Information about Okinawan Goju Ryu Karate and Budo by Garry Lever
I came across this link to footage of Toguchi Sensei demonstrating Seipai kata which I thought would be of interest to many of you.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9FmH3avlbvw
There is also a nice interview with Toguchi Sensei where he talks about his experiences of studying under Miyagi Sensei, which offer some insight into the personality of Chojun Sensei. The interview can be found here;
http://www.goju-ryu.info/Interviews/ToguchiSeikichiInterview/tabid/55/Default.aspx
Enjoy!
Training in karatedo is difficult in that there is nothing tangible to grasp.
When you strip away karatedo to it’s bare essentials, take away the nonsense of grades, ignore the ridiculous competitive element, and concentrate on just training for the sake of training, you can begin to find where it’s real essense lies.
The daily routine of challenging yourself against an opponent that exists only within your own mind is a task that for some can become quite uninspiring.
Often you may find yourself chipping away at it each day, with no visible improvement. With nothing to aim for, the path of budo can become quite lonely.
The challenge of budo and karatedo is to keep striving, and keep plodding along slowly, for on rare occasions you are rewarded with minor victories which are completely unimportant to anyone but you.
But that is the point….
When you train, train only for yourself. ‘Do not compare, and do not compete’ is a phrase that I heard many times from my sensei. The fact that today, for the first time in a long time, my tensho kata felt as though it was improving will ultimately not matter to anybody but me. But it is the fact that I noticed that is the important thing.
With this minor victory today, I gain further motivation to keep wandering slowly along the path.
Staying on the subject of Sanchin kata, the use of shime is often a misunderstood area. The term shime refers to the testing of sanchin kata by applying pressure against various points on the performers body. The idea of shime is not to destroy the practitioners kata, but to highlight the areas where he/she is weak.
It is common to see demonstrations where students will be struck hard, punched, kicked, and have peices of wood broken against their bodies. Whilst this may be impressive to watch for demonstration purposes, it does not really improve the performers karate.
The shime should be applied according to the ability of the student. Providing so much pressure that the student is unable to move without destroying his structure is not going to be of benifit to his kata. The ideal is to provide enough pressure that the student is able to feel for himself a connection between the striking arm and the floor, feeling the pressure from his fist all the way down to his feet, and then into the ground. This feeling is then transfered into other areas of their karate to develop a good ‘grounding’ or ‘rooting’ in their other kata.
The slapping of the shoulders again is not done for conditioning purposes, but to check that the legs are not over tense. There should be a spring like reaction in the knees and ankles. The clue is in the name goju, hard/soft. There must be a balance, and being too tense means that you will lose any connection in your body.
There are occasions where it is good for the student to be subjected to a particularly hard shime as this is good for the development of fighting spirit and endurance. However, this is not something which I feel should be done too regularly.
During my 2001 Okinawa trip I was fortunate enough to spend quite a lot of time learning under Yasuda Tetsunosuke Sensei of the Naha Jundokan.
Whilst practising Sanchin kata, Yasuda Sensei told me off for making a ‘sanchin face’. Just before my return to England he took me out for lunch and told me that the most important thing for me to remember after I left was this advice about sanchin.
I find it curious that whenever you mention to fellow karateka that you are a goju ryu practitioner, they always seem to pull this ‘sanchin face’ while joking around that goju has too much tension. This is a regular reaction even in Okinawa!
Something that I notice often comes up in conversation when speaking about sanchin is the fact that it causes high blood pressure and can lead to health problems.
I think what Yasuda Sensei was hinting at was that there should never be an over tension during sanchin. There is a big difference between making the muscles firm, and making the muscles tense. Too much tension to the point where your limbs are shaking, you struggle to breath, you start seeing spots in your field of vision, and you finish the kata feeling exhausted is the incorrect way to practise sanchin.
As with all of your karate, nothing should be forced. Movements need to be natural, and should never be harmful if practised correctly. When you finish your sanchin practice, you should feel refreshed and energised.
It is my opinion that the face pulling, over tension, and hard shime favoured in some schools of goju ryu is geared more towards impressing the public during demonstrations, rather than pure martial art.
