a similar one, but in Spanish.

…and for future reference, I have updated the seminar page and bought today my ticket to Prague for attending this summer the seminar with Endo sensei in Slovakia, at Žilina (info in English here, with only the year wrong in the date field!!).