After a conversation with Noah Legel, a smart, thoughtful and talented up and coming martial artist himself, he brought to my attention a topic regarding Goju-ryus Taira Masaji Sensei that I think is worth explaining to avoid any misunderstanding regarding his bunkai methods. This is what I told Noah: There are a couple things that are often misunderstood regarding Taira Senseis appraoch to kata and his continuous bunkai (that he has become reknowned for). Firstly, the renzoku Bunkai drills he developed were a way of succinctly recording the (incomplete) bunkai of each kata - its a bit like placing one of those small post-it notes as a page marker; once you have marked the page you can go to that place anytime and read in detail, or just skip over it and go to the next one, but the point is you always know where it is to come back to. In fact Taira Sensei spends very little time teaching the renzoku drills as he realizes it doesnt help people very much who arent aware of the finishing moves (complete) for each bunkai. IMO Taira Senseis genius is in the development of joints, as he calls them, that connect the bunkai to the situation at hand. These joints or fundamental drills (can be) universal to all Okinawan karate (and other martial arts too for that matter) as the redirection of an opponents energy/dictating an opponents response etc, are key to making anything work. Therefore what appears to be flow is actually the result of applying the joints effectively - and by the way the reason people keep saying it looks like wing chun. Furthermore its interesting to note that these joints are essentially the basic common blocks of karate put into action and context. Likewise the ashi waza are essentially no more than tachi-kata put into action. Once one realizes this it really doesnt matter the style of martial art - the kata movement/position is a full body technique from head to toe; the feet compliment the hands and vice versa.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 19:05:28 +0000
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