Imamura Tatsunori Sensei 今村樹憲 in Hong Kong

I did not have an opportunity to visit Hokkaido to go skiiing this year as my wife was afraid on the effect of the radiation on Japanese food so no opportunity to train with Imamura Sensei, 7th Dan, as I have done twice before. It's OK for us to eat Japanese food but we didn't want it to affect the kids. It just so happened that Imamura Sensei had planned a trip to Hong Kong as a graduation gift for his daughter and thus I took them around sightseeing. Despite his daughter coming down with diarrhea on the last day, I believe that they had a good time. I twisted his arm to come and teach at our dojo and he was kind enough to do so even though he was leaving the same day.

What was particularly interesting in the short 1 hour lesson that we took was that Imamura Sensei kept telling us to look at what was happening with uke's hips. It was really obvious that he was coming in under uke, and taking him off balance, one could see uke coming up slightly onto his toes. It's quite rare for Japanese Sensei to show this explicitly. And all this was done without tension, in a relaxed way. It was also a great opportunity to judge Imamura Sensei's Aikido from another perspective, away from his own dojo. Our members tend to be quite stiff and still use a lot of muscle, and he was able to handle it with ease, albeit not as smoothly as at his home dojo, where his students are probably used to taking ukemi for him. But for me it was more real.

Hokkaido International Aikikai    

Related Posts:

Aikido in Sapporo 
Aikido in Sapporo 2011