The Last Part of the Kata

At Shugyo, a blog about iaido and jodo training, the author made a post specifically about the last part of each iaido kata, the noto. It's worth reading and considering for every form that we practice.

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

The arse end of the kata

I was once told during a written examination of iaido in Japan, that the four "columns" of iaido consisted usually of nukitsu, kiritsuke, chiburi and noto. Every kata, more or less, contained all of these elements. Each possesses an essential quality of its own:

• Nukitsuke would be expressed by a range of strategies including taking the enemy by surprise, seizing the moment, controlling or suppressing their attack etc.
• Kiritsuke* would be expressed as a decisive termination of the enemy's life once the exponent had decided that this was the only solution.
• Chuburi would be an expression of zanshin once the distinct fighting part of the kata is over to release the body and unseize the mind.
• Noto additionally would be an expression of zanshin, almost the complete reverse of nukitsuke, but being uber aware during this dangerous moment of the sword being resheathed thus being a moment at which the exponent was most vulnerable to an additional attack. 

*For those kata that are concluded with a thrust, this element would be called Tsukizuke which is both difficult to pronounce without spitting and is a homophone of "moon pickles". 

Despite each of these elements being self-evidently vital, I sometimes (often) notice the tendency for noto to be given a slightly lower position on the priority ladder. It seems that once all the sword waving and posing for the camera had been completed, noto was a fiddly detail that one had to get through in order to progress to the next kata.

Given the number of minor injuries that I and others had suffered while doing noto, this feels like a wasted moment if not given the same priorities as the other elements in the kata. I mean, just because the letter "Z" is at the arse end of the alphabet, it doesn't make it less important - ask any Polish person! 

To illustrate this vital point, here is a list of the names of some my closest Polish friends with the Z's in their names caps'd and in bold.

•  LukasZ Machura
• Michał SZcZepański
• Paweł BrZeZiński
• AgniesZka KrawcZyk
• Marcin Zyga
•  Ziemowit ZenZiZenZiZenZic (shortened to "Domański")

Most of them have more Z's in their name than vowels! Some has more Z' than letters!

Back to the story... 

During 2024 and 2025 I spent some considerable time in Japan training at Shinbukan while students of our dojo prepared to take 6th and 7th dan exams in iaido and jodo. It just so happened during one of these visits, while coaching a 6th dan iaido candidate who had just been landed with her brand new shinken, that Ishido Sensei explained in detail the method of doing horizontal noto i.e. that used in Muso Shinden Ryu and other ryuha.

While I had picked up snippets of this methodology over the years, this was the first time to have it explained in such comprehensive and complete detail. Additionally, Ishido Sensei over the last year during my visits was very focused on the correctness and general performance of noto.

He showed me a scratchy old black-and-white video of some very old iaido masters (who were also scratchy and black-and-white) doing demonstrations and at one point, emphasised how, despite age affecting their speed and power in nukitsuke, kiritsuke and chiburi, their noto still contained the essential aspects of speed, fluidity, control and zanshin vital for a well performed noto. He told me that while most people could learn speed and power within a few years, true quality from decades of practice becomes visible in the way noto is performed.

And so he instructed very clearly and in detail, the exact movements of preparing for noto which I will try to present now. Please bear in mind that this is Ishido Sensei's version of Muso Shinden Ryu noto; other styles may have other methods, even other lines of MSR might vary.

I will first explain my understanding of his noto method up to that point and then explain why it doesn't work so well. Previously I had gripped the koiguchi in a natural way and then rotated the saya (that is the angle of the koiguchi to about 45°. Then as the sword approached the left hand I would rotate the saya to the full 90° to align the hasuji of the saya with that of the sword. I wasn't sure why it should be rotate to a 45° waiting position first, I just did it as I had been taught this way by Ishido Sensei.