6/4 Kendou

Today after exploring the nearby mall in Kashiwa, we went to a middle school in Kohoku to  learn a little bit about Kendou. We rode the train to Kohoku and took a taxi to the middle school. We had to take off our shoes before entering the school, bow before entering the dojo (at least, I think it's a dojo) , and take off our socks before walking on the hard wood floor. We then watched the kids practice kendou. From what I understood, the class was split between first-year and third-year students. The first-year students did some basic practice moves on each other and the third-years actually sparred.

I was a bit terrified that these 12-14 year-olds were going to beat me to a pulp.

Here are some pictures of the dojo and kids' fighting -

I drew black circles over the kids' faces to hide their identity. :)

After watching the kids fight, we had to try some of the moves ourselves. It was a workout! We learned different ways of how to hit someone, and each way came with a word you had to yell out with volition. My yells usually came out really soft and awkward, though. Towards the end we had to do a combination of moves. One combination was to hit them on the head while yelling "meh", and run to the side of them and across the room. I probably made a huge idiot out of myself but the students' were really friendly and were willing to help us out. During our break, some came up to us to try and talk. The older ones were a lot shyer, but some younger girls seemed really excited to talk to us and we attempted to communicate in broken Japanese. Because the break was only 5 minutes, we couldn't talk too long before getting back to it. 

I didn't get too many pictures beyond this, as I was too busy trying to hit a fourteen year old with a big stick in a proper manner. But here's a video of the upperclassmen really going at it. We were all a bit terrified. 

After the kendou class, we went to go have some ramen and explore a shopping center in Abiko before going back to Kashiwa and playing some uno. Tomorrow will be a yukata class along with our first day of travel Japanese. Hopefully it goes over as great as all the other cultural activities we've done so far!