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Old 11-16-2004, 05:05 AM   #4
Jim Simons
Dojo: Aikido in the Fan
Location: Richmond, VA
Join Date: Sep 2003
Posts: 21
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Freaky! Re: Bokken etiquette

Heh... Over the course of about a month or so, I was asked to switch all the bokken on the racks two or three times. We had them one way, and then a visiting Iwama instructor (our dojo is mostly ASU, but with one gent teaching Iwama on a particular night of the week) came for a dan grading and remarked that they were supposed to point the other way. Then our chief instructor came back from a trip to Hombu and suggested they should be flipped back... And so on.

Funny thing was, each of these folks had exactly the same reasoning: the point goes away from the door and away from the shomen. See, we train in an old garage; the weapons racks are mostly on the back wall. And there are large doors in <i>both</i> side walls... Fortunately no one was really taking all this seriously, more along the lines of "well, it should probably be this way, so let's go ahead and do it that way."

At least they weren't confused about which way the jo were supposed to point... ;-)
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