MEN cuts

by david chan
(malaysia,kuala lumpur)

What is the difference between HARAI men n HARI men?

Answer: Thank you for your question. I am not sure where you learned the term, Hari, but it is certainly the term of a technique. :)

According to Ichinikai, Kendo Q&A site, hari is a technique to move your opponent’s shinai out of the centre so you can strike. You can say that it is to for you to take the centre.

Now what you do in hari is that you slap your opponent’s shinai sideways with your shinai. Its movement should be smaller than harai. That means harai is stronger than hari. Hari is a sharp but smaller movement to take the centre.

And usually when we do harai, we execute it up down or down up whereas hari is sideways (horizontal movement).

Here is a good video I found at Itto Ryu ni Tsuite (about ittoryu). Unfortunately the page does not contain any info of the author.

Scroll down until you see hyperlinks. The first one is the video of hari.

As you can see, they are not moving their shinai up or down. Just sideways.

In harai, you use shinogi of your shinai (the right or left side of the shinai) to slap your opponent’s shinai. The movement of your shinai should be as if you are drawing a half circle. The direction of drawing a half circle determines either you are executing harai upwards or downwards.

If you know suri technique, you can use the motion in harai. We use our shinai as we do in suri (sliding) motion and slap our opponent’s shinai with that motion instead of sliding.

Hope this helps.

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