How Sword Arts Can Complement Your Existing Curriculum
In today’s martial arts dojos in North America, we increasingly see schools offering more than one art and usually these additional arts fulfill different needs or specialize in different aspects of the combat situation (eg. a karate school adding a jujutsu component to address the ground-fighting situation). The classical Japanese sword arts (an armed art) are a fascinating departure from unarmed arts and can fulfill those other needs that your students may have that they do not receive from training in your current curriculum.
In our experience, there are ways to incorporate our classical sword arts (kenjutsu, iaijutsu) into your curriculum. Here are some ways our sword arts have been offered at various dojos:
1. as a valuable addition or extension to an existing curriculum. In one example from a karate dojo, our sword arts have been used as a further extension of an existing black belt curriculum (ie. as a higher level of attainment). In another example, an aikido dojo uses our sword program as a “reward” for their high-level students. Since they already do aiki-ken, the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu program (because the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, also studied this system in his youth) is used as the ultimate incentive for those high-level students who aspire to learn more about weapons and the sword (and the roots of aikido), to keep them motivated and also to reward them for decades of service to the dojo, the head instructor, and the style or system.
2. incorporated as an integral part of the existing curriculum. Parts of our sword arts program (ie. specific katas or weapons sets) have also been designated as another one of the requirements that must be accomplished in order to attain a certain rank in their style (ie. in order to achieve shodan rank in a certain karate dojo’s system, the student must also demonstrate a working knowledge of basic sword kata #1, etc…). There are many ways to do this.
3. as a separate curriculum in itself. In this scenario, our arts have also been packaged as a special interest course alongside a dojo’s existing curriculum but not as a part of it. In one case, a dojo had their original unarmed stream, such as karate or jujutsu, and then they offered a sword arts stream for those students interested in exploring armed arts. This keeps the original curriculum intact and adds the sword course(s) as another interesting offering to add variety to the mix of courses offered by the school to its students.
As can be seen, these are just some of the ways to incorporate sword arts into the offerings presented by your school.