May 2010: Sumi sensei at Shubukan (First day)

This is not a usual report about one of my trips, but the report of the visit of Sumi sensei (8 DAN Hanshi) at our dojo in Torino.
Sumi sensei and his collaborator Tashiro sensei (8 DAN) visit our dojo in Torino every year. For all the people in the dojo it is a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot from this visit.
This time Sumi sensei will be in Torino from May the 14th to May the 16th.
We started the training at 8:00 p.m. We were about 50 persons mainly from Italy but there were also two people from Edinburgh (UK) and Mr. N. Yokoyama (5 Dan), in Italy for holidays.
This time I used a little video kamera located in the lower part of the men. Although it does not have the video quality and the wide view of normal video camera it give me the possibility to record the lesson and to practice at the same time.
We started with a brief warm up with stretching supervised by our instructor W. Pomero (7 Dan) followed by basic suburi.
Before the men tsuke Sumi sensei welcomed us to the seminar and guarantee an interesting and hard practice ^_^
After few rounds of kirikaeshi Sumi sensei started the lesson describing how to do a training about kirikaeshi. In the first part of the lesson he focused on the kakaritè site, which is summarized on the following video.

I apologize for the low quality of the sound but breathing silently in the men is quite difficult, especially after few rounds of kirikaeshi.
We run on kirikaeshi for some minutes and Sumi sensei described the training for motodachi during kirikaeshi, which is summarized in the next video.

We continue to work further on kirikaeshi and then we moved to some rounds of men tayatari men, men tayatari kote, men tayatari do.

After Sumi described how next round of jigeiko should be done. He focused on the point that there must be mind connection between motodachi and kakarite. Motodachi should let kakarite hit if the attack is genuine if not motodachi should use counter attack.
The jigeiko was set in the following way: kakaritè makes three long kiai and motodachi answer, after kakaritè make for big men followed by the kirikaeshi previously described. After kakaritè need to bring down to the tanden the power throwing out the breath twice before starting jigeiko. In the next video you will find a demonstration where kakaritè is W Pomero and motodachi is Sumi sensei.

We had about 30 minutes of this jigeiko which resulted to be quite heavy since when you get finally at the jigeiko you are completely without breath.
I managed to do a total of five jigeiko and I was so lucky to practice with all three Japanese sensei present at the seminar: Tashiro sensei first, then with Mr. N. Yokoyama and finally with Sumi sensei.
In the next video there are the three jigeiko.

The way I did the video showed me a tip I never realized, till now. During the jigeiko I keep turning around to sensei's shinai tip with my tip, trying to create an occasion to attach. This results on the fact that the sensei's shinai tip never get out of the center and instead I loose the center. So, I have to clean up my kamae removing useless shinai's movements.