Club History
Established 1992
Richard Kamimura (Co-Founder):
As far as the history of the club, Yuichi, wanna help out on this one? I remember Yuichi and I wrote an article in a UC Davis newspaper (not the Aggie, but more of an Asian underground newspaper, forgot the name) about Kendo and the Kendo Club.
Yuichi and I have been into Kendo since we were kids and have kept up with it throughout our childhood and competed on the circuit for a number of years. Yuichi belonged to the San Jose Dojo and I belonged to the Oakland Dojo. Our dojos are considered rivals along with Salinas Dojo back in the day. We were pretty decent back in our prime. I won my fair share of tournaments as well as Yuichi. Those were the good days. The Northern California Kendo Federation was rather small back in those days and we all pretty much knew each other in most of the other dojo’s. You could call it a close-knit family back in those days.
When we graduated from high school we still wanted to play Kendo, but it proved rather difficult since we were far away from our dojo’s. We wanted to place to practice and play, but did not want to form our own dojo (due to the strict rules of the US Kendo Federation and also we were pretty loyal to our respective dojo’s and did not want to depart from where we came from). But our main purpose for creating the UC Davis Kendo Club was for not only creating a forum for practicing and playing a unique and old form of martial arts for people, but more importantly use it as a vehicle to foster a better understanding of a small piece of Japanese culture to the public and instill not only some of kendo techniques our instructors given to us to others, but also some of the values they have instilled in us. When I was a kid first learning kendo, the first thing my instructor said to me is that the values you learn from kendo will carry with you in everything that you do and keep life into perspective. I know it sounds like a cheezy line from Karate Kid, but if you practice the art for a long time and really pay attention to the details of the etiquette of the art, one can understand.
So, we got permission and the ok from our head instructors from our respective dojo’s to start a club in Davis and went through the motions with the IM Department in getting the club officially organized and started. It was a struggle to get our name out for the first time, but we did it by doing a number of demonstrations at Picnic day, Asian Club Meetings, and other Davis sponsored events as well as putting up fliers (and getting in trouble for putting up fliers at places that were restricted) and making announcements in Japanese Classes. We also had a great connection with the cultural exchange program with the Japanese Police officers that come (as I recall) every fall quarter. As you may or may not know, police officers are required to know and practice at least one martial art (kendo being one of them). We often invited them to play. They were all very good. I remember one of them went to the World Championships and was on the Japanese Kendo Magazine. Yuichi got his autograph on the magazine one day during practice and later we got pummeled by the guy. I remember that day because we brought our game on and drew a number of people outside to watch (a number of people from other clubs we invited to watch). It drew crowds and also drew people to be interested and later joining the club.
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Yuichi Sekine (Co-Founder):
Rich did a great job explaining the history of the club, so I’ll just add a few bits of info that might be entertaining.
1. When we first started, students playing basketball in the Rec Hall used to come up to the 2nd floor where we practiced and complain that we were making too much noise. ha ha. We told them it was called “ki-ai” and if they had a problem with it, we can take care of it with them. They always left mumbling.
2. When warming up, we used to run around in the Rec Hall in our keiko-gi and do. That drew a lot of interesting looks and made it much more interesting because someone would almost always trip.
3. The IM director told us to register our weapons. She was talking about our shinai. It didn’t make sense that baseball players didn’t have to register their bats or golfers their clubs. So we didn’t register.
4. There should be a photo of the early club days posted on the walls of the Rec Hall. A university photographer came and took a picture one day. He never told us where it was posted. We never found out.
5. We used to pick on this one guy who wouldn’t come to practice. Remember him Rich? He knew how to play Kendo, but would always say he had an exam tomorrow or something like that. Since we didn’t have enough people in those days, we needed every help we could get. So Rich and I would get mean and whenever he showed up, he was beaten up. We apologize for our past behaviour and hope that he is still practicing.