The rest of the photos from the 55th All Japan Kendo Championship are here: http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/album/72157602935604815/

Look for a write-up of the even on the Kendo World home page in the next couple of days.

It looks like this past Saturday’s Publishers Tournament will be the last held at Noma Dojo. Kodansha is set to demolish the awe-inspiring hall towards the end of this year. Get a keiko in while you can.

Photos from the 2007 Publishing Companies Tournament at Noma Dojo are here: http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/album/72…45/

I’ve uploaded fifteen photos from the Mens Individual Tournament of the European Kendo Championship.

Congratulations to France, which won first (Sicart), second (Yonnet) and shared third (Diebold) place.

Congratulations to Germany (Ulmer), which shared third place.

The rest of the photos are available here: http://www.simulacre.org/wordpres…157600141470590/

Yesterday the German ladies set the tone for the day by handling nearly all of their opponents with ease and capturing the title. Their success seemed to carry over to the German men early on as they manhandled the Austrians and overcame an early deficit to the Hungarians in order to advance to the semi-final round. Unlike their long haired teammates they advanced no further due to the equally confident French team. To be sure it was a frenetic semi-final that required all five matches to determine the winner with players on the ground at various times. France eventually won through and went on to face Spain at the end of the day.

In that match France jumped out to an early lead with four quick points. In the following match Spain - to the delight of the crowd - answered with two points of its own. In the end, however, Spain couldn’t stop France from running out the clock in the final match and holding onto victory.

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In the Ladies Individual Tournament Hungary beat Bulgaria Belgium on a kote point early in the final match.

I’ll upload photos from tomorrow’s matches after the leaving party and all the rest when I get home to my wonderful fibre connection. Check here for more photos from the 21st European Kendo Championship

The German Ladies Team (Safiya Fadai, Sabrian Kumpf, Susanne Aoki, Dance Yokoo, and Kei Udagawa) soundly defeated the Polish Ladies Team to capture the 1st European Ladies Team Championship this afternoon. As they did with all of their opponents, except the French, the German’s dominated Poland nearly from start to finish. Even Sweden, which had managed to defeat Great Britain in three rounds, was only able to score a single kote(Komaki/Kumpf) and men(Gustavesson/Yooko) against the Germans. The French, however, caused the Germans a little bit of consternation and forced a stalemate in two of their matches (Kumf/Brunel and Yooko/Garcia). In the end the German Ladies Team remained poised and dominant advancing quickly past all their opponents to capture the day.

You could expect that winning the inaugural Ladies Team Championship will give the Germans a swagger and push them to perform strongly in Day 2 (Ladies Individual and Mens Team) and Day 3 (Mens Individual).

Photos from the individual match between Yoo (USA) and Hojo (Japan) are here:

http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/album/72157594478283481/

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Photos from the individual matches between Korea and Japan are up. The shots from the semi-final matches that pitted Gil-Hyun Oh against Tanaka Takeshi and Sang-Hoon Kang against Hojo Masaomi are in the semi-final set. The photos from the earlier match between Young-Dae Kim and Takeshi Tanaka are in their own set.

Shots from the semi-finals are here:

http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/album/72157594433954511/

Photos from the earlier match are here:

http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/album/72157594434059085/

Only another five hundred or so more pictures to process, so we’re getting close to done. Subscribe to the RSS feed, distribution list, or just check back regularly.