Number 10. Nice round decimal number. As is 100.
Everything goes along swimmingly today, jogeburi here, single-time men-saburi there. Yeah, give us something to challenge ourselves fellas!
And so they do: first they ask us to do one-handed men. With right fist on hip and our shinai in our left, away we swing. Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Rokku. Shichi. Hachi. Kyu. Jyu. My god that's tough! For an unfamiliar left arm like mine, it really is hard (and now, it actually is hard as stone, as a result of doing this repeatedly). My arm was aching after 10 of these unfamiliar swings. Pounding aching. "Do it again". I aint no skinny, freckled, chicken-chested nerd person who doesn't see the sunlight, despite having a blog. Oh no! And yet my (now rippling) bicep was totally thrown by having to swing this shinai back and forth, from 45° behind the head to our imaginary opponent's now nicely sliced open forehead, held only by my left hand.
Now the tricky thing was not actually the strength needed in the arm to raise the shinai, but the strength required to stop it at the right point. Not letting it swing too far forward so it is lodged deep within my victim's brain and takes two hands and a leg to wrench it out and move on to the next screaming psychopath. And to stop it, we use tenuchi. Tenuchi describes the squeezing of the shinai handle to give you more control of your implement. You see, if I was to just swing a sword at you and your beady eyes staring at me, and didn't use tenuchi, my blade would probably bounce off your skull after cutting ever-so-slightly into it. Just a wee cut. But if I use tenuchi, that is, a tightening of the grip at the end of my stroke to take control of it, I would be able to pass through the barrier that is your skin and skull and hairline with absolute surety, and, well, there'd be a lot of blood and those beady eyes would be kinda dulled.
The other thing that single-handed men help with is getting the line right. Each stroke is mean to come straight down the centre of the body, not waving the shinai around like a proud Pole in Rome with his red-and-white flag. The left hand is the driver, the right hand steers. So the left hand is really like a brain-numbed Pole on a kielbasa production line 20 years ago, eternally repeating the same tasks, day in, day out. Raise, strike, return to kamae, raise, strike, return to kamae, raise, strike, return to kamae. While it's the right hand which gets to lark about, decide this cut should hit the do, the stomach armour, this one should hit from the right at a 45° angle, this one should take out my opponent's wrist, decide which stroke to play. All the while my poor old solid, reliable southpaw just keeps on truckin', raise, strike, return to kamae, raise, strike, return to kamae... And one-handed men sure makes you know what your left and right arms are doing, and how!
So with aching left arm, we launch stright ito something else to test us: that's one hundred double-time men-saburi. It doesn't sound so hard. All we have to do is step foward and swing ourselves a nice, centred men cut, and then step back while doing another. Fifty times. With our left arms pounding. And it's not so easy. Making sure every part of every stroke is as good as it can be, that your footwork is correct, your kiai is strong enough and you have a vague idea of where you are in the 100 cuts. And so we struggle through this, breath coming shorter. Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Rokku. Shichi. Hachi. Kyu. Jyu. Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Rokku. Shichi. Hachi. Kyu. Jyu. Ichi... and make it to the end! Hurrah! "How was that?" wer're asked, "hard?". Our response, in unison: "Hai!". "Excellent", he says, "One hundred more". Groan.
Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Rokku. Shichi. Hachi. Kyu. Jyu. Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Rokku. Shichi. Hachi. Kyu. Jyu. Ichi... Jeez this is getting tough. I'm losing concentration, my strokes are all over the shop like a mad woman's custard, I'm starting to think I might not be able to make it to 100 again. Exhausted. And then the kiai kicks in. "Kiai louder" he says, and as I do, like a revelation from the Lord, the clouds open, a shaft of light catches my eye and the Virgin Mary is there, smiling softly, just like at Fatima. Well, nothing like that at all really, no light, no madonna, and especially no revelations to pox-ridden children, but the louder I kiai, the easier it is to execute the stroke. And the better I seem to be doing it. Real mind-over-matter stuff.
So there are two things at work here, in the death of 100 cuts: the zen of repeating the same motion over and over again, focussing on it in the most minute detail, refining it, again and again; and the mind propelling the body forward, like those slight mothers who can lift the car their children are stuck beneath.
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