A few weeks ago I had my first Naginata competition. It was for Saga prefecture and included all ages, which were broken up into elementary school students, junior high school students, high school students[1], adults under 30[2], adults 30-60, and adults over 60. Everyone who participated was female, except for two of my male high school students and a couple of young boys (maybe kindergarten students?) who were part of a demonstration.
All of the elementary school and younger students were so cute! For shiai (sparring), they didn't wear bogu (armor), but instead performed engi(forms)-style uchikaeshi (a sequence of strikes) against an adult wearing bogu -- i.e. two performed at the same time and the judges decided which was better.
I competed in engi; it was over so fast! I was sitting down expecting to compete after lunch[3], and then suddenly I was beckoned to line up. I wasn't nervous at all. I went into autopilot, which worked out okay. My partner and I were eliminated right away, which isn't all that surprising considering we've been studying Naginata for far shorter than the people we were competing against. A club member's daughter videotaped us; it was my first time seeing myself doing engi on video so it was really interesting and I could see why the pair we were up against won (my movements weren't entirely clean & precise at times, and I'm sure my partner made mistakes too[4]).
In any case, my partner and I were one of only three teams in our age group, so we got 3rd-place certificates, which was nice. And it's really good to have experience competing!
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[1] I'm glad my high school students were in a different category because I wouldn't want to compete against them!
[2] Of which there weren't any.
[3] Partly because I had misread the schedule (it was in Japanese) and partly because things were going well ahead of schedule -- the competition finished an hour early.
[4] I focused on myself when watching the video and didn't see what she did.
