Shizentai

It's really interesting to read these different stories.

Yeah, in years since then I often wondered what was up with that. She had a thick eastern-European-sounding accent. When I mentioned Kanazawa sensei she just looked at me like I had spoken in Latin. Who has a black belt in an organization without knowing the name of the founder? It sounded fishy to me. I know and like all actual SKIF folks I have ever met though. While it's true I am accustomed to seeing more men with this attitude, perhaps being a small woman makes me more of a target for girls who try to pull these kinds of stunts. It's pretty funny though, because unless I'm teaching the kids' class, I'm generally the smallest person in the dojo. I'm not sure what kind of rep someone is looking to get by besting someone who looks like me, even if they suspect I am more than meets the eye. I find usually people who want to challenge me are aiming pretty low, and are rather simple to deal with I got challenged a lot in high school based on this I think. It was just stupid kid-to-kid stuff, nothing seriously calling into question heritage or instruction. Still, at the time it was very personal and unnerving, and it made me think, perhaps very early on, about how I would and would not like to respond to aggressive one-upmanship. I had the nickname "Danger girl" back then, not because of martial arts but because I had a tendency of tripping and spilling my lunch when I would go to sit in the physics classroom near the robots to eat as a freshman (when I was a white belt). Everyone there was afraid I would fall and ruin their project, hence "Danger girl." In the summer between my junior and senior year, I went to a "welcome incoming students" event for one of the clubs I was in. An older former student who had asked to date me and been turned down the year prior decided to come to this event and publicly embarrassed me. As I was talking with a new student on the front porch of our club president's house, this former student came up behind me, reached around, ran his hand across my breasts, and as he leaned in to -I don't know- kiss me? say something? I hip threw him off the porch into a bush, walked down to the bush, made sure he was subdued, said some choice words to him, then released him before going into the house to find an adult to whom I could report a college student fondling minors. As I walked into the house I heard one of the new students say "Who is that?" to which someone responded "That's Danger Girl" ...though I didn't realize it right then, I should have known that I was going to have a problem the rest of my time in high school. Like I said, the challengers I got after that tended to be young inexperienced fighters looking for an easy win, maybe someone who thought this would be the quickest way to get to touch a girl, I don't know. No one that was hard to take out when they did strike. In any case, I quickly had to come to terms with the fact that by fighting a challenger when and where they challenge me, I am giving them some kind of power. I unfortunately had a lot of practice at evading challenges in a way that would not compromise my integrity, or that of my martial art that year. I made mistakes handling some of these situations, but I like to think that I made better choices next time. Some of the thoughts I arrived at back in those days still ring true today though: When I was new I thought only about karate protecting me, now I think about protecting my karate, because karate is part of me.

I was fill-in instructing at a college dojo for a few weeks, when it happened to me. We were in the middle of kihon and this woman walks in and announces "I heard you do some kind of shotokan here. I'm an international competitor in SKIF and I want to see if this is the kind of place where I can train." Naturally, I responded "Oh! Kanazawa sensei's organization! He was my Sensei's roommate in college. Cool! So you are one of his students?" When I got no response I suspected she was not, so I quickly tried to change topic, saying "You're welcome to watch if you like, we just started" and gesturing to some chairs at the edge of the room. As we continued on with class, I had them doing partner work when she all of the sudden jumped up, walked into the middle of the room, and started grabbing at one of my students saying something like "No, no, that's not the way it's done. You need to move like this-" I was admittedly confused by her behavior, and a bit annoyed, though I tried not to show it. I responded "If you'd like to join in, you may, but all students are required to sign a waiver before they spar each other. It's university policy" -which it was. "You can practice kata and kihon with us today, but as you are late, the club president will have to fetch a waiver for the next class." She agreed to these terms, and at first seemed to be normal, but she kept trying to teach the class, and furthermore kept talking about kumite. Finally, she just outright said it: "You're the only other black belt here so I want to spar you." My response was, of course "The university has a policy. If you sign a waiver, I'd be glad to spar you, but as I mentioned before, you will have to wait until Thursday. The club president needs to bring a copy." Well, long story short, she never showed up Thursday though I was waiting with a waiver in-hand for her. It turns out after class was over that night one of my green belts fought her without me knowing. I don't know what happened, but the visitor seemed to have lost her taste for bothering us after that. Whoops. Kinda funny really. **I should add that SKIF is a terrific organization, This person was just being a weirdo, and I have no proof that she even had anything to do with them.

Turning around in circles on one foot has always been a bit of a problem for me. I have notoriously floppy ankles and have to concentrate on tensing the right muscles in my lower body to make sure my foot and leg stay together at all times despite the friction of the ground under me. It's good for me to face my weakness I think. There is a lot of room for me to grow there. I've heard of Gankaku a few times, but never saw it. Just watched it performed by Kanazawa on YouTube. Very cool kata IMO*.Not knowing anything about its history, I'm guessing Kanku/Kusanku has very similar roots, as it looks like Itosu and Funakoshi could have developed Pinan kata from it. Pinan is from Kanku, but looking at Gankaku, if I didn't know better I'd say Pinan came from Gankaku. *Kanazawa will make any kata look great. Gankaku is Funakoshi's name for the kata, Chinto. Legend has it that "Bushi" Matsumura Sokon confronted a shipwrecked Chinese man who had been stealing from locals, and we unable to apprehend him, in the end exchanging martial arts training for resources. Chinto is supposedly either the kata Matsumura learned from the man, or the kata that Matsumura made to record what the man taught him. Chinto may have also been the name of the shipwrecked man. All this is legend, of course, and pretty close to impossible to confirm, but it's a neat story. If you search for Chinto, you'll see a wider array of versions than you will get from searching for Gankaku Thanks for the primer! Say, Wastelander, do you know what the characters are for "Chinto" ? I'm having trouble looking them up. I ask because I had always assumed it was related to the kata "chinte" which means "unusual hands" ... but a man's name starting with "unusual" would be... well- unusual. Assuming this is not the correct character, I wonder what is.

Technically I am supposed to wear patches when I train... pretty much everywhere I've trained, but I am an unimportant person in the dojo, and as I like to hover back and forth across organizations undetected, I tend to avoid patches and embroidery.

I am working on gankaku lately... trying to make it a favorite kata. Right now it's right down at the bottom for me.

Oh boy. I think I need to put this in writing so that I don't procrastinate any longer: 1. Attend every single 5:30am training of Kangeiko in January. 2. Finally get comfortable with gankaku (my least favorite kata) 3. Take D-level judge and instructor exams either at the summer camp, or Nationals in November And my lofty stretch goal: 4. Test for san-dan ...of course, I need to decide whether I am going to go after these things in JKA and/or ISKF, not sure if that will ruffle too many feathers to try to do both.

I'm not big into labels, but truth be told, I am one of those "spectrum" people, so I would be glad to give you my perspective, from inside-out. Before I trained karate, I was going through a period in my life where I felt like nothing about me was worthwhile. I was a small, frail girl, incapable of doing anything with poise, and who found dresses intolerable. I especially felt like a disappointment to my parents in my performance at school. My two older sisters, who are neurotypical, were pretty, good at dance and theater, and earned straight-A's. Meanwhile my parents were taking me to psychiatrists, calling me labels and acronyms, giving me pills that I did not want, and none of it seemed to help me be "normal" in their eyes. I always liked myself as a very young child, but as I got older, I just really didn't feel comfortable in my own skin anymore. I felt more and more defective. It takes a long time to change from that way of thinking. Even martial arts didn't fix it right away. I remember as a 5kyu having a conversation with my sensei that marked a turning point for me though. He had let one of the higher ranks teach that night, and instead sat in the back of the room observing. I was the only non-black-belt in the intermediate/advanced class that night. Sensei: How did you find tonight's class? Me: Me? Oh, well it was very challenging. Sensei: Were the combinations too difficult? Me: ...well, maybe for me sensei, but I'm a little slow. Sensei: What do you mean "Slow"? Me: "I- I mean... everyone else is more-" Sensei: "No, no, no- You don't need to be smart. You don't need to be strong. If basic things you can do, then over time with dedication to training, you can do anything. Basic ability is enough. Training is most important." I remember being taken aback. Here I was in life, at a time when I was told that I was too weak to participate in PE, being told that I was too stupid to get math, being told that I was too awkward for ballet, .....and yet here was sensei, expecting me to go toe-to-toe with blackbelts twice my size, 10 times my experience. He was taking no excuses from me. He just believed in me. It was like a light switch. Just then I realized that the only thing "wrong" with me was my attitude. Everything else was as fine a starting point as any. If sensei didn't seem to care that I was weird, then it must not be that important. Last year I competed in the selection for the JKA's US team. This year I am preparing to defend my PhD thesis. It makes me laugh to hear people tell me how lucky I am to be born smart or strong. They have no idea that the journey is more important that the starting point. 11 years ago, who wold have even thought I would have made it through college? My sensei, that's who. It's so important to have someone believe in you. Even if you're a very confident person, it can really make a difference. Discipline is all well and good, but my sensei's ability to see in me what other's couldn't (even me), was what really changed my life around. Kids on the spectrum actually get told quite often to "fall in line" and "shape up." What they don't get often enough, from my experience, is people having genuine confidence in them, and having opportunities to grow confidence in themselves. This, to me, was the greatest gift karate could give.

I think I know what you're saying: that students perform the entire kata quickly and morph one technique into another. As all mention, and I agree, this is a common mistake for beginners. However, I think it's important to mention dynamics here as well. When performing kata, there should be a contrast between fast and slow techniques. Speed has it's place in kata too. Getting a karateka to physically understand this balance between tense and relax, and fast vs. slow in kata is advanced indeed. It's one of the things imo that makes a lot of high-level competitors stand out: their ability to control and exhibit both speed an purposeful slowness. case in point for good speed contast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lPJD5eIMs

Well hi guys! Long time no see. I'd just like to say that I've really been enjoying watching the videos in this thread. As for contributing one myself, well, I don't know that many of them exist out there already, and I'm somewhere really remote at the moment where it takes forever to upload a new video. However, I found video of me at an open tournament in 2009 (blast from the past!) doing tentative kumite for the first couple of minutes, but then getting it together towards the end: I'm the short one from 5:43 - 8:12 ... I don't think my hair has been that long since that tournament lol.

I started karate when I was 14. My friend and I decided that because we were going to be freshmen in high school, we should probably try to be as cool as possible, which somehow we decided was synonymous with becoming martial artists. Originally, we were just going to train during the summer before our freshmen year, get some basics, and then discontinue (we had a tradition of doing varied summer activities like this)... however for some reason I never quit. My parents didn't want me to train. I was a very slight ~100lb 5'3" girl at the time. I had a penchant for fainting in PE, and I often had braces on my ankles and wrists to support chronically weak joints that were constantly being injured. I remember when I went with my dad to watch the first class. I saw this woman throw a man twice her size right over her head and into the ground. I saw people of all ages, sizes, shapes and skill levels fighting each other with smiles on their faces. Unexpectedly, the instructor came over to me after class and asked "Why do you want to train karate?" I hadn't prepared an answer, so I just awkwardly blurted out "A lot of people tell me I am weak. I'd like to find out what it's like to be strong." Not a bad answer I'd say. I mean, I did get bullied a lot back then, but I never wanted to fight those people. I didn't want anything to do with them. No, I wanted to be able to fight those people I watched that day, those smiling martial artists on the floor. I wanted to be like them.

- This is the year I was invited to selections for the US team in women's individual kata. - This is the year I missed my chance to be on the US team in women's individual kata. - This is the year I trained kata harder than I ever have before. - This is the year I regrew my motivation. - This is the year I watched my friends compete in Japan, so proud and happy for them and all that they have done.

Congrats to all!!!

Agreed. It's fascinating to see, when someone gains fighting skill, but turns down the wrong road and decides to become an aggressor, how they instantly fall to a disadvantage. As important as confidence and commitment are to making ant waza effective, believing you are invulnerable or are simply "better" than other people is and always will be a gravely incorrect assumption... especially if you've only been at a martial art for 3 months. I mean, REALLY!? Indeed! Although, as I said before, even if you do everything right, sometimes trouble finds you... especially if you are not a particularly intimidating looking person (my experience: in my work place, at school, riding my bike near my house, walking home from the grocery store, at my friend's birthday party, walking the dog, you get the idea, females get hassled a lot). Even so, not seeking trouble betters your odds of a peaceful life. I wholeheartedly agree, not just for small and young people though, for everyone. If a fight can be avoided rather than engaged, this is the best possible outcome. One of my favorite, albeit non-conventional, bunkai practices is to pick apart kata in terms of which movements can be interperated as getting-the-heck-out-of-there so to speak. So often we focus on which throw, which take-down, etc. Where is the safe retreat? This is honestly something I think everyone could train more.In some cases, it is not possible to run at first, however (like, in my experience, when someone has suddenly picked you up off of the ground from behind; a common small person problem). For those instances, there is martial arts.... so you can get to the running part.

I think I get what you're trying to say here. I truly respect people who know what they know through life experience, and that is indeed something that children do not have, life experience. I also feel as though it is not a good idea to place a child, regardless of his or her skill, in a position of authority over adults in a martial art, because many of them haven't even learned to value what can be gained by the life experiences of others yet. So what if shodan means whatever it means, kids are kids, adults are adults. I actually think we are in agreement on these points. I am not sure that we agree on one point however: that children can be martial artists Yes, I also agree that those are two different types of people, but who is more likely to be attacked while walking down the street? 18 stone man or 7-year-old girl? Isn't it more important that we foster a good mind-set in the young, the small, and the vulnerable to enable them to protect themselves in the event of conflict? Such things I believe cannot just wait to instill in them till later. By saying kids are incapable, we lower our expectations of them, and thus they have no way of learning to become competent karate-ka at an age where it could be utterly essential. Right now, I am at my heaviest in my life. I am a whopping 8 stone 28-year-old woman. I am average height for a woman... in Japan. In the US I'm smaller than most. I will never be a 16-stone 30-year-old man, but like my more sizable dojo mates I am on the path that some would say qualifies me as a martial artist. Though I have never been to war, I was bullied as a kid before I trained. I still have a scar on my hand from where my left ring-finger was de-gloved by a boy's shoe. Since starting karate at 14 I have been confronted on the street by a man with a weapon who wanted to take my money, I've been attacked a house party, I've had a man try to pin my arms in a bar and do, who knows what (none of those folks got past their initial attacks, so thankfully I'll never know). I have gotten through all of it so far just fine >knocks on wood< relying on my tiny, young, female self, but what's more so than that, by relying on my training. Apparently that was enough. In my home dojo no one said to me "you can't." In my opinion, people learning how to end physical conflict with their training, genuinely and earnestly are martial artists, regardless of age, sex, weight, perceived toughness, etc. Harkon, I really like what your sensei said about leaving your ranks and preconceptions at the door. I think your sensei must be quite wise. We are all on the same road after all. Can't we just turn off the pedometers for a little while without getting lost?

Okay, I have a few things to say here. I apologize for dredging up old posts, but please bear with me. So it seems to me that there may be some Japanese language confusion here. In Japanese, there are a lot of homophones that are written as totally different kanji (chinese characters), that carry with them very different meanings. The kanji for "dan" denoting black belt ranks in various Japanese martial arts, looks like this: 段, and it just means "step" or "stair" as in the Japanese word for stairway "kaidan" (階段). There is not even a particle in that character that means either "man" or "adult" (it breaks down into: "table" "also" "one" and "of"). On the other hand, the sound "dan" in other contexts can mean "man," but it is a totally different word. It looks like this: 男, and is pronounced "otoko" on its own, but when paired with other characters, takes the sound of "dan," as in "danshi" (男子) meaning "young man." Even in this context though, that kanji for "dan" does not mean "adult," that's "otona" (大人) in Japanese (literally "big person"). Therefore, the kanji for "shodan" have nothing to do with the age or sex of the ranked person. It just means "first rank". Anyway, sorry to use kanji on here. I know you guys don't care for it, but it's hard for me to explain without showing them to you. Just in case your browsers don't allow eastern languages, here are links to the two kanji in question: "dan" meaning "step" or "grade" (as in "shodan"): http://jisho.org/kanji/details/%E6%AE%B5 "dan" meaning "man" or "boy" http://jisho.org/kanji/details/%E7%94%B7 Okay, now that that tangent is out of my system, on to more recent posts and the actual topic of this thread! YES!! Solid post!! This may seem like a cop-out answer, but I think it all depends on what "black belt" means to your style as to whether or not kids should be able to attain the rank. I get the sense from a lot of people that the rank of shodan in the West is invariably tied to teaching responsibilities. If this is the case in your dojo, then I think it makes total sense why you wouldn't want to promote a child to this rank. However, this is simply not the case in Japan, or at least anywhere I've trained. Shodans may be asked to lead warm-ups from time to time, or perhaps be the club president in a college club or some such (though usually only if it is a REALLY small club), but generally speaking they are not handed responsibility of teaching at that rank. In fact, in order to be certified as an instructor in the Japan Karate Association, you must participate in special training and pass special exams. There are also 4 levels of instructor, with different responsibilities and different age and rank requirements for each level. Folks aren't even allowed to take the lowest of these exams until they are at least nidan and over 20 years of age. I don't know if this little girl is JKA (edit: I checked, she is JKA), but my sense is that other organizations have similar de-couplings of what it means to be a blackbelt and what it means to be an instructor. The rank of shodan for many simply means "can proficiently perform any basic techniques." This of course means bunkai as well as kata. Basics and some form or randori or sparring should also be good (which we haven't seen from this little one so I cannot judge). I myself have only met one 7-year-old black belt. She deserved it in my opinion. On her test, there were no kids her size, so she had to spar with the next smallest kid, a boy who was 14 testing for shodan as well. As soon as the match began, he rushed in and she threw him on his back punching to face with excellent control. Ippon. Her kata was very good too. ...The most special thing about that girl though, was revealed to me in something she said to me once. She was usually a very pleasant child, but one day when I walked into the dojo, she had a big scowl on her face. I asked her "What's wrong?" She responded, "No one in the kids' class is serious when they train. I don't know if they think it's just a game or sports or something. It's not." Pretty wise. Just a thought. What does "sho-dan" mean to me? To me it means what the kanji read: "first step." In any scenario, it is a very important step, but in the end it is just the beginning.

Indeed! Thanks for sharing. Truly amazing. I would like to add another video to this "no excuses" thread if I may. I'm sorry there's no English translation on the interview part (though I think you may not need one):

I don't know that it happened all at once. I think it was a progressive thing... that being said there were certainly some pivotal moments: The first time I threw my beginners' sensei in kumite as a yellow belt was probably the first one of those times for me. The look of surprise on his face was pretty terrific. I had only been allowed to train with the advanced class for a few months when it happened, and everyone else was a blackbelt except for me. The throw was kind-of an accident, but I tried to roll with it and it just worked out somehow. He was about twice my weight but it didn't seem to matter. When he landed I yelled and punched ippon to the head. A bunch of the others cracked up laughing at, I'm sure, what was probably the most awkward-looking throw they had seen in a while. Still I remember thinking "Well, maybe I'm not completely useless at this after all" Keep in mind, before I did martial arts, I was a very slight teenage girl, with a habit of fainting and spraining ankles or wrists while doing the most mundane of activities (stepping off a bus, singing on stage, etc). Even just being able to do a pull up like the other kids was amazing to me. If you had told me a year before that I would be going toe to toe with a grown man I would have thought you were crazy.

BU-DO Okazaki sensei often speaks of this term that we roughly translated in English as "martial art." Yes, if you look up the two characters separately in a dictionary, you'll see that "BU" translates as "warrior" or "military force" (the "martial" part), and that "DO" translates to "road" or "way" or "philosophy" (more like the "art" side). However, as foreigners I think it's easy for us to lose touch with the origins of these terms, especially in the case of the character for "BU," which dates back thousands of years to ancient China. If you know a bit about Chinese characters, you may notice that "BU" (or "WU" in Chinese) is actually the character for "stop" and "spear" combined into one unit. That is to say, "budo" or "martial arts" is often also translated as "art of stopping conflict." In fact, there is written doccumentation of this interpretation of the character being commonly used as far back as 481BC. What you talked about in your post is therefore irrelevant to martial arts. A person can kick all the butts in the world, but if that person does not also seek to end conflicts rather than start them, he is not a martial artist, he is just some bully.

Some believe that to bring the warring mind to all situations is the only way to be a strong person. In reality, it takes far more strength to bring a peaceful mind into a conflict. I am beginning to think of an excerpt from the book of 5 rings in which there is Musashi, a monk and a venomous snake....

Haha! That was a good one! Oh dear! This is such a fun thread, I'm really enjoying reading everyone's stories!

yoko enpiuchi The back side of my elbow is a bundle of exposed nerves due to my unfortunate skeletal structure. If I ever seriously use side elbow strike or rear elbow strike, I lose feeling in my hands for a while. I an not sure that there is a non-surgical solution for this aside from not hitting with that part of my elbow. Unfortunately, this is a pretty basic technique. Luckily we usually just practice it in the air, which is not a problem.

Haha! What a fun thread! I have too many possible entries so I'll just post two of my favorites. That awkward moment when I am wearing a new gi that has a different tie than I'm used to... then after kicking a bag I stand up in shizentai and my pants fall around my ankles. That awkward moment when I walk into the dojo late to find that everyone else is already meditating quietly in seiza... then as I try to quietly slip into the dressing room I catch my bag on a metal stretching machine, that as it is falling knocks over a weight rack, sending free-weights rolling loudly across the floor and one onto my foot, which results in my hopping around with my hand over my mouth like a cartoon. When I looked up every single person was staring at me. That was my first day at headquarters. I was called "the entertainment" for a while after that, as in: "Hey look guys, the entertainment has arrived!"

Indeed! You can't get much closer than that. The instructor of my instructors grew up in Okinawa, and never even traveled outside of there until he was already middle-aged. Yet because that Okinawan man's name is Gichin Funakoshi, my karate is not considered "Okinawan," even by students in the US that study goju ryu but are 6 generations removed from Okinawan instructors. I think that this is very interesting. After all, all karate (as I use the term) passed through Okinawa at some point. The common usage of "Okinawan Karate" and "Japanese karate" as I have heard it seems basically to just exclude traditional shotokan from every other traditional ryu. Why do we do this? "Okinawan" ryu are so very different! I think this is an interesting way of describing things, as the length of time between Funakoshi leaving Okinawa and other ryu spreading to the mainland of Japan was not that great, within one generation if I'm not mistaken. I think it would be more meaningful to use a term that indicates stylistic differences, not that it's anyone's choice to change or anything. Just a meandering thought. I'll stop now. But yes, in my dojo I often speak in Japanese, not just for commands, but in casual conversation as well. We are fortunate to have a strong Japanese community in my home town, which makes this possible. I like Okinawan Japanese dialect, though I don't know of it much yet. I'm more comfortable in mainland Kansai and Kanto dialects.

Floods wash away many things. Yes, there are many things that I lost nine years ago today, my colored belts were some of them. I can't say I've missed them much though. Tokens of the past pale in comparison to knowing that the real legacy lives on regardless of 'things'. That is one of the most beautiful aspects of karate if you ask me. We require neither weapons nor armor, nor even shoes. We can just as easily train in a dojo as we can outside in the grass. No, I do not regret the karate trinkets I have lost: gold medals, belts, certificates, etc. For as long as I continue to live my beautiful life of training and discovery, regardless of the clothes on my back, the money in my pocket, or the artillery in my arsenal... ...I will always have karate.