Climbing someone else’s hill to look across at your own.
Looking at the advantages and perils of dipping into other styles of karate, or other systems.
Long time, UK-based Wado karate teacher, Sakagami Sensei once said, ‘It’s funny how Wado stylists can easily slip into other martial arts, while other martial artists find it really difficult to slip into Wado’. Subsequently, this is something I have come across numerous times.
Back in the late 1980’s I was ever-eager for training experiences, specifically anything that contributed to my physical conditioning, and it was in this quest that I accidentally stumbled across an authentic Okinawan Goju Ryu Dojo about ten miles from where I was living.
How this came about was a story in itself.
A chance meeting.
At that time, I was training regularly with an Aikido group, I got on well with them and the instructor was excellent, but I had taken a short break to go away on holiday and when I returned, chatting with one of the regulars in the changing room, he told me they had a new beginner show up, ‘I think he’s a karate guy like you, but he hasn’t admitted it’.
I spotted him as soon as I walked on the mat and recognised him straight away, not from meeting him previously, but from the martial arts magazines. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was clearly powerfully built, about forty years of age, mixed ethnicity and obviously taking his training in Aikido very seriously. This was Dickie Wu. He was part of a Kyokushinkai derivative called Renshinkai, who did very well in the 1980’s and developed a tough reputation.
Over time we trained together regularly, all of it was Aikido. I remember one night in particular; for some reason the only people at training were myself and Dickie. The Sensei asked us what we would like to do; Dickie and I didn’t hesitate to suggest that for the whole evening we do just one thing, just one technique. The Sensei was clearly impressed by this request, he said that this was what true martial artists would say (normally his class involved running high speed through maybe thirty techniques, just to keep everyone spinning) and that was what we did. At the end of two hours of Ikkyo (the first basic throw) we were battered and rinsed through – it was excellent.
In conversation, Dickie said, if I was looking for some hardcore training I ought to check out the Goju Ryu group who trained nearby. And that was my intro.
Jundokan Goju Ryu.
The Jundokan group was the organisation associated with Miyazato Ei-ichi Sensei (1922 – 1999), Richard Barrett Sensei had spent time with Miyazato Sensei in Okinawa and was clearly somebody who totally lived his art. He could be an obsessive fundamentalist, but also very open-minded and friendly, his enthusiasm was infectious. He had a small group of dedicated students, I don’t think any class had more than eight people training at any one time, which, he said suited him fine, as ‘any decent Dojo should only have about seven students’, something he’d learned from his time in Okinawa.
The training was very physical. Kata and Hojo Undo (conditioning exercises) were the main practice; no marching up and down in lines, which, I must admit was a bit of a surprise. For the conditioning exercises they used a lot of kit; some of it traditional, some of it they invented themselves.
To list some of the traditional equipment we worked on:
· Makiwara – heavyweight slightly sprung punching post.
· Chi-ishi – a levered weighted block made of stone.
· Kongo-Ken – I hated this piece of kit, a solid iron ring which stood about five feet tall and you had a series of exercises which were supposed to simulate grappling.
· Nigiri Game – weighted jars which had to be grasped by their lip (which was smooth, not pronounced) in a way that the use of the thumb was limited; then walking down the room in Sanchin Dachi, painful.
· Tou or Takebata – a bundle of bamboo canes nested in two paint tins, top and bottom, suspended on a bracket, which had to be attacked with Nukite, brutal for conditioning the finger tips.
I will be honest, the general conditioning exercises, to harden the body rubbed against the grain for me, there was nothing like it in Wado.
Ude-Tanren (Kote-Kitae) was a kind of hard impact arm banging, there is no other way to describe it. You stand face to face and smash your forearms into each other. Sometimes my wrists were so swollen the day after I couldn’t fasten my shirt cuffs. But I pretty soon realised that the regulars hated doing it with me because my wrists were so bony, ‘like razors’ one of them said, although that gave me a bit of a boost, it didn’t make it hurt any less.
They didn’t do sparring as part of normal training, though we did spar, very occasionally. When they engaged in any free-fighting there were no rules, outside of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. It was incredibly enjoyable and I soon realised my limitations. The Shiai format I was so used to did not have all the answers, and often we would go to the ground. In a weird way, it worked, but only because we realised what damage we could do to each other.
There were some oddities about their fighting strategies; for example, they didn’t care if you cover their jodan mawashigeri with your arm – they would just kick straight through your guard. This was where the Irimi strategy of Wado helped me out. Their one weakness was that they struggled to read a feint; they were so determined to react to whatever you were doing you could easily sell them a dummy. Richard Barrett spotted this and one night he asked me to conduct a fighting class – I was happy to oblige.
This wasn’t the only time he asked me to take the class. He was curious about Wado and invited me to teach them something unique to Wado. I decided to go for Tanto Dori; in hindsight, not a great decision.
This is where the earlier Sakagami Sensei quote comes in.
The Tanto Dori just didn’t work. I don’t mean they couldn’t perform the techniques, they did, but clearly in a Goju Ryu way. I don’t know what I was expecting. They really went for it, but that was the problem; each move for them was power-based and at that time I had no idea how to explain it to them. It was wholly my error, not theirs.
I had a similar experience teaching kumite gata on an open course to a group of students who described themselves as a hybrid of Wado and Goju, the incompatibility of the two systems was like acid and alkali, they just cancelled each other out. I’m not saying it can’t be done; if it was ever attempted, both sides would need such a massive mind-shift and so much would have to be ditched it would be unrecognisable, instead of looking like one of those Greek myth Chimera critters. In those circumstances the first casualty is the subtlety of Wado. With the kumite gata guys, it was all ‘Go’ and no ‘Ju’.
I stayed with the Jundokan people for well over a year. Richard could see that their core kata of Sanchin was not for me, “it doesn’t suit your body type”, instead, he gave me a pet kata to play with, Saifa, which I learned to love.
I also learned to love the makiwara (striking post), So much so that I constructed my own. I worked it exactly the way that the Goju Ryu guys had taught me. The only problem was it was ruining my Wado. I didn’t spot it, but my Sensei did, “What has happened to your punching?” he asked me, I think I mumbled something about ‘experimenting’ – I didn’t mention the Goju Ryu club – his reply, “Well stop doing it then”. ‘Monkey see monkey do’, I was picking stuff up subconsciously and it was contradicting my Wado.
Back at the Jundokan, they didn’t do things by halves.
One night in July 1989 (so my notebook tells me), I showed up to find everyone quiet, grim faced and pensive. They hadn’t warned me but this was the night they’d pledged to do thousands of exercises and techniques. It was a charity thing.
As a starter we launched into the target of a thousand press-ups, in sets of ten, alternating with ten punches. Then, a thousand laying down single leg raises, a thousand Mae-empi strikes, a thousand Hiza Geri, a thousand each arm Kakei. When we lay on the floor to do the leg raises we left wet body imprints on the floorboards, but the most damaging was the Hiza Geri. By the time we got to those I was so soggy that with my Gi bottoms gliding repeatedly over my kneecaps it rubbed the skin away. I had a similar experience on a Uechi Ryu course where the instructor insisted on a warm up of one thousand sit ups. It took the skin off my tailbone area; I still have the scar – fortunately nobody gets to see it. Least of all me.
Conclusion.
All of it, when taken as a whole, taught me many things; but most interestingly it showed me a different perspective on Wado. I had climbed the lower slopes of somebody else’s hill and looked across at my own and I was able to take stock of Wado as a system and a philosophy and to weigh and measure its strengths and weaknesses (but really, all of the weaknesses were mine).
One of the biggest take-aways was how it was possible to pick up an alien way of moving almost by osmosis, which can very quickly threaten to undo years of what you thought were engrained practices.
It is experiences like this that cause you to reflect on the actual pedagogy of Wado; just what are you trying to achieve in what you do? Take kata as an example; someone once speculated that there is a belief out there that the objective of practising kata is to get good at doing kata, this is wrong, in so many ways, yet instead of this trope diminishing as we get smarter and more informed, it is actually growing – look at the ‘Olympic’ karate kata event. And, in this, as if to clumsily plug the obvious gaping philosophical hole, a confected ‘bunkai’ performance is inserted into the proceedings to seemingly validate it.
I don’t want to put people off mountain climbing, but in all such enterprises, make sure you know what you are doing.
Image credit: Hokusai (1760-1849), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Those are some intense exercises! I felt like I was watching an intense movie-training montage, but this is real life. I'm glad that you got to train in other styles and to experience the changes that you did. I think it really emphasizes to me that as martial artists we think that we are unchanging, and yet, we change all the time. The key being is to adapt accordingly, which as human beings, we are very apt to do.
Nice piece. I was intrigued. Found a glimpse from an 80 minute documentary that features some of the techniques you mentioned.
https://youtu.be/R7PF224xP1o