Support Notes – Further aspects of Wado karate.
A set of notes intended to reinforce the recent weekend course in the Netherlands.
March 2023 Eemnes in the Netherlands. Three days training, four separate workshops, nine hours of training.
The notes are intended as a crib for those who attended, but also might be of interest to karate students generally and Wado students particularly.
Overarching themes.
Self-awareness.
My recent exposure to the teaching of the third grandmaster of Wado Ryu inspired my main theme over the weekend, and that is ‘self-awareness’. This is not the general and broad concept of ‘self-awareness’ but is solely about somatic self-awareness. Do you know what your body is doing? Are you tracking into these key areas:
· How the various parts of your muscular system are contributing to the techniques/movements you are trying to master.
· Are you in command of your overall body awareness, or is your mind being hijacked into narrowing down your field of concentration?
· Are the various muscular and neural relays firing off in the most efficient and economic ways?
· How much are you reinforcing bad habits?
All of these were augmented by repetition supported by conscious and constructive body awareness – the discipline of just training in a mindful way. Repeat and sweat it.
I am sure that all forms of martial arts at their highest levels are interrogating the above aspects.
The zone of movement.
As Wado practitioners, ‘movement’ should be our zone. For Wado people, what happens in motion is like water is to fish (or it should be). Inertia holds no interest for us, it presents no threat.
The lack of movement is like limbo.
And here we have our main conundrum; a problem that comes from the idea of ‘picture book karate’. Really, we need to wean ourselves off this. What I mean is that we complement ourselves by making ‘picture book’ postures, stances and attitudes; it is a very lazy metric by which to measure our success. As I have said before, our job is to ‘interrogate the dynamic’.
Looking through different lenses.
Something that I tried to tease out over the weekend.
If we try and get a clear view of what the founder of Wado karate intended and to understand his developmental arc, we find that the shadows of his senior students often confound our clear vision.
We see the shades of the man through our exposure to others who were influenced by him and his mercurial thinking. Throughout his long life Otsuka Sensei was constantly evolving.
My view is that one way to approach this problem, to gain a sharpened and more focussed view of Otsuka Hironori Sensei is to be mindful of what lenses we apply. Bear in mind I said ‘lenses’ not ‘lens’, because a single lens suggests a single bias. Rather like an optometrist’s trial lenses, one lens fits over the top of another to tease out by trial and error which combination gives you the clearest view. In short; a single lens narrows your vision.
Solo kata.
We examined two kata over the weekend; Pinan Nidan and Jion.
Pinan Nidan.
This kata is the gift that keeps on giving. The key aspect was the emphasis on challenging the changes of direction; an important ingredient within this kata. There was a continual reminder to execute moves on a single beat, as one complete action – if ever it feels like it’s made up of a double or triple action, then you’ve got it wrong.
The dynamics of the two featured dropping blocks (Otoshi Uke) was examined. Both are running very different agenda.
Jion.
I enjoy teaching this kata, its simplicity is deceptive. Particularly, there are some very useful sections within the kata that can lead you into training and appreciating the two sides of the body.
To explain:
It is too easy to concentrate all effort and attention on the overtly operative limb, be that a punch or a block; but what about the so-called non-operative side? By really working and putting emphasis on this seemingly passive side, the two halves of the body really complement and support each other. There are so many points in the kata where this becomes apparent.
Jion has a unique identity in Wado; it doesn’t have the athleticism of Kushanku and is no match for the complex package that is Chinto, but it does supply sets of very intriguing variances of what you already know. I have never agreed with the idea of ‘advanced’ kata in Wado; many of those beyond Chinto are more like ‘additional’ kata. For my money, Chinto is Wado’s apex kata, certainly for me, it’s the one with the most challenges wrapped into it and the lessons learned within the complexity are solid gold.
Paired kata – Kihon Gumite, Kumite Gata and Ippon and Sanbon Gumite.
The featured paired kata across the whole weekend were intended to make connections with the key themes. The selection was very deliberate.
The Kumite Gata were the Gedan series; working inside and outside lines as well as Ai-kumite and Gyaku-kumite, all dealing with kicks.
Kihon Gumite had a key lesson wrapped into it, and that was that the paired kata doesn’t necessarily end where you think it does. Putting your own personal ‘full-stop’ on the end is counter-productive – there is no ‘end’.
A postscript about the ‘mallet head’ and the hand grip.
During the paired kata I was asked about the dynamics behind the seizure of the opponent’s wrist/hand. The trick is to engage with and track the dynamic of the limb and secure it at the optimum time. If you do this correctly you can employ a kind of ‘self-tightening’ capture, one that means the greater the energy, the tighter the control becomes.
It works rather like the way the head of a carpenter’s wooden mallet stays firmly on the shaft. A beautiful piece of simple practical design. The shaft is slightly flared in shape and so is the hole it is slotted into; this means that when the mallet is thrown forward to strike the head of a chisel there is zero risk of the head flying off, in fact, every throw causes the two parts to self-tighten.
Thus, employing the same idea, the grip you take on your opponent’s hand becomes incredibly secure, chiefly because of three factors; the ‘flared’ shape of the hand/wrist, and the grip you use which is dominated by the little finger and ring finger, as well as the direction of the energy.
Falling onto the grip.
In Wado, particularly in the Tanto Dori (knife defence) the fluency of the exchanges of grip and control of the opponent are a critical skill to develop and do justice to the nature of the kata and the lessons learned therein.
Conclusion.
As with all the courses in the Netherlands, I particularly enjoy it when students and instructors ask searching questions. I am always up-front in saying that I don’t have all the answers, I am on a learning path like everybody else, but sometimes we can tease out the answers by engaging with the right questions together. One of the best questions of the weekend was about a peculiar hopping on one leg we sometimes have to do to secure the right angle for a particular kick – great question!
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