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P.S.
I have a student who has done western (french?) fencing for many years. For a large man he is extremely fast in Japanese fencing - however he finds it very difficult to not use his right foot forwards because this is the way he trained! I think training on one side is rediculous.
Also, what 'side' do you train on? e.g. although we might do ikkyo from a right handed attack all the time, if we go to do sokumen-irimi-nage/kokyu-nage and uke tries to block our hand, we then have to do ikkyo on the blocking hand, which is their left hand. Training equally on both sides seems not only necessary for balancing the body (and Ueshiba did say to train both sides equally), but is also essential for self-defence in the long term (though maybe not essential in the short term).
I would be extremely interested Peter if you could tell me where it says that Kano was better because he trained just on one side - I have never heard this before.
Ian
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