March 5th, 2022 The last day of the workshop. The dancers asked several last-minute questions for Hino during the Q&A session. By this point they had been quite impressed and intrigued by the wide range of Hino sensei’s life experience, from becoming a self-taught, Olympic-level gymnast in middle school to having a gun pointed at him at the office of a Yakuza boss… And now he’s an internationally acclaimed, multifaceted Budo master. So much more they wanted to know, but oh so

March 4, 2022 The fifth day of the workshop started with a Q&A session as usual. There were many different questions asked, but several of them had the common theme of dealing with fear of some kind. Fear of getting injured or hurt, fear of misjudging a situation or a person, fear of doing things wrong, etc. Hino sensei responded to those questions with various anecdotes and illuminated the nature of fear. It is the kind of thought that cripples the body and stops it from fun

March 3, 2022 The fourth day of the workshop. Today was about deepening the work from the previous day. Hino sensei had the dancers review the Twisting exercise in a group of three (A, B, and C). A twists B’s arm in a way that B feels a spiral line that goes through the elbow, the shoulder, the torso, the pelvis, and the knee. Then B unravels the twist by tracing back the spiral line from the knee all the way to the elbow. C is observing B to see how the line is traced back a

March 2nd, 2022 Day 3. It was a clear, sunny day in The Hague. The day started off with a Q&A session. Quite a few questions were asked regarding Hino-sensei’s life, study and philosophy. Everyone was curious about how Hino has become the Budo master as he is today. What inspires and motivates him to study Budo in the first place? And how did he learn all that he knows now? The dancers seemed to be putting the pieces of his various anecdotes together in order to form a more c

The second day of the workshop. The day started with a Q&A session. Since Budo (martial arts) he has been studying is based in the reality of life-or-death fights, someone asked if he had ever been in a life-or-death situation himself. His answer was yes. Three times. What did he do when his life was at stake? -- the dancers were all ears. Hino sensei shared a few gripping tales of his close call with death. The common thread in all his stories seemed to be the strong, clear

February 28th, 2022 I’m currently in The Hague, the Netherlands to work as a translator for Hino sensei. He is giving a 6-day workshop at NDT (Nederlands Dans Theater), one of the prominent contemporary dance companies in the world. It is always an honor and a privilege to observe Hino-sensei’s work. His method and his way of teaching have been transpiring transformative bodily dialogue between him and the dancers. It is an inspiring thing to witness. Today was the first day