This repository is intended to -- gradually, over a long time -- hold my collected notes on iaidō, jōdō, and kendō kata. It is very much an incomplete work in progress, and will always be a living, ever-changing thing, as I do not expect ever to be done in this pursuit. There will be errors, omissions, pure opinions, and sometimes speculation, but the main purpose is to collect and order my thoughts, to force me to analyse what I do, formulate it in words, find inconsistencies, and -- by putting it all out here -- humbly invite you all to help me do so. To contribute, please consider opening a discussion or an issue to discuss the particular matter, or, if you find a typo or (the horror!) a grammatical error, a pull request with a correction. If you are not a programmer by trade and don't already have a GitHub account, or just want to give me some light feedback, don't hesitate to contact me via other channels (which I will inconveniently omit here, since I expect mostly existing contacts to find this page).
What prompted me to embark on this overly ambitious (not to say pretentious) project was that I found, in my own struggling training as well as in teaching junior students, that far too many things are unquestioningly accepted and handed down as divinely revealed truths. Angles, footwork, hand placement... Many important details are treated as things we just have to do in a certain way because some important person (or the cowled technical council in their infinite wisdom) decided so, rather than as naturally emergent properties in specific contexts. Most things, once you understand why you are doing them, are actually quite simple. I, like many others, have had to discover the long and hard way why certain things work and other not, but it is rare to find these explanations collected in one place.
Although a few of the points herein are genuinely my own conclusions -- usually ones that are too obvious for my seniors to have even bothered telling me (but surely there are some as slow as I who may benefit from having these in writing) -- most are pieces of the larger puzzle that I have learnt from more experienced teachers and senpai over the years, and simply tried to collect in writing and share with others. Thank you all.
Rickard von Haugwitz
Shōbukan, Gothenburg, Sweden