Continuing Steps in Karate

How can we know that the kata we are learning is the original form? One of the things that we are told - often unsolicited - is that we should do kata exactly as we have been taught, because 'the old masters knew what they were doing' or 'we will lose the meaning of the kata if we do'. Leaving those two very leading assumptions aside (for now), implied in that is that the kata have been unchanged as they have been taught and handed down from generation to generation. But is that actually true? There is no denying that each kata had, at some stage, a starting point where someone (or someones) created it. At that point in time, there was indeed, only one version of the kata and it was undoubtedly the correct one. But who created it, when and for what purpose, is often difficult to determine. For some kata such as tensho, the gekisai and pinan kata, we do know who created them, when and have at least some recorded information about their intended purpose. So surely, th...

Following on from the previous post regarding the dual nature of uke-waza, most beginning and intermediate students find it possible to stop or at least weaken the strength of an attack, although this may not always be consistently possible.  What they do find very difficult to do with any reasonable probability of success is also weaken or off-balance the opponent at the same time. From trying to teach students how to effectively perform and use uke-waza over the last few years I feel two of the major reasons are the shape  of the arm and the direction  of movement. Shape Most beginners and intermediate students, in my experience, hold their arms too compactly.  Their elbow is too close to the body, and the forearm is held at about 90 degrees to the upper arm.  This shape is easy to collapse when force is applied to it, and the lats and shoulder girdle are not activated, meaning that it is only the strength of the arm muscles that can be applied....

For the last 7 years I have been attempting to 'translate' Ohtsuka Tadahiko's book "Goju Kensha Karatedo Kyohan", as he is the founder of the particular tradition I am in.  As far as I am aware, it has not been translated before into English, so this is the only way I can read it. I don't speak Japanese, but with a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary, knowledge of the martial arts and its terminology, youtube videos to teach myself the basics of japanese grammar, and using duolingo to start to get used to the language, I have made a slow, intermittent attempt at turning 1970s technical Japanese into something vaguely comprehensible in the English language.   The original kyohan was published as a series of 13 booklets in the 1970s and then collated in a single volume in the late 1970s.  It was reprinted in 2009 with additional notes on the Bubishi and with the thirteenth booklet replaced with material on shorin-ryu kata from Higa Yuchoku (with ...