[chelviweeme]

To be honest, I don't see a nice way of dealing w/ national anthems and flags. When I first started kendo in CA in 1995, I remember there only being the US flag. I don't recall a Japan flag and I definitely don't recall the Japanese anthem being played. In the tournaments I've seen in the Midwest lately, I now see Canadian and Japanese flags and their anthems being played. Does including the Korean flag and anthem resolve the issue? What do the flags and anthems really represent? I think they have different levels of importance to different people, and my opinion is at a local/national level the local nation's flag and anthem is sufficient. At the international level, we should imitate the Olympics or follow what the rules for General Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) are. Then again, I don't particularly look forward to the ridiculous introductory pageant of the Olympics and playing every country's anthem.

If the matches are not meant to be national in nature (i.e., national teams), I don’t think they should bother with the national anthems & flags. The point here is that once they decided to do it, they should have included everyone. BTW – competitors from Hwa Rang Kwan who were there didn’t really care about this at all. They more or less laughed it off as the sponsors not being well prepared.

I wonder how the high level korean instructors view kendo and how they view the dynamic and energetic versions commonly seen from korean dojangs nowadays. Coming from a Japanese training background and starting at college, my view has been that the dynamic version is a product of not being overtly strict and restrictive in forms, extra emphasis on physical fitness, and allowing the players to develop and adapt to what they think works. Rather than emphasize points that are almost philosophical in nature, the player experiments with what works best for them. This dynamic form is also what you see a lot in Japanese high school and college kendoka, where natural ability and winning tournaments take priority. Even many of the younger players in US have similar styles. But then you see the steady style of the older and higher ranking senseis kicking the butts of these young practictioners. And some of these same kendoka eventually develop into the steady, metaphysical style of the high ranking senseis. You can argue that the steadier style is heavily influenced by physical capability, experience, and judging criterias, but I think most of us would agree that there are kernels of truth in ideas like seme, tame, controling the center, and other ideals. I would be extremely interested in hearing about how the older generation of Korean instructors perform their kendo and how they view the more dynamic version. My guess, which could easily be wrong , is there are more similarities to the steady metaphysical style than the dynamic style.

I would tend to agree with you. Dynamic style does not preclude the mental/philosophical aspect of kumdo – I think they go hand in hand. Physical & aggressive energy which is not controlled and focused in a disciplined manner is just wasted energy. Our master (he is quoted in the article) is always talking about the mental and philosophical aspects of the art, and my impression is that most Korean instructors are like that. And they do care about and pay a lot of attention to proper forms – you’d be hard put to score any points without proper form and attitude. This may be a case of different routes being taken to the same end point, as you point out.

The article was very well written, both informative and polite. The only thing that bothered me was saying the WKC happened every 4 years.

Yea – I noticed that. He also says keup is kiai. Keup is the non-black belt grade (numbers decreasing as you advance), Kiai in Korean is kiahp. If it can be written in Chinese, it’s probably a Chinese word with local pronunciations (which is usually very similar between Korea and Japan). But the author clear did his research.