In the Japanese martial arts, the words “uke” and “ukemi” are important, subtle concepts, which don’t translate neatly into English. And these concepts apply across many, if not all martial arts. In this blog article, I’m going to look at these two Japanese words in some depth, to see what light this might shed on their meaning . . .
Sho 初 means first, new, beginning; and dan 段 means step: so the basic meaning of Shodan is first step. But something that practitioners often ask, is why do we use the word Shodan, instead of Ichidan (1-dan), given that the next ranks are Nidan (2-dan), Sandan (3-dan), Yondan (4-dan) and so on . . . ?
Every kanji tells a story . . .
The word Aikido 合気道 is pretty much impossible to translate into English precisely. We tend to say things like:
– The Way of Universal Harmony
– The Way of unifying (with) life energy
– The Way of harmonious spirit.
In trying to understand this complex word, it may help to know a little more about the three kanji that make it up . . .
For this post, I decided to analyse the kanji that make up some of the different Japanese words for “training”. Because they can be so hard to differentiate in English; so I wanted to shed some light on … Continued
This is one of a series of posts, where I analyse the kanji for key concepts in the Japanese martial arts, to see what interesting meanings can be found there. Today’s example is 礼 Rei.