While visiting a cathedral in Montréal, Ōtake Toshiyuki-sensei looked at a spiral staircase and thought of Tachi-otoshi. The descending curve reminded him of the path of the sword. He then laughed at himself: apparently jōdō had occupied enough of his mind to follow him into church.
The story surfaced during a weekend seminar devoted largely to the twelve standardized ZNKR jōdō forms. It was funny because the recognition was immediate and unnecessary. Nobody had asked for an analysis of the staircase. Years of repetition had simply made a technical line visible in an ordinary object.
This kind of seeing begins with much less poetic work. The familiar green ZNKR manual is deliberately concise. It establishes a common sequence and terminology, but a few printed lines cannot fully describe distance, timing, posture, or the changing relationship between uchidachi and shijō. Those details have to be seen, corrected, and repeated with another person.
Different teachers and communities can accumulate different emphases around the same twelve forms. At the seminar, Ōtake-sensei’s instruction gave me an opportunity to return to the common framework and examine where habits from other parts of my practice had entered. A movement can remain recognizable while its distance or timing has quietly changed. Standardization is most useful at precisely that point: it gives everyone something specific to return to.
Another story from the weekend concerned Aun, the final kata of the Shintō Musō-ryū Okuden curriculum. Ōtake-sensei said that his teacher, Yano Shōichirō-sensei, had taught it to him only once. The principal action is, on the surface, little more than a simple honte-uchi. Yet he regards Aun as the most difficult kata he practices.
Advanced material is often expected to look advanced. We imagine additional movements, unusual weapons, or techniques whose complexity is immediately visible. Aun suggests a less convenient possibility: the movement may become simpler while the standard applied to it becomes harder to satisfy. When the action is plain, uncertain distance and incomplete timing have nowhere to hide.
The staircase and Aun pointed in opposite directions. In one, long practice made a technical shape appear everywhere. In the other, a familiar technical shape remained difficult after decades of practice. Together they made the seminar’s larger lesson unusually clear. Repetition may change what the practitioner can see, but it does not necessarily make the object of practice smaller. Sometimes the simplest line continues to deepen—until it reappears unexpectedly in the curve of a staircase.
