Bujinkan

I'm in a martial art known as Bujinkan which means 'Divine Warrior' or 'Hall or House of the Divine Warrior' however way you want to say it. I personally think its a funny name for such a renowned martial art with all those thousands of years of ninja and samurai lineage. I liked its old name, the name it had back in ye olde days was Budo Taijutsu. However due to the imfamous Ninja Boom in the 80's, Grandmaster (or Soke) Hatsumi decided to change the to make it a little more secretive in the midst of many fake and illegitimate ninja masters that sprung up in during the Ninja Boom.


Anyways, I had made the decision to test today, meaning I'm going through all my techniques in front of the class and sensei. I have made commitments to test many times before, but never followed through on them. I'd always fall behind, or get caught up in other things at home or with friends and I don't have the opportunity to train very often. I always felt extremely bad for having sensei go though my techniques for me multiple times because I lose my notes (don't know how?) I'd really hate to use my 3-4 hour a day bass playing habit, or my friends as an excuse. Because there really is no excuse, I've been at the same rank since early June, and now its Febuary and I'm just now getting to it. I'm just glad I did it and got it out of the way. Sensei Heath Meadows (Nidan, second degree blackbelt), who usually runs class on wensdays basically told me last week, that I need to test now come hell or high water. He says pass or fail I should give it a shot, just to get it out of my system, and he's absolutely right. So today I asked Sensei Andrew Russel (Godan, fifth degree blackbelt) that I'm going to finally test. He said it was about time.


The test was sort of informal, they didn't have me test directly, but in the middle of doing techniques every now and then they'd have me go though some of them, and then later another set. I screwed up on my second techinque, drew a complete blank on the nihongo (The Japanese language, we use the language when ever we can) but every other techinique was alright, no major flaws. It went much smoother than I thought it would. Then after that I was paired up doing techiniques with Dustin, another blackbelt who usually trains up in Bexley and I went though a helleva beatdown. We were going through his techiniques, and I was uke which in Japanese I believe means punching bag, I have a couple light bruises, nothing bad, but it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt like hell. But in the end, after we bowed out I was promoted to Hachi Kyu which is a second degree green belt. The belt system in the Bujinkan is very weird, but I'll elaborate on that later.