Vassar College Aikido Club

Just gave the site a slightly modified look. It was fun to use my HTML skills again a bit. Thanks to WYSIWYG editors, I hadn’t hard coded any HTML in a long, long time.

If you scroll down a bit, you’ll also find some permanet link ads I posted to books and a DVD . They’re all for sale at Amazon.com.

What is called Tomiki Aikido in the west has several sets of sword-on-sword techniques (that is, where both people who are practicing are armed with swords). The one most commonly practiced is part of the Koryu Dai San no Kata (the Third Collection of Ancient Techniques).

I’ll describe some of the details I’ve learned here at Shodokan dojo.

There are eight of these techniques. Their proper names are given in Dr. Loi’s book Tomiki Aikido. I’ll do my best to name them here correctly, but don’t take my names as definitive. (Also, please realize that most of the practitioners in Japan also just refer to them by number. For instance, “This is the fourth technique in the sword-on-sword set from the Dai San.”)

With the exception of the eight technique, each technique begins from 6 steps back from sword-tip-to-sword-tip distance. That is, start at sword-tip-to-sword-tip and each person take three steps back. You then each take three steps forward to begin each technique so that they are all done very dynamically.

1st. Shomen Uchi (Top of the Forehead Strike)

Here, I have no great advice except to say that you really cut down nearly perfectly vertically at hour opponent’s forehead. The tip of your sword only ever so slightly tips to the right so that you deflect his sword cut (which is also vertical coming right at your forehead) before you land your own strike. (Obviously, don’t actually hit him as you are practicing.)

2nd. Migimen Uchi (Right side of the Forehead Strike)

The trick here is that as uke tries a shomen uchi against you and you taisabaki to your right to avoid it before striking back, you move into migi hanmi (right foot forward half stance). You do NOT move into ordinary upright migi gamae (right foot forward stance.) This has several advantages. First, there is less movement, so you are quicker. By going into migi hanmi, you only barely get out of the way of the strike. Second, there is more extension. Since in migi hanmi your are leaned a bit forward, with your bodyweight mostly over your right foot, you can extend your arms (and, thus, the sword tip) farther horizontally than you could if you were standing upright in a right-foot-forward stance. As you strike, you aim for uke’s right side temple (That is, the right side from your view. To him, it’s his left temple.)

3rd. Hidarimen Uchi (Left side of the Forehead Strike)

Here again, you go into hanmi. But since the taisabai is to the left, you go into hidari hanmi (left foot forward half stance). You are just barely off of the line of uke’s shomen uchi strike. And as with the previous technique, you get a lot of advantages by being in hanmi rather than going into a regular, upright, left-foot-forward stance.

4th. Nodo ni uchi (Throat Strike)

This name I’ve given the technique is most certainly wrong. Look to Loi Sensei’s book for the correct name. Here, uke again goes for a shomen uchi, but while he’s raising his sword up, you slide in and threaten to poke him in the throat. To do this, you rotate the blade so that it is pointing up. Just turn both of your hands clockwise 180 degrees. The hilt of the sword then rests atop of your right forearm, and you slide forward abruptly with both feet to put the point of the blade within an inch or two of uke’s throat.

You now have uke trapped. You can easily kill him by poking a couple of inches ahead. Furthermore, even if he tries to strike downward and move back at the same time in order to try to strike you while avoiding your throat poking, he faces the prospect of cutting off one of his own arms since your blade is pointed up. As he strikes down, all you would have to do would be to duck a little while raising the blade. He would likely lose a hand if he swung down with any great force.

You next walk a couple of steps forward to indicate you have full control over uke (who quickly backs up so that his neck doesn’t become a blood fountain for vampires). You then turn the blade back to downward facing while raising it up so that it is a couple of inches in front of uke’s left forearm (his right side arm from your perspective). This also would mean that if he swung down, he’d cut off his own arm. You then back away from each other.

5th. Doh! (Chest Strike)

In kendo, a lateral strike to the torso is called a do (pronounced the same as “dough”). Here you will strike uke with a do as he tries to strike you with shomen uchi. The timing is important. You must slide into a right foot forward stance and to the side just as he is bringing the sword down. Don’t go too far to the side. Just enough to make sure he can’t hit any part of your body. At the same time, you strike across his chest; from your perspective, your sword swings from left to right. Keep moving. You take several slides forward, all in a right-foot forward stance. This is the equivalent of leaning in to him with your body weight to really slice his chest open.

As you pass him, it will be hard to hold on to the sword with both hands, as it will be pointing back and to your left as you pass near him and keep moving forward. Consequently, open up your left hand (the one near the end of the sword handle). The fingers and the thumb make a tegatana and the shaft of the handle rests in the V formed by the index finger and the thumb. After the tip of the sword has passed uke, you can regrip in the normal way as you point the sword tip in front of you again, like normal.

6th. Kote (Gauntlet Strike)

Kote is the Japanese word for gauntlet (the heavy defensive glove worn by an armored swordsman.) In Kendo, a kote strike is a wrist area strike. Here, you and uke move forward until your sword tips are almost touching. Then, almost imperceptibly, you bait him. You tip your sword tip down just a little so that he has a line for a kote strike. When he comes in for it, you deflect his strike and do a kote counterstrike against him. At shodokan, this happens really quickly. You walk toward each other, tip your sword, and then go into the strike-counterstrike very quickly. You do not walk up, pause to build up tension for a moment, and then bait him by tipping your sword down (which is how I learned to do it.)

7th. Kaeshi Men (Counter Strike to the Forehead)

Here, you and uke walk towards each other in the normal way (three steps each). So the rhythm is 1-2-3. But you take an extra long time with your 3rd step. Uke strikes with a shomen uchi on 3. He thinks that you are in synch.

But you do not move with him. For you, the third count is very long. You wait for his sword to almost hit you before turning the blade up to block, and then switching your stance from right to left to go into hidari hanmi (left foot forward half stance) for the counter strike to (from your perspective) the left side of uke’s forehead. (After you block, the sword tip swings around to your right, behind your head, before coming around your left side to strike at uke’s head.)

The long third count is the key to doing this technique correctly, and ads the appropriate reality. Only by getting uke to really commit to the downward strike (which you do by appearing to be slow and not getting up a defense early) will you be able to take advantage of his full commitment to block and counterstrike safely.

8th. Kumi Tachi (Swords Moving In)

This fun kata is a short duel with multiple strikes. I’ll only describe it briefly since it is very complicated and you pretty much have to have done it anyway for any sort of description like this to make sense. You begin sword tip to sword tip. You then take four steps/slides forward. What is the difference between a step and a slide? In a step, the forward foot changes. In a slide, both feet move forward but the same foot stays in front. The fist movement is a slide.

Since you start in a right-foot forwards stance, you slide both feet forward. Then you step forward. That puts you into a left-foot-forward stance. Then you step again, into a right-foot forwards stance. And then you step again, into a left-foot forward stance. That’s four slides and/or steps for you in total.

In the mean time, uke backs up ONLY three steps. He starts in a right foot forwards stance. When you take that initial slide forward with your right foot, he backs up by stepping backward, into a left-foot-forward stance. Then when you take your first step (into a left foot forward stance) he backs up again with a step, putting him into a right foot forward stance again. And then when you take your third step/slide (into a right foot forward stance), he steps back again, into a left foot forwards stance. Notice that at this instance, you are in opposite stances but at proper distance.

You then bait him by pulling your sword up to hold it vertically with the handle held by your right shoulder while stepping forward that fourth time with your left leg. But doing that final step, your leg is closer than proper distance and a prime target. You are using it as bait, begging him to strike at it. And so he does (after also going to hold the sword vertically by his own right shoulder, which you can see in the Loi book).

From here, I have no interesting details, except that every time you block, your armpits should be closed and your elbows pulled back against your chest for extra strength. It is assumed that uke will thrust/strike with his body weight behind each blow–so you must be in a really strong stance with your arms well attached to your torso to take the blows. The final strike (the coup de grace) is to the neck, not to the head.

Tomiki Sensei wanted to get to the essence of things. So he cut down the 2,000 plus aikido techniques to a small set of core techniques. The full set of 2,000 can be viewed as that core plus variations on the core.

Meanwhile, Ohba Sensei liked to catalogue old techniques. That is how we got the six Koryu no Kata (collections of old techniques). The third set is the basis of the first, second, and third degree black belt tests in what is now referred to in the west as Tomiki Aikido. (In Japan, there is no style name. The organization is the Japan Aikido Association, and the head dojo is Shodokan.)

Let me go over some things I learned recently about the sets of techniques called tachi dori (literally, “grabbing the sword,” but actually meaning disarming a sword wielding opponent when you are unarmed) and tachi tachi (literally, “sword sword,” but meaning that both you and your opponent have a sword). They are part of the Koryu Dai San no Kata (the third collection of old techniques).

For those of you not familiar with these techniques, I refer you to Loi Sensei’s book, Tomiki Aikido.

Tachi Dori

There are five of these techniques where a sword wielding opponent (tachi) attacks you when you are unarmed. In each of them, you take the sword away from tachi. I’m going to describe them all assuming that tachi is right handed and standing in a right foot forward stance. Since he’s right handed, his right hand will be farther away from his body when holding the sword.

To begin the first technique, uke takes a vertical sword cut (somen uchi) at you. As you taisabaki to the right your right tegatana cuts down at tachi’s forward wrist (right wrist if tachi is right handed). You then push forward and move your right foot forward maybe six inches as you grab the sword between tachi’s hands. That gets an initial kuzushi. Be sure to grab from underneath and then rotate the hilt forward as you throw. To set up the throw, you slide your left leg behind you, staying low. You do NOT push way up in this technique. Everything stays under tachi’s shoulder level. You turn till you are almost facing the same direction as tachi and then push forward while rotating your wrist to throw. Uke goes over the little toe of his right foot. (He was in a right foot forward stance the whole time.) You keep the sword as they take a forward roll.

For the second technique, uke again attacks with shomen uchi. Do your taisabaki to the left and cut down on uke’s forward (right) wrist with your left tegatana. Next, use your left tegatana to push in and down at uke’s elbow. Your blade should fit right in the crease of the bent elbow. As you do this, slide the left foot forward so you can push on the arm with your full body weight to bend the elbow. As you are doing that with your left hand, the right hand grabs the hilt between uke’s hands. You then pivot to your right and do shiho nage (tenkai kote gaeshi). Make sure not to poke yourself with the sword. (Uke should turn with the shihonage so that they can take a forward roll rather than a backfall.) You keep the sword as the fall.

For the third technique, tachi is going to poke at your throat with a strait tsuki (stab). As he does this, his arms and the blade should all be parallel to the floor, at his own shoulder level. The key thing to understand about this technique is that you are doing hanmi (half-stance) for the taisabaki. As you move to the left and turn out of the way of the thrust, do not turn your hips a full 90 degrees. Only go into left-foot forward hanmi. Your left hand goes up vertically (as if you were taking the oath in a court of law) as you do the taisabaki. The blade should miss you by only a couple of inches because you don’t really get off line, you just do hanmi. You then bring your right hand up and over as a tegatana and hit uke square in the head. And I do mean square. Your tegatana blade should split him in two, right down the middle of his face. (Uke obviously leans back when you practice this so as not to get his nose smashed.) And actually, for this technique, uke keeps the sword as he falls. The idea, though, is that he is unconscious. If you were to land this blow, he most definitely would be.

For the fourth technique, tachi from his perspective cuts diagonally from top left to bottom right. It is a kiri-kaeshi (a diagonal sword cut). Move forward as torii and block with your left foot forward and with your left tegatana. Your tegatana should block in the middle of tachi’s right forearm. Also, crucially, block with your own forearm, with contact about two to three inches below your wrist. That matters because if you then relax your wrist, it naturally drapes over tachi’s forearm—meaning that you can easily pull on the forearm—as you do next. Pull and move to your own right, pivoting to your left as you do so. This will spin tachi around and you can quickly slide your left hand up under his elbow so that you can then push forward and throw him with oshi taoshi. He lets go of the sword as he goes into the fall.

For the fifth and final technique, when uke cuts straight down (shomen uchi), do a left taisabaki, going into a left-foot forward hanmi. Your left hand comes down over uke’s right (forward) wrist. Then grab the hilt between uke’s hands with your own right hand as you step forward with your right foot. Squeeze the sword towards yourself, using your right hand to pin it on your right hip. Next do something very complicated. (Or at least complicated for me to describe!) Take your left hand and snake it between uke’s two arms. It should go over his right arm (the closer one to you), under your own right arm (the hand of which is grabbing the hilt) and then come to rest palm-up just beyond the sword’s tsuba (hand guard). In particular, place the palm-up hand so that the back of it is touching the top (dull side) of the sword blade. Typically, it’s hard to reach so far and only the back side of your hand by the thumb will be touching the top of the sword. As you do all that complicated insertion, your hips will naturally turn a bit to the right. Once the hand is in, you turn back to the left (i.e. towards uke) and pull up while rotating the blade vertical (that is, the tip goes down and threatens to cut tachi’s groin in two). Tachi falls backward, his wrist having been locked, and the blade now threatening him. As he falls, he lets go of the sword