The ways of the bo

I've titled this post very similarly to an excellent post recently made by oniyagi on his blog. I say similarly because you can see the tiny "s" added to the word "way" from his post to mine. That's because I've been learning many ways to handle the bo in the last year.

First way was in our competition bo class. These classes, taken after Andrew had picked the bo as his weapon of choice and I simply tagged along, became very interesting to me, very quickly. In open bo competition, you could pretty much make your kata as you go along. Bo movemement is very fast, although still very crisp. There's some spinning of the bo, which some people might refer to as "baton twirling". I don't care much for how other people call it as I have fun practicing it. As weird as this may sound, it relaxes me to handle the bo, toss it in the air and pick it back up. I do have some spins incorporated into my bo kata, but I also try to keep all strikes as meaningful as possible. This kind of bo kata is pretty much the most "artistic" I've ever been in my life.

Then came a first sort of more traditional bo handling in my learning of Sushi no kon sho. There's no spinning in that kata, lots of blocks followed with strikes, some who don't look so much powerful but more precise, and some other which are powerful downward strikes. Some differences about hand placement during these powerful strikes are still giving me trouble while doing this kata. While your hands are placed each to a third of the tips of the bo when you bring the bo over your head to strike, you slide your right hand down a bit as you strike downward. That way, with your left hand being the lower one, your right hand will end about a forearm's length from your left. Will need to practice that to perfect it.

Finally, a third way, even more traditional, is the kobudo way. We'd brushed that kind of bo handling back in May and we practiced it again for the whole hour of yesterday's class. Man that was interesting, confusing at first, but very interesting. We spent some time perfecting the strikes, yeah, yet again, as there are, again, some basic differences. Whereas you never really reverse your hands with either the open style or the first traditional style I'd practiced, now we were asked to reverse them on the bo to be able to do strike both right and left handed, both times going downward. I mean, in open style, we often have strikes where the left hand is the forward hand, but these are usually strikes where you're going upward. We finished the class with a few sparring type techniques where you were first asked to block, then disarm and finally strike the attacker.

I found that class to be absolutely great but the most exciting part of the night was actually right after the class itself had ended. The instructor that gave us class yesterday was not our regular Monday night instructor, although he usually assists on those Monday night classes. Right after the class ended, four of us discussed with him of how interesting that kind of class was and he told us that he's been taking classes of kobudo weapon handling with the idea being to eventually offer some of these classes at our school. He then demonstrated some of the bo kata done in this very traditional way, even doing our pinan 1 kata with a bo. I told him that if they needed to build a list of names of people interested, they could put my name down right now. I would be very interested in a class like that.

He added that not only the bo would be part of that kind of class, but also the sai, the tonfa, the kama, and even the sansetsukon (or three sectional staff). That last one scares me to death to be honest with you. :)

FM