I’ll be challenging Shodan next December barring any unexpected circumstances that prevent it. I can grade again in 6 months except that the next grading opportunity is in 5 months and the one after is in one year. I completed my kata and etiquette in 5 minutes and 23 seconds.
I went back slightly further than necessary, but in the higher levels that tested after me, someone failed for being in front of the line. I didn’t forget my kata or skip things, but I couldn’t focus on counting my steps back to the line. Etiquette was a difficult thing for me to learn for some reason and I definitely don’t think I’m close to mastering it, but at least I’ve improved considerably in that area.ĭuring the kata, I tried to take my time and get my sword and feet in the right places. I had to tuck my sageo twice instead of once to make it neat. This meant it was technically further in my lap than it should have been, but I figured that was better than dropping it and making a bunch of noise. My thumb was growing numb, my hand was sweating, and I worried I would drop my sword, so I used my other hand to help hold it. When it came time for me to sit in the chair, it was hard to sit properly as we were told we had to sit very erect and on the edge of the seat. I tried to look mainly at the wall above the judges as I didn’t want to watch others do their kata and worry that I wasn’t as good as them. I was standing behind the chair of the person who would be going up after the person who was already on the floor. This meant that I got my testing done early, but it meant that I spent a lot of time in the testing room waiting for my turn. Well, I was in the 3rd group of my rank challanging for Ikkyu. This was a little unnerving, but I thought back to my days in the theatre. There is an observation area right near where I was practicing. We got a little time to practice beforehand. Just go and do my kata to the best of my ability and stop thinking about the other stuff. My sensei posted a “Keep calm and do your Iai” meme, which was nice. Add to that the nervousness of my friends who were also grading, them thinking I was crazy for choosing Uke Nagashi, and I was a little scared. For months I’d been told things that would cause me to fail like dropping my sword, stabbing myself, not getting back to my line, looking at a judge, sloppy clothing, poor sageo control, exiting or entering the dojo and/or floor improperly, forgetting katas, doing katas out of order, looking around the room, bad footwork, running into others while doing my kata, not going down to one knee in the katas that require it (especially mae), etcetera. The day of the exam I felt a mix of low level excitement and terror. The night before the exam, I had trouble getting to sleep. I chose Mae, Uke Nagashi, Morote Tskui, Sanpo Giri, and Ganmen Ate. For the practical portion I had to perform 5 Zen Ken Ren kata of my choosing.
The Ikkyu written exam asked me to label the parts of the sword and explain some techniques. There’s also the likelihood that there isn’t enough higher ranks to vote on awarding a 9th Dan.Īll this to say that I recently went to my first Iaido grading.
Allowing no one to go beyond 8th Dan is partially about respecting the history and lineage of the art and partially about realizing that today the highest levels are all about the same in skill as each other. Times have changed considerably as we don’t have swordsman as a profession, so the idea with the elimination by Kendo is partly because it’s inconceivable to think that someone studying the art today could ever get to the level of proficiency that was seen in ancient times. In the time of the samurai, 9th and 10th Dan were voted on by a committee. Given that Iaido is part of the same organization (at least in Canada) and there is no information about wait times between ranking, Iaido has either done the same thing or votes on those ranks. Every other level has a minimum waiting period as follows:įrom what I’ve read on various forums, Kendo has eliminated the 9th and 10th Dan rankings. Between No Kyu and Ikkyu is up to the descretion of the sensei. There are waiting periods between each rank. I believe this is because we swing swords around and even someone who hasn’t done the art extremely long can kill someone with a sword, thereby making them more dangerous than the average inexperienced martial artist. So in essence we go from white belt to brown belt and skip the ranks that are in between in other arts. If needed, seniority can go as granular as the day you first came to the dojo to train. If you don’t know, you err on the side of them being higher than you. How do we do ranking in the dojo? You just know who’s ranked higher than you are and line up appropriately. We don’t have a belt system our belts are simply to keep our hakama up and our katana in the right place.
Iaido has a different grading system than other arts.