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About the Publication
With Suburi, Andrea Re continues the study begun in Kamae, moving from the individual guards of Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū to the movements that connect them.
The book examines the fundamental strikes and actions that recur throughout the school’s kata and shows how they develop from the kamae studied in the first volume. Rather than treating each technique in isolation, Re concentrates on the transitions between positions: how the feet, body, hands and sword work together as one action leads into the next.
At the heart of the book is individual practice. By breaking movements down and working on them repeatedly outside the complexity of kata, details of posture, balance, timing and coordination can be examined and corrected. Suburi provides a structured way of doing this, progressing from individual actions towards increasingly complex combinations.
Detailed explanations are accompanied by extensive visual sequences, allowing each stage of a movement to be studied closely and providing a reference to return to between lessons. The purpose is not to replace training with a teacher, but to make individual practice more precise and productive.
Although the techniques come from Katori Shintō-ryū, the underlying method reaches beyond a single school or lineage. Breaking movement down, understanding its component parts and rebuilding it progressively is a way of training that can benefit martial practice more broadly.
The second volume in Andrea Re’s series on the technical foundations of Katori Shintō-ryū, Suburi develops the kamae introduced in Kamae through movement and prepares the ground for the study of the long staff in Bōjutsu.
I do not claim that this manual will turn you into a “Master”. My hope, however, is that those curious enough to buy and study it will discover aspects of their practice that are not working as well as they should.
Andrea Re holds Menkyo Okuden in Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū and is a Jōden-level Shihan in Hōki-ryū Nakazono-ha. He also holds 6th Dan in Aikikai Aikidō and teaches at his Zanshin Dojo in Milan.
He began studying Katori Shintō-ryū in 1984, training with Yoshio Sugino and Goro Hatakeyama. His principal teachers have also included Kazuhiko Kumai in Hōki-ryū iaidō and Yoji Fujimoto in Aikidō. Over the years, he has trained with many leading Aikidō teachers, including Hiroshi Tada, Hideki Hosokawa, Kisshomaru and Moriteru Ueshiba, Yoshiaki Yokota, Tsuruzo Miyamoto and Hayato Osawa. He regularly travels to Japan to continue his sword and Aikidō practice.
His books reflect an approach centred on the fundamentals of Katori Shintō-ryū. Kamae, the first volume in the series, explores the fundamental guards of Katori Shintō-ryū and the structural and tactical principles behind them. Suburi develops those foundations through the strikes, footwork and linked movements that form the groundwork for kata. Bōjutsu, the third volume, applies the same method to the long staff, progressing from its fundamental handling and individual actions to the exchanges found in the school’s bōjutsu kata.
His work as an author reflects the same commitment to sustained, detailed study. Rather than presenting Katori Shintō-ryū as a collection of techniques to be memorised, his books examine the foundations on which its practice is built and the way those foundations develop through movement.
