FIK European-zone Kendo Referee Seminar was held on February 7 and 8, 2009 in Brussels, Kingdom of Belgium, as in the past years. Before the formal seminar, Ji-Geiko for 90 minutes was carried out in the evening of February 6 joining 120 participants.

The FIK instructors of this year were as follows.

Mr Nariaki Sato, Kendo Hanshi 8 Dan
Mr. Hitoshi Murakami, Kendo Hanshi 8 Dan
Mr. Tadahiro Ajiro, Kendo Hanshi 8 Dan

In addition, the following 2 more delegates were joined to the seminar from FIK Japan in this year.

Mr. Shuji Fukumoto FIK Vice President, Kendo Hanshi 8 dan
Mr. Arinobu Kurose FIK Assistant Secretary, General Kendo Kyoshi 7 dan

This was a special case, the delegation has been received traveling subsidiary from Japanese government this year.

The seminar was started from 7th Feb. there are formal trainees of 96 from all over the Europe, and some local players for referee training, total participants were more than 120.

Following to the opening message by Mr. Alain Ducarme President of European Kendo Federation, Mr.Fukumoto VP of International Kendo Federation explained the propose of this seminar and important points.
After that, Mr. Sato and Murakami explained to the participants the aim of this seminar and detail points of refereeing, i.e. making sincere efforts in improving the referring skills to judge Yuko-Datotsu correctly and to deal swiftly and properly with prohibition items and positioning among the referees.

In the morning of second day, the seminar continued mainly reviewing last day’s study and in the after noon the grading examination was held with the applicants of 111. The results were as shown in the following figures of success/number of applicants. Shodan 8/10, 2Dan 4/5, 3Dan 6/10, 4Dan 4/10, 5Dan 3/13, 6Dan 6/50 and 7Dan 3/13.

We could have wished to do more challenging practice and expect further devotion.