Support notes from the recent weekend seminar in the Netherlands.
Intended, in-part, for those who attended the November 2023 course, but also as a general technical piece.
To set the context; these weekend seminars and workshops are part of a developing programme, a collaboration of like-minds spearheaded by the Kenkokai Dojo in Eemnes headed by Martijn Schelen de Vries as part of Shikukai Karate-Do International. It has been my great privilege to be invited to lead the instruction for twice yearly training for a long time now.
Across the weekend we managed to rack up eleven hours of training. Some people were able to make the full weekend, others could only attend single days. Here are some of the pointers and key themes across the whole weekend.
The training was planned to develop these key themes, which were slotted in right from the start.
Keiko or Renshu?
The intention of this course was to impart vital information on Wado karate techniques and principles but also to polish, hone and attempt to ‘softwire’1 the nervous system and neural pathways; to truly rehearse and practice the skills we wish to absorb. Particularly the Sunday training, where we worked relentlessly, akin to musicians repeating and repeating scales, arpeggios, chords etc. to sharpen their ability.
‘Keiko’ is the sweat and toil part of anyone’s training. The next level up is ‘Renshu’ and this was where I intended to really pitch the whole programme; this is the ‘polish’ and refinement bit.
And then there is ‘Shugyo’; the austere training, only for monks and hermits; but let’s leave that somewhere up in the clouds.
Information needed to be delivered, and this was where the kata content came in.
Naihanchi.
This is a tough kata, no wonder Otsuka Sensei suggested that you needed a whole lifetime to get to grips with it.
It is fraught with apparent contradictions. Looked on from the outside it appears simple, repetitive, awkward, cramped and restricted, and also it seems far-removed from anything that might resemble ‘fighting’.
If you are curious enough you might be driven to run comparisons between other karate style’s versions of the kata (Naifanchi, Tekki, whatever you want to call it) but, from my experience it just leaves you chasing down a rabbit hole, which eventually becomes a total dead end.
If you want to figure it out, there are very few handles to grasp and only one key that fits the lock. The key resides with Otsuka Sensei, he made that kata his own.
The contradictions are that at times the kata insists upon the most demanding of rotations and then, when you really feel you should be rotating, the kata says ‘no’. Which forces you to think, ‘well where the hell is the power coming from then?’, answer; ‘your problem, you solve it’.
And then there’s the stance. The kata does everything it can to test you and try and force you to drop the stance. Without the distinctive Naihanchi stance the kata becomes meaningless – at least from a Wado perspective.
What is also intriguing about the kata is that individual parts can be extrapolated. The integrity that holds them together can be easily jumped into developed moves; all you need is the key.
Observe how the body is trained; the contractions and expansions, extensions and retractions, tensions and releases. A heavy session on this kata and your body will feel it the next day, but where? The answer to that is a useful piece of body wisdom, something you can work with.
Attack lines and engagement timings.
All Wado people have an acquaintance with the three timings (at least I hope they do):
1. Go no Sen (reactive).
2. Sen no Sen (simultaneous).
3. Sente (stealing the initiative).
The question we looked at was; can you recognise and use these timings in directly applicable ways? Particularly the difference between the first two.
Very recently Sugasawa Sensei unpacked these actions for us and directed us towards exploring them and understanding their strengths and weaknesses. For him, Go no Sen was the challenge to address first and foremost, because it’s the hardest one to do – get that right and the others easily fall into line.
This aspect of the timings appeared again and again across the weekend, but was particularly amplified on the Sunday special session, where the Renshu character of the training came to the fore. If you didn’t get it at the beginning, you definitely had it at the end.
The ‘attack lines’ related to the points of engagement that occurred in the middle of a committed attack. This followed one of my favoured mantras, ‘engage with the dynamic’. The fixation on ‘end position’ is a red herring. It was all a question of geometry, understand that and you can own the position of safety while your opponent is in deep trouble; this is indeed very WADO.
Lecture time.
After formal training had finished on Saturday, I had prepared a PowerPoint lecture. An hour, intended to open a window on the very earliest roots of Wado karate before ‘karate’ became a thing for the young Otsuka Hironori.
This was Otsuka’s Budo/Bujutsu base. Personally, I think this is important if you want to understand the system of Wado karate as it exists today and evolved over time – it’s not just for history geeks.
Wado will continue to frustrate people if they look at it through the wrong sets of lenses. A western mindset will want to transpose on top of it a linear structure associated with simple transmitting and receiving information, with as few stages in between as possible, anything beyond that is looked upon as inefficiency. But this squeezes out any possibility of building structures that contain methods and pathways that provide access to abilities that are higher up the evolutionary chain. In Wado these pathways exist and although it is a relatively new system its structural roots are with the older Japanese Budo and associated philosophies.
In the talk I tried to include specific examples that directed a beam of light into the level of skill master Otsuka had before his exposure to Okinawan karate. It’s an ongoing project for me and one that continues through the premium section of Substack.
Sunday’s ‘Lab Rats’.
Those who trained on Sunday experienced the bringing together of the ideas taught through the earlier paired kata, the timings, the angles and the dynamic. This was a heavy Renshu emphasis. On the Dojo whiteboard I wrote, “Just do it!”
My worries were; would it get bogged down in technicalities? Would we get through the whole planned programme and (crucially) were they up to it?
On that last one; I needn’t have worried, nobody ‘dropped the ball’. I think it was because the group were so up for it, and they also proved they had the technical ability to make it work. Full credit to the team.
I say they were my ‘Lab Rats’ because this for me was an experiment, something I might have trialled (in part) in my own Dojo but never done as a complete session.
These were continual paired drills, intended to repeat, repeat and repeat again. Partners changed regularly and a huge number of flowing repetitions occurred. They all followed pure Wado body mechanisms and worked both sides. All but two drills were Soto Uke (to the outside side), which leaves the door open to explore the Uchi Uke; so maybe next time.
The paired kata.
I always like to respond to requests, and this time it was clarifications on kumite gata from a specific series; Go no Sen, Aigamae, Uchi Uke. The consistent theme across the three levels (Jodan, Chudan, Gedan) is the involvement of the gyaku-hip action. Although the endings are nuanced and required some explanation, the opening move in all three needed fine-tuning.
We also worked on the Kihon Gumite, exploring aspects of Kihon 4 and Kihon 9.
As a final point; the fundamentals, our foundational techniques, were an integral part of any training we do. Without that secure base our whole technical structure is perilously insecure – you can’t build on sand.
We already have plans for the next course in Eemnes in the early part of 2024.
I tend to favour the phrase ‘softwired’ over ‘hardwired’, as an acknowledgement of the plasticity of the human brain and nervous system. ‘Hardwired’ is too fixed.