We dug into the archives — and found a recording almost twenty years old. This is a kendo tournament held in Saint Petersburg in 2008. One of the early ones in the history of the city's kendo scene: the movement was still finding its shape, fights happened in small halls, and shinai and bogu were brought in through friends, because finding a full set in Russia back then was a quest in itself.

The recording survived as it is — no editing, no modern graphics, in the quality of its time. We decided to show it exactly that way.

What kendo in Russia looked like by 2008

By the late 2000s, Saint Petersburg already had several groups: Siten, Gekken, and others. Each worked in its own way, but all of them gravitated toward the same thing — a regular event where you could meet other kendoka, do ji-geiko, and understand where you actually stood.

By that time, the city had been hosting the Open Kendo Festival "White Nights" for several years — a summer tournament that brought together schools from different cities of Russia and Europe. The 2008 tournament you see in this recording is part of that wave: no longer the first steps, but still the era when most participants knew each other by sight, and the judging panel was assembled from their own senseis.

What a tournament looked like back then

If you watch the recording closely, a few things stand out:

  • Small venues. No big sports arenas — a regular hall, tape on the floor for boundaries, judges' flags. The atmosphere is closer to a family event than an official one.
  • Mismatched gear. The bogu shows traces of real use: a worn-down men here, an old do there, a shinai with an obviously re-wrapped tsuka. No gloss. This is what kendo looks like when people actually train in it.
  • A lot of kyu-grades on the court. Dan-holders were noticeably fewer, and any fight between two dan-holders would automatically pull a circle of viewers around it.
  • Judging by your own. The main referees were the same senseis who trained half the participants. That created a particular tone — not a "competition from above," but a "check from within the school."

Modern tournaments in Saint Petersburg are run differently now: more regulation, more categories, separate brackets for kyu and dan, a children's cup. This recording is about a different time.

Why we are publishing this

We want the school to have a memory. Not a book, not a medal registry — just living footage: how people moved, how they shouted, how they bowed after a match. As kendo grows, these pieces are easy to lose — everyone is looking forward, to the next championship, and it gets forgotten that ten or twenty years ago all of this started with literally a few people in a hall.

If you were at this tournament, recognise someone in the video, or have your own archives from those years — write to us. We will gather everything we can and make a separate "how it started" section in the Club page.

For now — watch the recording. An hour worth seeing.