Hajime Class and Final Classes 2025
What an incredible year we have had here at Aikido Shoshinkan Tokachi! I cannot believe how much we have achieved and grown. Students numbers are now sitting at 20 split across the adults and children, we might not be the biggest club and have seen some students come and go, but quite a few have really stuck with the club since they started and have become the heart and soul of our group. I mentioned to our friends in Nottingham that we have build a real family centred and friendly group that makes anyone feel welcome. Growing steadily over the year and building a solid foundation foe the long term. We started with Monday Classes and sometimes Wednesday in Obihiro, but now we have both the Monday and Friday classes in Memuro and put the Wednesday After school classes on hold as it is quite difficult to find a place to train. I have never been at the dojo and not had anyone turn up to train with me. I’ve had a single students a handful of times, but that has been very rare. Most classes have at least 5 kids and 5 adults. I’ve counted up the total number of participating student attendance hours and the kids have rocked up over 600 classes!! The adults are at about 250 classes - How amazing!
This year we held two gradings and now have three 8th Kyu and three 7th kyu students in the adult classes, the kids classes have 5 orange belts (Kids 7th Kyu) and 1 red belt with four more on their way! We have given out over 20 badges for the Badge Challenges and had our first student gain the Ukemi 1 badge this year.
We also held three online classes, we started at a local high school’s judo dojo, but found the sound difficult to hear in the big hall and the small screen not very helpful, but recently I started BJJ and they had a really nice dojo with a big projector. So thankfully the master allowed us to hire it for the afternoon and it was incredible. Narita Sensei was able to talk directly to the students and we could easily see what he was asking us to do. I am looking forward to the next one in 2026. It also made me realise how much I am missing by not regularly training with Tad Sensei. So my upcoming trip to the UK and hard weekend of training with him before Christmas is going to be invaluable.
In August we held our 1st Anniversary Demo, it was our first ever one and the students did an incredible job, it lasted over an hour with the students demonstrating all aspects of their skills and training and also showing off some special skills such as using a tanto. I have started to think about how I can start training them for the next one in 2026.
To finish off the year we had a fun class with the kids with loads of games and a big final Badge Challenge. It was nice to see the group grow so quickly and how much the children have stuck with their training. I will talk to Tad Sensei in the UK about how to better improve my teaching and curriculum.
For the adults we had a Hajime class, I know Hajime means ‘start’ or ‘begin’ in Japanese, but what it refers to is the call the teacher uses in the class to start each part of the training. It was a tough training session that both Tad Sensei and Rowan Sensei helped me understand the format and concept of. We started with a simple stretch warm-up and then straight into a strict Kamae practice followed by a gruelling long Kihon Dosa training. We did each one 20 times and held extended positions for long periods - working the students really hard. If they thought that was tough we then went onto back break-falls and ended up doing 125 non stop!! I was so surprised how well the students stuck with it and were willing to keep going though it. For the techniques we did Yokomen Uchi Ikkajo Osae 1 and Shomen Uchi Shomen Iriminage 2. Here we practiced them a few times then went into Hajime mode where the sensei calls ‘Hajime!’ and all the pairs do the technique once then hold kamae until everyone is done. Repeat this about 30 times and we were all sweating buckets!! The final part was the conditioning, we did loads of pair training and finished with the circle of hell where we held squats as a group holding shoulders in a circle. We were all pretty exhausted and very much ready for our final beer together at the end.
I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to train with these people and make friends with them. The club is them and I couldn’t have done any of this without them.
