Any online examples/help with Japanese sword techniques?
Its doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just useful, a step-by-step picture diagram would work great.
Of particular interest is Iaido, the sword drawing techniques (draw your sword and kill your opponent in the same motion) and nukitsuke which is a part of Iaido if I remember correctly.
http://www.shinkendo.com/
There are some demo videos. Not sure what you can learn from them.
Sword drawing has a lot of complicated small motions. Sheathing the sword with the blade up, so it doesn’t cut the scabbard when pulled down by gravity. Drawing the sword with the blade pointing outwards, in a one draw, one strike, simultaneous combination. But if you press the sword up against its edge, it might slice apart the scabbard, along with your fingers. So big no no there.
This is why iaido, for battle, gets more dangerous the faster it gets.
Masayuki Shimabukuro’s "Flashing Steel" is of particular interest to you then.
But don’t expect to find any online diagrams or step by step pictures because most Iaido styles are Koryu (old school), which means that traditions and oathes prevent posting amd distribution of the styles secrets to the uninformed masses because, after all, there could be "ninjas" or other such old world problems of teaching the wrong people.
Here are some tameshigiri videos:
http://www.nihonzashi.com/tameshigiri_videos.aspx
And this is a list of some terminologies:
http://www.nihonzashi.com/sword_dictionary.aspx#Cuts
That’s the only place I can think of off the top of my head that had the most. Hope that’s close to what you were looking for, though you said diagram and these are videos.