Rare Footage: Haga Junichi, Genius Swordsman of Showa Period Kendo 

Is that Electrocompaniet sign?

Martial arts is based on understanding, hard work and full understanding of techniques. Good techniques are those involving fast changes, wide variety and speed. Body training, mind training, mind training True Knowledge The way to transcend karma is in the correct use of mind and will. The unity of all life is a truth that can only be fully realized when the false notions of a separate person, whose destiny can be considered apart from the whole, are annihilated forever. Emptiness includes everything and has no opposite, that is, there is nothing that it excludes or opposes. Become a wooden puppet: he has no ego, thinks nothing, is not greedy or clinging to anything or anyone. The expression of an artist is the display of his soul, education and composure. Behind all movements, the music of his soul becomes visible. The masters of all branches of the arts must first be masters of life, since the soul creates everything. The biggest mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the fight. Simplicity is the shortest distance between two points. Struggling behavior should not be different from normal behavior, his expression should not change, nothing should denounce the fact that he is engaged in deadly combat. A conditioned mind will never be a free mind. Fighter must always be a stubborn, single purpose: fight, without looking back or sideways. He must get rid of the restrictions of his movements, be they emotional, physical or intellectual. To meditate means to realize how imperturbable our original nature is. Concentration is a form of exclusion; It is a narrowing of the mind ...

Long Nguyen , that is not hard to learn. i mean not to look.

Flawless execution of the techniques without looking is hard.

Those who are saying that have never handled a katana Especially one as big as the one he is using for his frame.

Can you tell some of those stories here?

Heard iaidoka who train with sharp swords tell me they've all cut themselves at least once

@@eedwardgrey2 check that

xqcL

***** are you a swords man?

Very true

because van gogh was shit at kendo?

+shooter2055 wtf is this!? is this a rarity, of this old man, drawing and seathing his stick.... jes'....

Thank you for some really interesting information, Much appreciated.

You have to remember that this man likely started his training in the late 1800s (he looks to be in his 50s or 60s), so he likely received training from retired Edo-period samurai. I'm going to assume that they practiced iaido in a much different form than we do now. EDIT: Well, not *much* different, but different enough. EDIT2: Did some research, Junichi Haga was born in 1908, so he probably didn't learn from samurai, but he was only one generation removed, and may have even met the founder of his school, Negishi Shingorō, though he would only have been 4-5 at the time.

I agree completely This is probably much closer to true samurai than most of what we see today.

I think most of the appearance of jerkiness is due to the fact that the video isn't playing at the proper speed. It's playing too fast. Differences in detail as to how certain waza are performed aren't a problem, different Ryu (schools) are just different. I don't think it has anything to do with "modern vs. 'real samurai'". These are the same waza that are practiced today.

+Srdjan Milosavljevic Yeah I was about to say! That looks like guard!

Its like vale tudo quard..more open then classic BJJ

Up until 6:07, it's ALL Iaido "katas". (Waza is the more correct term than kata).

Yes i do, i would love to feel his ito

+Ivan Visita (Rukiokai) his chiburi(blood shake) and noto are impresive. well hes only doing 40 years 500 cuts a day probably

Sorry, Katana technique is NOT the same as in using a bolo. Ang layo. Bolo is hack-and-slash and dovetails well with daga y daga, arnis and other two-hand styles. Also goes well with a shield. Samurai ettiquette pretty much required you to have both hands on the katana when fighting and that alone has so many implications to the techniques used.

Me Owthorr If you mean the wakizashi, yeah, maybe you could be right. But not really

dosdadio siapa i use bolo too, but i put it on my spaghettis pastas, with parmesan powder on it. so yumyum everyone wants to nomnom!!

+Marc Augier we use bolo to gut animals or butcher them by kilos so that they can be eaten with so yumyum. many are also gutted in the belly or face while they nomnom. You do not even know how to use a bolo and you commented that way. I hope someday that you will be gutted in your fingers with a bolo while you put it in a pasta so you will know how terrible a bolo is.

dosdadio siapa so just for a joke about bolo and BOLOgnese sauce, you wish me to cut myself while cooking stuff, that's it? just "to know" (for your fun?)? you're fucked up man. bah, you're just human. even a dog would not wish this for another dog.

If you did kendo in order to know how to 'make minced meat of your fellow man', you absolutely missed the point of kendo. To train the mind, body and spirit is the objective of kendo, so that people don't do bad things to each other. That is atleast how I see it myself.

Mrakoplasz a nah, i do of course know about the effort that has been made to make kenjiutsu into a Do. But actually i can still smell where it came from: Killing your opponent.You hit men in order to slice the head, Kote, to cut his hand off and so forth. Add what is present in Japanese culture today, Zatoichi, Yojimbo, Lone Wolf etc. Slicing, Killing, Sepuku. That is strange to me today.

Mrakoplasz Your ignorance of what you believe in reminds me of religious fanatics who have never read their own holy books. You are the one who missed the point of kendo. You are obviously ignorant of the horrendous and sadistic atrocities committed by the samurai on the peasants and the unarmed civilians. Wholesale massacres and human trafficking of the civilians were casually carried out by the samurai, not to mention the systemic sexual violence on the female populations in times of war. These are well-documented historical facts. You are just a consumer of the "beautified" and "sanitized" rendition and sugar-coating of the real bushido, which was propagated by the modern Japanese media. The samurai was not about honour. It was about the willingness to engage in extreme violence with an unflinching eye. Such mindset invariably harbours sadism and inherent denial/disregard of any value attached to human life. After all, bushido is, more than anything, about unconditional obedience to your higher-ups, fearlessness in violent confrontations, and revenge, which also happen to be the defining characteristics of any modern organized criminal groups and street gangs, regardless of their cultural or national origins. The samurai culture is just a more refined and codified form of the business of the modern criminal organizations: the exploitation and subjugation of the unarmed and helpless peasants for the purpose of taxation ("protection money"), the competition over which one clan (gang) must engage in warfare with others, which in turn necessitates the obsession over the killing techniques and fearlessness in a turf war. But then again, the above description can apply to any class of fighting men serving the ruling class, ie, knights in Europe, although their behaviours and philosophy behind how they treated the peasants slightly differed from culture to culture. The difference is that the samurai were the ruling class PLUS the fighting men. Therefore, they were the self-serving fighting men, maintaining their own rule over the peasants.

BillboardTopMVlyrics You seem to be very knowledgeable in the historical aspect of "bushido," but you mentioned nothing about kendo itself. Therefore, I will assume that you know nothing about the role of kendo in modern life. Anybody that spends a reasonable amount of time practicing kendo would know how different modern kendo is from the former "killing techniques." You are right about how the artifacts of the past related to bushido and samurais are glorified, but that has nothing to do with modern kendo. Despite its origins, it is no longer about "killing" people, just like fencing. It has become a sport, and with training comes discipline. The "training of the mind, body, and spirit" is just a product of the process.

hofmanntho - Ditto. I did EXACTLY the same thing and after 24 yrs training, reached the same conclusions as yourself. I'd thought I was alone in this.

+Matheus Rebelo That's exactly what I was thinking, "What's this Iaido doing here?" And this is coming from a fan of German Longsword~ ^^

+Matheus Rebelo it is Iaido old style omori ryu and later eishin ryu.i would be very careful about judging level.its living art.and our iaido is probably far from Hasegawa Chikaranosuke Hidenobu origin

peter lukaszyk Oh, yeah, I wouldn't dare judge another martial art too critically. Not unless I felt confident enough with one I favor... and I honestly don't.

+Matheus Rebelo I would love to see you post a video half the length but of the same quality swordsmanship.

+Matheus Rebelo Kendo and Iaido used to be Kenjutsu.