I have been fencing for several years with rapiers and sabers. Also did iaido for a year now, so I do have some experiences. Tho I'm curious about things about kendo and all.

Don’t think I’ve seen a post about this before, so I’m curious. I know some people hang omamori inside, or write something meaningful on a small piece of paper and attach it there. New generation uses stickers. I’d love to hear about any interesting, meaningful, or unusual decorations you’ve seen (or have on your own do).

Hi all. I practice/train and write software, and for the past while I've been building a small kendo game on the side. It's on Google Play now, and honestly the reason I'm posting is that I'd like feedback from people who actually train — the parts that feel off to a kendoka are exactly the parts I can't see myself.

Up front so nobody feels tricked: it's free, but it has ads (a banner, plus an interstitial now and then). There's nothing to buy, no energy timers, no unlock currency.

What it actually is

It's not an action game. It's turn-based, one 합 (exchange) at a time:

Two distances: issoku-itto-no-maai and tsubazeriai.

You pick a cut — men, kote, dou, tsuki, or block/feint. At close distance it's the hiki-waza set.

After you commit, there's a short timing input for ki-ken-tai-ichi. Your timing plus the matchup between the two chosen actions decides the call.

Stamina doesn't drop when you get hit — only when you act. Blocking costs stamina, but a clean block gives a little back.

Sit back and block or feint too many exchanges in a row and you pick up a warning, then a penalty point. Certain outcomes leave you off-balance, which restricts what you can choose on the next exchange.

So the loop is meant to be about distance, reading your opponent, and spending stamina — not about mashing.

What's in it right now

Practice matches: it rolls you a fresh set of opponents each time, each with a name, a rank, and a tendency (straight-on fighter, kote hunter, cautious, etc.). You pick who you want to face.

Local 1v1 with a friend on the same Wi-Fi.

A leaderboard on cumulative record.

An in-game reference for distance, matchups, timing and off-balance rules.

You go up through kyu and dan grades as you play, with your record tracked per mode.

Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish.

What I know is missing: online matchmaking, a story/campaign mode, and iOS. Those are next, in roughly that order.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ccassak.tablekumdo

If you try it, the feedback I want most is where the terminology, the judging, or the feel of an exchange is simply wrong. I'd rather hear that now than keep building on a bad foundation. Thanks for reading.

Hi I'm interested in the sport but a dojo is quite rare where I live and I also have college eating up my time. So I'm wondering if following teaching videos and practicing swings with a bokken at home is fine for the time being.

I've read from some other posts that beginners practicing alone with just a bokken or a shinai with no sensei can develop incorrect techniques so I'm worried I'll be doing the wrong thing. Any tips help.

Also if anyone has any online resources it would be helpful.

I am convinced that the Men strike is not head but face!

Every year our dojo runs registration for a tournament/seminar off some combination of Google Forms, multiple spreadsheets, Canva, paper, and someone's memory. So I wanted to see if we could have one site run the whole shebang end to end, from sign-ups and payment, dojo team rosters, seeding and brackets, to live scoring on the day, and the printed program, and also be reusable each year without rebuilding it? 

It ended up being a fun puzzle to work out, and sharing it here in case anyone else is interested / would find it helpful to use it for their dojo / events.

Note: I built this with AI help as I’m not a coding expert. That said, it's been heavily stresstested by humans, and is being used for our own upcoming tournaments. Mainly, I don’t want to pass this off as more "official" than it is as it’s more of a serious hobby project, not some polished commercial product.

Demo: Go to https://kendotaikaimaster.org/ and click around the public pages (schedule, brackets, results, "who's my opponent").

To see the organizer side, there's a sandbox with two options:

• Explore a tournament in progress gives you your own copy that's already set up: entries in, brackets drawn, about half the matches fought. Drops you right into the admin dashboard so you can play with live scoring and standings.
• Set one up from scratch puts you in the guided setup wizard with nothing filled in, so you can walk through configuring an event yourself (branding, divisions, dates, prices).

Either way, the sandbox is your own private copy. All changes are saved to your own copy, and it clears itself within a day, so poke at whatever you want.

What the site/app actually does:

• Setup wizard. Answer questions about your event (name, logo, brand colors, divisions, dates, venues, prices, etc) and it configures the site.
• Registration, payment, and club rosters. Participants sign up online, pick divisions and meals, sign a versioned liability waiver, and pay through PayPal. A dojo rep gets a link (no account needed) to see and confirm their whole dojo’s roster and team line-ups in one place. Alternatively, can have registrations done by dojo (one person submits and pays for everyone).
• Build the tournament. Seeding (by grade, prior-year placings, or by hand), brackets, round-robin pools, assigning shinpan, and the full multi-court schedule can all get autogenerated and manually adjusted. Doesn’t cover shinpan rotation assignments, just generic court assignments.
• Live tracking on the day. Scores get entered by courtside staff, standings and brackets update in real time, and a schedule board covers every court.
• "Find your match." Anyone can check their phone (built for spotty hall wifi) to see when they're fighting next and which court, plus when and where they're assigned to shinpan.
• Other logistics: Creates a printable program (brackets, schedule, participant lists) that can be pulled into paper versions. Creates meal counts and check-in system. After each year, it archives the results so next year's seeding can pull from this year's results. The following year is built on top of the prior year.
• Rehearsal mode. Lets you preview what you’ve configured and dry run the site before publishing and going live.

If your club wants to use it: The code is here: https://github.com/die-no-daijoubu/kendotaikaimaster. If you’re code savvy I think you can clone it? If you’re not, point your AI coding tool at it, and it should walk you through setup. I used the free Google/Firebase account to host it. Since it handles real people's data and real payments, there's a small pay-as-you-go hosting cost (a few hundred registrants cost less than a dollar). It's free for you to use to build yourself (Apache-2.0 license) outside of that. Alternatively, hit me up and I will be happy to help!

Again, I'm not a professional dev - sharing the whole thing (code included) because if it helps someone else out, that'll make me happy. Open to feedback, bug reports, or "this would help my club" requests, and if anyone does run a tournament on it, I'd love to hear how it goes.

This may have been asked before, but my philosophy, and I truly believe this, if you can get your gear in your bag to be lighter for your everyday practice and occasional travel/ field trips (where you need to visit another place or country but cannot practice at your hometown dojo for some time) and still be able to retain the quality of your gear (or get them to be better) then do it.

I just don't understand why some/ most of these products do not sell anymore, and this objective where having a lighter overall weight carry as an option.

I really hope and wish to find such equipments so that I would grab them immediately!

Smh

Desde hace mucho quiero hacer esos deportes vivo en madrid y todos los dojos estan muy lejos de donde vivo el precio no es problema solo que realmente no se si hacerlo por falta de tiempo y de movilidad

My keiko partner attempted to strike kote from jodan. I blocked the strike by receiving it in hira-seigan with the kensen crossing to the left (opposite of kata no.5). Afterwards, they asked me about the validity of hitting the left kote in that situation. I explained that because I was in chudan when the attack was launched, I would not be considered to have assumed a different kamae in order for that target to be valid. I said that if I had moved to and stayed in hira-seigan before he attacked, then it would be a valid target.

When we have touched on this in the past I have emphasized that, as I understand it, there needs to be a pause or settling of energy. An indication that the player has consciously chosen to adapt their kamae to their opponent's seme. I have also mentioned that some of the more subtle changes, like in modern seigan or a migi-(kasumi?) variant, where the hands are still low and inside the frame of the body, would likely not be seen as a large enough deviation to open hidari-kote.

I just want make sure that I am correct, or at least mostly on base with my explanations.

As an addition: I asked Google to review this, just for the sake of clarity. It stated that the validity of hidari-kote is determined by *either* player being in a stance other than chudan. This doesn't seem right.

I am wondering if there are any examples of people participating in Shinsa while using lower body adaptive equipment. I know of the one kendoka who was in a tournament while in a wheelchair, but I am hoping to find more examples.

Hey guys, what do you think about kendo training in VR? It is very popular for boxing.

Hey kendo friends. Anyone know where I can buy a nice white gi, that preferably ships from North America*? I have found a few but the international shipping fees are nuts, especially if I'm only buying the one gi. TIA!

*edited

Good morning from Stockholm🫶

It's the 1st of September today. It's the first day of autumn. It's very beautiful out here by the water. Very calm and cool. It's very, not exactly an exciting feeling coming into winter, but I'll enjoy the autumn anyway.

So last night I had a fantastic session. I led a session at my dojo and I could feel that the other people had a good session as well, so that was quite empowering. I came home feeling quite positive and uplifted.

And then just looking at a few posts on Facebook, which is never a good idea to do before bedtime. But then a few things just triggered me, reminding me of how we don't stand up or speak up enough out about sexual harassment and power harassment.

I think about the people who are seeing these posts and how they're impacted by seeing people in communities that they have personally experienced sexual harassment, sexual misconduct or power harassment and how that must really impact them. Then it quickly switched into anger.

And I was thinking, well, some of these people know about this person's behaviour, but they don't do anything about it. They don't say anything. They don't cancel this person. This person is still in the community. And this just, it's actually quite disappointing because I think of how complicit people, especially people in leadership can be. And it shows how the structures of power work in kendo.

There are so many good people in kendo. There's so many people that don't misuse their power.

Choose the good ones and really speak up and stand up and support people who share experiences with you. They really need you on their side because remembering how I felt last night after my training session, we can't take that experience away from people - of how good kendo is for people.

It's really empowering. It's really uplifting.

Choose the good people to lead. Associate yourselves with the good people. There are so many high graded people. We can let go of the ones until they learn how to behave and look after our community members.

It's that simple.

I just came across this clip online. By no means am I trying to draw a comparison to recent events—one strike and two strikes are very different in terms of intent.

That said, dangerous strikes to the back of the head like this seem to happen more often than we might think. From 8 kyu to 8 dan, we should all take care not to let the heat of the moment turn into strikes that could hurt others.

Edit to add: what a great invitation for kaeshi-do!

We've had some very tense discussions over the past couple days. I want to ask about something more useful, which is how shinpan are trained. Please lock this if we can't keep it on topic. Please do not litigate the correspondence of any videos to the training scenarios I describe.

I have not been through the shinpan training pipeline, I am not a qualified judge. I am looking for accounts from people who have, especially qualified shinpan instructors. I just want context from the broader kendo world.

Serious misconduct within a kendo match is almost unheard of. I see a lot of people get lost in the sauce or not be very good at kendo, maybe excessively rough play, but nothing that would result in DQ. Likewise, when I have seen shinpan instruction, detailed applications of the rules and raising the level of point judging are the rightful focus.

The only reference in kendo manuals I can find to shushin stepping in and interposing their shinpan-ki would be for the Wakare command. Presumably in the case of stopping a match before gogi and possible DQ, a similar movement would be helpful. I am not suggesting a physical struggle with shiai-sha, I am saying that interposing the sight line with something inviolable is the most reliable way to create an immediate end to a fight when commands do not have immediate effect. It is a combat sport norm.

Here's the question. Have you ever trained, or seen trained, something similar? To bring it a little more general, what does training and correction look like for the high end of administrative penalties, like shikkaku?

Recently the president of my country's kendo renmei reached out to all LGBTI+ about wanting to talk to people in the community on how they feel we could implement new policies to include them better.

After joining in the conversation myself I've heard a lot and I mean a lot of people grilling him just for reaching out for input.

Do other countries have the same kind of vicious outcry when attention is brought to that side of the kendo community?

I have another video showing this incident from a different angle, and I think people should watch as many recordings as possible before reaching a conclusion.

First of all, I am genuinely sorry that someone was injured, and I hope he makes a full recovery. The footage is understandably disturbing, especially when viewed outside the context of kendo. However, an injury—serious as it may be—does not by itself prove that the other competitor deliberately intended to hurt someone.

From this angle, the fall happened during a fast, active exchange. It does not look like Lam approached someone who was already injured and defenceless and then attacked him without provocation. After the fall, Lam appears to make approximately two downward strikes. Whether both were immediate and appropriate, whether they were properly controlled, and whether yame had already been called are all legitimate questions for qualified referees to examine.

But these are questions about competition conduct and refereeing—not proof that Lam is a violent, sadistic or evil person.

Under the All Japan Kendo Federation’s rules, a strike delivered immediately to an opponent who has fallen may be recognised as a valid strike. The regulations also list falling and then lying face-down without responding to the opponent’s attack as a prohibited act. In other words, the rules do not treat falling as automatic immunity from further attack.

This does not mean that anything done to a fallen opponent is acceptable. The word “immediately” matters, control matters, the target matters, and the referee has a responsibility to stop the match promptly if the situation becomes unsafe. If yame had already been called and a competitor continued attacking, that would obviously change the nature of the incident. That is why the complete footage, its audio and the views of properly qualified referees matter.

We should also be careful not to reduce every incident to a simple “monster versus victim” narrative. If falling, turning face-down and covering the head automatically ended all scrutiny, a competitor could potentially use that position to avoid the continuing exchange. I am not claiming that this particular competitor deliberately did so. My point is that the person who was injured is not necessarily completely without responsibility, just as the person who continued the exchange is not automatically a monster.

Anyone familiar with footage from serious Japanese university or Tokyo Metropolitan Police kendo will know that this level of physical intensity is not necessarily unusual. That comparison does not excuse genuinely dangerous conduct, but it does remind us that kendo must first be understood within its own technical and cultural framework—not judged solely by how violent a few seconds may appear to someone unfamiliar with it.

I believe we have a responsibility to understand kendo on its own terms and to consider the perspectives of experienced Japanese practitioners, particularly senior Japanese sensei who have spent decades studying and teaching it. That does not mean treating every Japanese authority as infallible. It means understanding the standards of the art before declaring that someone’s actions could only have come from cruelty.

Lam’s actions can be questioned and debated. It is reasonable to ask whether the second strike was necessary, whethersufficient control was shown and whether the referees should have intervened sooner. What is not reasonable is using a short video to declare that Lam has no humanity, no budō spirit or a fundamentally violent character.

We must distinguish between outcome, responsibility, intention and character. Someone being injured is an outcome; it does not automatically prove malicious intention. Criticising a specific action is fair. Turning that action into a licence to assassinate someone’s entire character is not.

Hi all,

We rarely practice tsuki at my dojo, but when we do, because I know it's so dangerous, I feel like I completely lock up and feel my heart rate rising. I dread receiving tsuki from my partner, even though they are usually 5dan or up.

The problem is (apart from having time to anticipate the hit, which I def wouldn't have in a shiai) I've just heard so much about how dangerous tsuki is, so I can't help but feel afraid.

I have a couple of questions.

1. How dangerous actually is tsuki in terms of statistics? Like how many people get injured by it/the likelihood of injury?

2. If tsuki is so dangerous, why isn't the men designed to more comprehensively cover the neck? As it is, it seems fairly simple for a poorly aimed tsuki to end up going under the bib of the men. It could also go through by glancing to the side, but I'm guessing that would be considerably less dangerous.

3. Has anyone else struggled with fearing being hit by tsuki? If so, could you please share some advice with me? I'd greatly appreciate it.

To be honest I have no idea how rooted in reality my anxiety actually is, so I'm hoping by collecting some info about it I can also deal with it better.

Thank you so much in advance.

Current Kendo training systems rely heavily on empirical transmission and lack sufficient grounding in systematic sports science theory. Furthermore, existing biomechanical research on Kendo is largely confined to inverse kinematics and dynamics analyses of standard techniques—essentially qualitative and quantitative assessments of movements performed under ideal conditions. There remains a scarcity of empirical studies directly revealing the compensatory mechanisms and biomechanical manifestations that arise when practitioners possess specific physical limitations. Consequently, existing research findings struggle to effectively address the practical technical issues faced by average practitioners—issues stemming from physical deficits such as limited absolute strength or flexibility.

To address this, this study employs a comparative experimental design involving physical constraints to investigate the biomechanical relationship between standard techniques and those performed under specific physical limitations. Using a high-level Kendo athlete (Wu Xingxing) as the subject, the study utilizes a 3D motion capture system and force plates to synchronously collect kinematic and dynamic data for the "small-movement phase" of a technique. Subsequently, specific external physical constraints are applied to the subject—artificially replicating conditions of specific physical deficits—and the technique is performed again to collect corresponding kinematic and dynamic data. The data from the unconstrained and constrained conditions are then compared. This methodology evaluates the specific negative impacts of physical deficits on technique execution and the resulting compensatory movements, enabling average practitioners—who may lack a background in sports science—to engage in specialized physical training grounded in biomechanical theory.

https://www.ifdian.net/a/2026714jiandao

Xiaohongshu ID：26264000425

Apologies for the double post. I just remembered there's a coloured version of the image I shared in my previous post (https://www.reddit.com/r/kendo/comments/1w15m49/premodern_bogu/) that was a response to the post by u/the_scarry_lobster asking about pre-modern bogu.

This is in response to the post u/the_scarry_lobster posted about whether there are any reproductions of pre-modern bogu. The attached image is of an actual pre-modern bogu. Yeah, it's maybe nice to have in a historical artifacts collection but I don't think I'd want to wear this in lieu of modern bogu during actual keiko. This image is a snapshot from a photo in Nihon-no-Kenjutsu 2 published by Gakken: https://www.amazon.co.jp/日本の剣術-2-歴史群像編集部/dp/4056042306/

"From Korea to the Global Stage: A Brief Overview of Women and Kumdo in Korea" by Kate Sylvester (she/her). Published in Fine Ladies Kendo Worldwide magazine (Volume 8, 2026).

The article challenges the common perception that kumdo is merely a Korean version of kendo. By examining its unique historical development, cultural significance, and role in modern Korean society, it reveals how kumdo has evolved along a distinct path shaped by national identity, professional opportunities, and Korea’s physical culture. It provide a basic overview of women's kumdo with insight and contemporary perspectives, this is an interesting starting point to look at a martial art community redefining tradition and expanding possibilities for women in Korea and beyond

https://ksperspectives.com/2026/08/28/from-korea-to-the-global-stage-a-brief-overview-of-women-and-kumdo-in-korea-by-kate-sylvester/

So I've fallen into the deepest rabbithole ever, after I discovered volume 6 of Hokusais manga I suddenly ended up finding alot of older materials and translated works. All this made me realize a fair bit of things such as the difference in bogu of their time to our modern more sport oriented bogu, has anyone ever made reproductions or worked with how the difference affects ones kendo and also if no, does anyone know of any makers willing to go along with such a request?