24fightingchickens

Do you think samuri had so much extra cash that they could just run out to sword mart and pick up a new sword. What do you have to back up that statement. Yes, I do think the Samurai had so much extra cash laying around that they could afford to own multiple swords and in many cases collected them. The Samurai were not poor soldiers as in our society today. The Samurai were the nobles of their time (think knights during the Middle Ages), and were the wealthiest people in Japan. Everyone else - farmers, merchants, fishermen, craftmen - were all poor in comparison to the wealthy Samurai. I visited a swordsmith in Seki City, Japan outside of Nagoya while I was living there. It is a relatively famous city within the sword smithing industry in Japan, and has long been famous for swords of excellent craftsmanship. His father taught him, and he was taught by his father, etc going back generations before the Tokugawa Shogunate. They made then, and they make today, swords of very high ornamental quality, and swords of very high utilitarian quality, for wealthy folks who enjoy collecting them. I remember saying something about the sword being the soul of the Samurai, and I was given a lecture about how the concept of a sword was, but the individual sword itself was not, because swords chip, shatter, bend, and are otherwise damaged with use. Sometimes even an expert will draw his to cut something for a show and hit it wrong and bend up the sword. Any good swordsman worth his salt, Samurai or not, keeps a stash of swords, not just one. And by the way, they also oiled and polished these swords, just as we today wash our belts.

The samurai did not really believe that, you know. They used to dump their swords for new ones regularly, and often owned many. That too is an urban legend.

The funny thing about something you need to train a lifetime to achieve is that by definition you die immediately after doing it. That sort of begs the question why anyone would do it in the first place. I understand why this sort of thing happens. The concept at work here is All or Nothing Thinking. It has to be 100% one way or 100% the other. Why not find a compromise in the middle? Why can everyone not simply do their own idea of karate, and the club rotate around the type of training provided? Share.

A kick to the chin? I prefer to use this kick to attack the side of someone's knee or their lower ribs. It is next to useless above that level, as are all kicks other than the round kick.

Our society has plenty of traditions, Sensei Rick. No need to look to Japan for traditions. As for not washing the belt, that is not a Japanese tradition.

Favoring one side or the other is not a "bad habit", Angus. Favoring one side is something every great athlete does. A good fighter does not need to be balanced between left and right. Mohammed Ali was not so balanced, neither are most great boxers. They have a lead side, and they stick to it. It emphasizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses. The person who taught me to do this went from being like our friend "I cannot kumite" to the Women's Cup holder in Japan two years in a row. Yes, but there is also the fact that the attacker can often control the center of the match simply by moving forward. If the other guy side steps or defends and counters into my charging attacks, then he is so much better I would lose anyway. This is just the easiest way to fight. Absolutely. Do this instead of #1. This is not an either/or situation. If you have 4 combinations, and you practice leading with one side and then the other, you now have 8 combinations. Pick your strong lead side, and lead with it. Swapping sides is for guys with a lot of talent, not guys trying to barely hang on in a match. No, not at all. That will not work. I believe I described the very basics of a method of how to do this. I wrote a book on how it works, and I used it myself to great effect. I described how to do it in my previous article. Just read it. It's pretty simple. You just go in determined to practice your combos and see what happens, instead of trying to win or avoid being hit. Sometimes you might score, but sometimes your experiments will fail. After having built up experience, then you'll be able to win. Try this out before you throw it over your shoulder. My biggest resistance to this idea is fear of losing and being shamed in public. My gut tells me "don't just lose. How stupid!", but my experience says, "This was the most valuable thing I ever did."

I was just like you. Here is some short advice for people who stink at kumite: 1. Pick one side to lead with, and do most of your practicing on that side. Don't try to do balanced left/right everything until you are comfortable with what you are doing. Pick a side to cut down the content you must train so you can increase repetitions and have fewer choices to make in the ring. 2. Attack. People who aren't very good shouldn't hang back waiting for the other guy to come in. That is more difficult to accomplish. When the match starts, charge in. 3. Pick 3 or 4 combos and stick with them. Practice them over and over, and only use those when you are in the ring. This reduces the choices you have to make. Fewer choices = quicker reaction time = better performance. Each combo should be 3 techniques long - not four. None of your combos should start with a kick. Always lead with hands and follow with kicks at the end. And now for the hardest advice to take, but the best you will ever get: 4. Lose. Lose and lose a lot. Set out in practice to lose all of your matches. Try to lose. The goal is to lose so many times that your fear of losing goes away. Don't just walk in and throw your matches, but understand you will lose before you get in. Watch you opponent come at you, learn from what he is doing, and find an inner calm observing the match while in it. The more losses you pile up, the better you will get. Most people I give this losing advice to freak out and say I'm an idiot or they are too scared and embarassed to try it. It is very, very valuable and worked great for me. Pile up the losses - so high you could climb the pile like a mountain. So high that your dojo mates think you are THE kumite dork. When the losses have piled really high, at some point, you just won't care if you lose any longer, and you will suddenly be able to turn it all around and win because of your unexcited emotional state and reduced fear. During all of this losing, remember to still try out techniques and be observant - just don't run away and waste time trying to not get scored on. Methodically try strategies and techniques - test your combos - experiment in the ring knowing it will cost you the match but win you more than you could hope to get by struggling to win in a chaotic, excited state. Once you are no longer afraid to lose, and you start trying to win, observe your changed emotional state and heightened and sudden fear. It will teach you a lot about yourself and how the human mind works. You will find the excitement of trying to win to be exhilirating.

I never learned to "overcome" my jitters. Instead, I learned to stop being ashamed of having the jitters, admit to myself that I was afraid of losing, afraid of being humiliated, afraid of being injured, afraid of looking a fool for goofing up. On some level, I think I was also usually afraid of winning. Being nervous or anxious before an event is an expression of fear. Fear is a good thing that we grow up thinking is something to be embarased of. Behold the bumper stickers that say "No Fear." Ha! Everyone feels fear all the time. Fear is our alert system telling us "Condition Yelloy - Pay attention." It can be annoying to have your breakfast sit uneasy in your stomach, hands get sweaty and clammy and mouth go dry, but it is something you can use. You can dig down into that sensation and actually find a spiritual power source from which you can draw to win in competitions. The best way I ever did this was by really psyching myself up before an event by forcing myself to smile, growl, squeeze my fists, and yell, "YEAH! YEAH BABY! YEAH! I'M GOING TO BREAK SOMEONE OVER MY KNEE! YEAH!" and scream it. When you are going into your match, have that smile on your face, and do your best to have fun. I learned that from the godan in our dojo in Nagoya, Yoshigai, who taught me to hold my own against the really talented sparring guys where before they used to just blow through me. One of his secrets was to try to have fun in the match. He said to be aware, to not worry so much about winning, that if I focused on winning or losing, I would surely lose. Instead, he suggested I focus on partying while I was in the ring, playing with the other guy and trying to tease and annoy him instead of trying to show everyone how cool I was. It is the difference between taking things too seriously and taking things lightly and in a detached way, as a practioner of Zen might suggest, and through that detachment finding a calm wash over you that gives you strength, and just enough nervousness to provide extra performance without depleting your will to try. Good luck. And remember, it is OK to lose.

Haku = White Tsuru = Crane 白鶴　＝White Crane

Sochin (Shotokan) The opening technique is called Muso-Gamae, which means incomparable posture. And it is. I imagine that someone is trying to shoot at my knees with his hands forward. I step forward into him, right hand goes to his belt, left arm comes up to his lapel, I pivot (not in the kata) and I dump him over my shoulder head first into the floor. This results in my hands in the posture of the vertical sword hand block. Then I punch the guy twice in succession. Another application - Lapels have already been grabbed, so I bring my right arm down on one and my left arm up under the other to break the grip, press my left palm into his face hard while bottom fisting the guy in the nuts. Attacker punches with his right hand to my face. I block with the left arm and latch on to his wrist and twist the arm. I bottom fist his lower rib on his right side as I step in, then put the arm under his crotch and fireman's carry and dump him on the floor. Two punches. Attacker front kicks with his left leg. I block it with a down block, and grab his left wrist with my right hand. I chop with a sword hand at his lower ribs or neck, whichever is exposed, and then two punches. Attacker left side round kicks at me, I put the right hand under the kick up on his thigh, put the left hand on his face, and step to put my left foot behind his support leg. PUSH! Over his goes - two punches. I think in many cases the two punches could be interpreted as a sort of BJJ forward mount where you just start beating the guy senseless for daring to attack you. LOL! That's my favorite move.

I don't think that kind of thing is a problem at all. I am suspicious that half of the people who wear a black belt on the job just went out and bought one anyway.

People seem to have random luck when it comes to having their ranks recognized by various clubs. I hope the day comes when karate systems that are similar enough automatically recognize any rank the person has earned before the same way colleges recognize any degree you ever earned no matter how long it has been or whether or not the subject matter was the same. When I went for a masters degree in business administration, no one asked me to go back and earn a bachelor's degree in business. My psychology/sociology/political science degree worked fine for them. When people come to train with me, I prefer to just let them wear whatever rank they say they have, because in my class, I am the teacher, and everyone else is the student, and their ranks do not affect me, and no one is an assistant, so it doesn't matter who wears what. Belts and ranks are for personal satisfaction only, imo.

I don't believe that focus mit training helps speed any, but one thing it certainly helps is the concept of punching through a target and controlling the arm after having done it. It teaches very well the idea that tensing on impact is a bad idea, and that instead you should punch through and use that "focus" crud to stop your elbow from hyper extending after you blast through the focus mit. One thing I did once and enjoyed was hanging a focus mit from the cieling in my basement and then setting it up swinging. Trying to hit the flat surface as it went by spinning around was very challenging and good timing practice.

Onegaishimasu is what people will respond with, but that is not really what onegaishimasu means. "Negau" means to ask, and onegaishimasu is the humble form of the verb. You can make it more humble by saying onegai-itashimasu. Please teach me is "Oshiete kudasai" in the most basic form. You might want to ramp up the politeness a little bit though to appear more refined and create distance between you and an instructor that you do not want calling you at home every day: "oshierarete kudasaimasu ka?" is more polite - perhaps a bit odd. "o-oshie ni natte kudasai" is respectful and polite "o-oshie ni narimasu desho ka" is very soft and respectful in that it only implies perhaps they might teach you while speaking up to them as a professor or doctor. And I feel one of the most pleasant ways to ask something is "karate o benkyo sasete itadakenai desho ka" which essentially says "May I humbly receive the honor of you allowing me to study karate? I would not say this: "oshie-agaru na", because it basically says "You dare come into my presence and teach?" in a very insulting and arrogant way. If you can run fast, it might be pretty funny. Thank you for teaching me is easy. "gomendousama deshita" - thank you for going to the trouble or "otsukaresama deshita" you must be tired or "arigatou gozaimashita" thank you for what you have done for me.

Domo is casual. Arigato is proper. Together, it is formal. Tsuki usually refers to punching, but it generally means strike. In my two years living in Japan, I never once heard anyone in Nagoya say "Domo arigatou." More frequently heard were: Arigatou ne Arigatou gozaimashita and other phrases like gomendousama deshita The Sumo wrestlers say "Gosan desu."

I say go through with the fight. If you back down, you will feel like a coward for the rest of your life. As long as you are not in danger of actually being killed, then fight the guy. Find out what it is like to be in a fight. You won't really hurt till the next day anyway, thanks to adrenalin. As you said, you have nothing to lose. If you win, you will be "da shiznit" of the school. If you lose, then no one will be surprised. He will of course come running at your with his head down and try to grab your legs as his first move. You might have a friend come running at you like that and practice grabbing his hair as he gets in range and pounding his face with your knee - or grab his hair as he comes in and back up as you push his face down into the ground and keep your feet back and spread out kind of wide. Some guys grab their shirt and pull them in and push down at the same time like we do in American Football, but I think that's a little too close to a grappler with someone of your level. The instant he hits the ground, back off and go in and kick the ever lovin' heck out of him every time he tries to get up. Don't get suckered into jumping on him, because he will turn around and wrap you up, and then you are meat. When trying to get up is when ground fighters are most vulnerable, I've found.

This book is written by a man who's focus is preaching his religion and its connection to various activities as a way of making it pallatable to the Westerner. His agenda, imo, is generally to connect a "Zen" to everything he can - including some other religions which would consider him a blasphemer for saying so. While the work is certainly an interesting view into Zen, it is essentially written for the purpose of "selling" Zen - not really relevant to Samurai so much, since Zen was not widely practiced amongst them. In fact, in the last 300 years of their existence, sword fighting was not widely practiced amongst them! Sword carrying was what they practiced, as it was a badge of office for them - not so much used as a weapon during the Tokugawa times as a symbol of authority and status. When it was used as a weapon, it was often against someone unarmed. While Musashi's classic is referred to by many for concepts on strategy (and understood probably only by the kenjutsu practitioner), it doesn't really contain any relevance to the Samurai lifestyle or connections between it and karate. Musashi is the same man who once jumped out of the bushes, attacked a small boy and killed him, and then fled to the Kenchiin temple in Kyoto and lived there under "Sanctuary" for some time - before heading off to live like an animal in a cave. I still get a big kick to remember businessmen in the US carrying a translation of this book around with them as if they were learning how to buy and sell stocks and bonds or manage companies better from Musashi's quite literal instructions on how to use a blade to cut someone to pieces and prepare for death. God save us from fads. All good works on the Samurai lifestyle and what it meant. Summed up in a few lines, a Samurai is a perfectionist warrior/poet who studies everything he can in hopes that it will make him a more perfect weapon. He is fiercely loyal and obedient, and values this over his own life to an extreme. He tries to live and die in beauty. Left out of all of these expositions is any political analysis which reveals that the Samurai were also a ruthless, totalitarian class of nobles in an oppressive dictatorship most of the values of which are outlawed today in any civilized nation. I would agree with anyone that said that many Japanese instructors of karate wish that they were training people to be like Samurai, because it would essentially result in ultra-loyal customers who valued that loyalty above their own well-being, enabling the "sensei" to pretty much strut around without worrying about his clientele complaining about anything. My central argument on this topic does not address any of this, however. I am more interested in why people think that karate, a set of instructions for physical movement and tactics while playing a sport (or fighting as some believe), has a philosophy. Karate cannot have a philosophy. It is not a person - it is an instruction set. Only the people who do it can have a philosophy. I would say it is more accurate to say that karate instructors have philosophies - that karate players have philosophies. The karate instruction set does not contain ethical instructions within it or anything inherently moral or ammoral. It contains only movements and applications of those movements. The philosophy and ethics all come from either Hollywood, corporate karate associations, and individual instructors who attempt to enforce or teach a code of conduct. But there are also instructors who preach no code of conduct at all, and they merely teach the tactics and leave it up to the student to determine their own ethics.

I hope everyone reads this part twice. It is a very important point that is often lost in the miasma of cultural transplantation so typical of martial art schools. Indeed. I used to think that the answers were in Japan. Then I got there and found them as lost as I was. The answers are not in another country. The answers are not in another culture. The answer is inside each of us ourselves - in our own desire to be better people - not outside of us. Trying to change the world around us to become better will only change the backdrop of a really bad play. We must change the actor, the script, and the costuming if we are to improve upon it. Then no one will notice the backdrop, and it will not matter what it is.

You don't think that karate contains elements that are found also in the Samurai tradition? The whole respect, honour, etc. thing. Not inherently, no. There are some of the more nationalist karate associations that have slapped such things onto their karate at the end of World War II in order to convince the occupational authorities that their banned activity should be allowed again because it was a cultural thing and not an attempt to militarize the citizens to defend the homeland in a suicidal fashion. But if you look at it, the code of Bushido, which is a controversial thing itself that many say is largely revisionist history taken from a single book (Hagakure) and then backwardly applied to an entire era of Japan's culture, has little to do with any principles of a karate association or karate practice. Samurai were expected to live and die at someone else's command. To embrace death and filial loyalty, even because one's master was bored, was the very center of being a Samurai. To not live like this was to be an outlaw. It was the ultimate form of slavery - the hierarchical arrangement of a tiered slave system in which every man was the virtual property of the man above him to the very top, and the top man was a prisoner of his shame. I see some negative side effects of this history appear in modern karate practice as taught by some Japanese - treating the sensei a little too worshipfully, being overly serious about practice, etc, but these are because Japanese do karate, not inherent in the karate itself. The "philosophy" of a martial art is not inherent in the art. The art is the moving around technical stuff. The "philosophy" part usually amounts to nothing more than the personal principles (or just preaching) of the organization or person who is writing and speaking about it. Until karate men start slitting their own bellies in protest of karate tournament results, their will be little similarity between them and the samurai.

Do it if you think it will be fun. If not - don't. Tournaments are a very subjective experience and if taken too seriously can ruin your experience. If taken light-heartedly and with low expectations, you can have a great time.

Karate did not reach Japan until 1922. It was created on the island of Okinawa which was not part of Japan until the mid 1800's. The Japanese, being the inherently ethnocentric culture they were at the time, rejected anything from China and Okinawa utterly. However, as their war in Manchuria continued, they began to reach out for things to adopt that might help them, and they found karate on Okinawa and imported it. Therefore, karate and the samurai/bushido have nothing to do with each other. The Samurai caste system in Japan was eliminated in 1868 with the onset of the Meiji Restoration, and karate did not arrive in Japan until after that was long after. However, that doesn't stop thousands of people from claiming that karate contains the Samurai tradition and is based on bushido, even though it is neither. As for other fighting arts in Japan, you asked this in the karate section, so I assume that is all we are talking about.

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None until karate arives in Japan in 1922, and in order to get it accepted, the people promoting it begin a marketing campaign aimed at tying it to "bushido" etc. It's little more than talk, imo. There is no bushido/samurai anything about karate.

I don't do any breaking and haven't done any since I was a kid in high school. I have no idea why anyone bothers with it.

But in the case of karate organizations, "promotion abilities" means that the organization will trade their validation of what you do for you toeing the company line. Since karate credentials have no "transfer value", meaning that they only have value to the person that earns them and the other people that accept the credentials as having value, they really don't matter very much. It's sort of like being elected president of your fraternity. You and your fraternity think it is cool, but the rest of us could not care less about your position in your fraternity. I once had a friend of mine who said, "My 4th dan is the equivalent of a 4th level elf in Dungeons and Dragons." I have a 3rd dan I earned in Japan, and I feel the same way. It was fun for me, but hell, no one can even read my suffer-ticket except my Japanese friends. LOL!