Annual MWKF Summer Camp

August 8-10, 2003  Kalamazoo, Michigan
All photos by Dave Christman

 

Notice Scott listening intently to Ron Fox and Ken Sakamoto demonstrating sanbonme from the ZNKR kendo kata. The kata practice was all Saturday afternoon, almost 4 hours worth. They finally finished with 45 minutes of jiyu-geiko. It was very nice to see Mr. Fox and Mr. Mike Murphy, they came down from the MSU Club for the afternoon and both Scott and Lil' Bob had a chance to spar with them. They are old and dear friends of mine.

'Big' Bob Mack practicing kata with the advanced group. Here he is with Mark Kenoyer, Mark always organizes and brings down a good size group from U of Wisconsin, all the way from Madison.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gym, Hooper sensei was making sure everybody had a thorough understanding of ipponme-mae. (kata #1) From front to back in the center row - Chris Rogers (BC), Tom Okawara (Choyo), Charles Ham (EMU
Here is Bronson Diffin and Ray Nelson both from our dojo working on their O-chiburi.

It was such great weather, we had a room rented to practice Iai indoors for Saturday evening, and didn't use it. Straight outside our door was the campus quad, about 2 acres of lovely cool grass. Hooper sensei couldn't resist. Good time for practicing the tachi-iai, the kata #5 through 12. Here Charles is helping sensei show the bunkai of kata #5 Kesa-giri.
Hooper checks Reiko's kesa-giri. She is a professional piano player playing this summer with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. 
This is a view in the other direction, so you may see our dorm in the background. Kalamazoo's campus is so nice for seminars, it's compact and easy to walk to any location on campus.
 Saturday night is time to party, and discuss kendo theory over some brewski's. We destroyed some of those and tore through about 6 bags of various chips. Here it seems sensei Hooper and Tagawa are talking about two different things!

 More party pic's.

 Notice we even have chandeliers.
This year we re-established an old summer camp tradition: 7:00 a.m. TAISO !  Yes a pre-breakfast warm-up outdoors....only concession was it was OK to show up in your normal clothes, kendogi not a requirement. 
Almost everybody rolled out of the sack for this, the few who didn't were ribbed pretty hard. Tagawa sensei led the exercises, and we were afraid for a moment we going to be doing 1,000 suburi !  But alas, not enough time before breakfast. 

 

 

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