By Peter Hedegård, Guest Writer

After a visit home to Japan, where among other things he had visited the Ko-Budo master Arakawa Busen from Rin-Bu-Kan in Tokyo, whose So-Kan Ryu nunchaku system we had previously trained, Tonegawa Sensei came to training as usual, and I asked him if he had had a profitable trip.

“Yes, very good…very good,.. I went to visit So-Kan Master….show me new kata”!

"Did you film it?", I asked, hoping that in that case I could get a copy of the video made.

“No”, answered Tonegawa Sensei, “but So-Kan Master very kind…..show everything twice”!

The mentioned kata turned out to be an H-kata, i.e. the movement pattern runs over an H-shaped ground plan, and included over 55 different actions and movements, and when Tonegawa Sensei started teaching me it, it took me more than 3 weeks to get even a rough consistency in the many combinations.

And the entire long kata had been "photographed" by Tonegawa Sensei and memorized just by watching it twice!

It made me wonder a little about the differences between European and classical Japanese training. Here in Europe, students are used to having everything explained, repeated, shown, corrected endlessly. They question the performance, the technique itself and the need to learn this particular technique, which they may find irrelevant or difficult.

In Japan, students are expected to practice what they are told, no more, no less. And they keep training until told otherwise. They are shown a technique - no explanations or elaborations, and then they practice it until their teacher is satisfied, or until he thinks they can't progress on their own, after which he corrects something and lets them practice further .

The difference is that in Europe the students have an expectation that the instructors must ensure that they learn something.

In Japan, the instructors have an expectation that the students want to learn what the instructors have to give them, and that they will therefore exert themselves to the utmost to learn it.

There is an old saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Just as little as you can force a horse to drink if it doesn't want to, just as little can an instructor "ensure" that a student learns something. It is 100% up to the student himself.

Tonegawa Sensei considered the second time Master Arakawa showed him the kata a gift…a gesture out of the ordinary, and his comment to me showed that he truly appreciated this gesture. Perhaps this was something to think about for the students who, due to a less than optimal concentration on the task at hand, must always have shown the same thing over and over again?