Jo-Ha-Kyu and the Discordant Aesthetic

As a young man in my early twenties I spent a year living in Japan. What brought me to live there was my determination to deepen my training in a Zen sword discipline called Iaido. At the time my Japanese language was quite poor, only surviving with rudimentary phrases. Luckily, the philosophy of Japanese martial art training was observation and practice. Hardly anything was explained, its theory, philosophy and execution…