The Karate Kata named Jion used to look boring to me. It has no flashy techniques, no extreme athletic excesses.
But Sensei Koyama decided that it was my favorite Kata, which seems to me in retrospect to have been a brilliant psychological move on his part. He does that a lot.
On the one hand, since he’s called it my favorite Kata since he taught it to me, when I think about Jion, I can’t help hearing the words, “Your FAVORITE Kata!” spoken by Sensei Koyama.
In addition, I subsequently watched a 6th Dan named Sean at our Dojo perform the Kata as part of his promotion exam, and I was blown away. Sean’s old, beaten up gi was snapping and crackling like Rice Crispies and his technique was flawless, and I suddenly wanted to be able to do that Kata exactly the way he did it.
Finally, it’s one of those Kata that’s kind of like playing the guitar. It’s very easy to do, and very, very hard to do well. But because there’s no elaborate flying backward upside down double kicking in the Kata, it’s possible for a sixty-year old like me to do an adequate job of going through the motions.
But this isn’t about the Kata, which looks for all the world like a simple series of kicks and punches and blocks, and which is of course NOT a simple series of kicks and punches and blocks. Although you can use Jion to train those, as well.
Instead, this is about the Bunkai for the Kata Jion.
Bunkai, the application of Kata, have been the subject of an explosion of thought and literature in the last few decades. It has been suggested that the transmission of Karate from Okinawa (the beloved homeland) to Japan (the oppressive overlord) was not entirely perfect or complete.
Maybe so, maybe not. I wasn’t there.
Here’s what I do know.
When Karate began to be taught at the Okinawan Public Schools, it was not taught as the bone-breaking, throwing and tripping, throat-crushing, choking, testicle-attacking, eye-gouging secret art that had been transmitted from one Sensei to one student during the “Dark Ages” of Karate in Okinawa.
Because if you taught little Johnnie how to pop eardrums, snap arms, and poke out eyes, that might have given rise to problems with Mommy and Daddy, even in rural Okinawa, which had a shortage of lawyers.
So Karate was taught to Okinawan schoolkids as a relatively gentle art of blocking, kicking and dancing (Kata), and Mommy and Daddy were happy, and Okinawan schoolkids didn’t use shuto on each others’ throats very much.
Fast forward to the present.
Today, Karate has been taught as a relatively gentle art of blocking, kicking and dancing all over the world. The last pages of Gichen Funakoshi’s autobiography muses that sending out teachers all over the world might be a good idea, and it was, and they did, and we studied.
And now we wonder: what do all those dances really mean?
General McArthur really was misled into the belief that Shotokan Karate was just a sort of picturesque native dance. And even though we have photographs of Gichen Funakoshi teaching the use of weapons (see his autobiography), that’s not part of the Shotokan syllabus today because McArthur asked if karate practitioners used or trained with weapons, and he was told “NO!” That official statement became official policy in Shotokan Karate.
I spent my wild years training with sword and shield in a group called The Society for Creative Anachronism, but that involved weapons use in Western Martial Arts, not Eastern. Mostly.
But today’s topic is the bunkai for the Kata Jion. Focus, focus!
Iain Abernethy has contributed greatly to the dissemination of knowledge about Bunkai in world of karate. He has produced and he sells dvds, and if you don’t have them, get them. Today would be good. His approach to teaching Bunkai is practical, not doctrinaire or religious, and he admits that he doesn’t have all the answers. But he sure has a lot of answers about the applications of the kata, and they make a lot of sense to me, and he’s like the Energizer Sensei: he just keeps teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching on his dvds.
So get them all, and study them all. And do not, for any reason, use those techniques to defend your family or yourself if prohibited by local law.
Note that Iain Abernethy is a Wado-ryu practitioner, and Wado-ryu shares a bunch of Kata with Shotokan, and is one of the four major Japanese styles of Karate. Understand that all the Japanese Sensei and Okinawan Sensei studied together and learned together and trained in the same bundle of Kata. All of the legit traditional styles teach similar bundles of information, although the emphasis is slightly different in each style.
Iain teaches in a small group of islands where the ruling monarch decreed that the use of any weapons for self-defense was illegal, and therefore the use of empty hands for self defense has reached remarkable heights of development, because any weapon use at all is simply forbidden.
The island chain is not called Okinawa or Japan. It’s called Great Britain.
And while I’m delighted at the parallel history that gave rise to high levels of proficiency in empty-handed disciplines in Great Britain, I have to wonder how free men permitted their right of self-defense to be stolen from them.
But that, too, is a topic for another day.
Here are some nifty resources for Bunkai for the Kata Jion:
-Here’s a demonstration on Youtube.com of one version of the kata itself, followed by a series of applications (bunkai) by an instructor named Didier Lupo;
-Here’s one site where the language is French, but the Kata is Jion, and Bunkai is demonstrated-to some extent the techniques are kicky-punchy, but there’s more as well;
-Here is Iain Abernethy’s discussion board, where Jion is being, well, discussed!
-Here is a link to a nifty e-book by a gentleman named Rakesh Patel, who has given a lot of thought to the applications of this simple Kata, and has produced an excellent and free e-book about the Jion Bunkai, and free is My Favorite Price;
There’s more on the net about this kata, and as I learn more, and get a Round Tuit, I’ll post more here.
Until then, gentle reader, just practice. And remember to be gentle with yourself. Just go to the kitchen, or the living room, or wherever you can clear the furniture a bit, and practice your Kata. You don’t even need to put on your white pajamas (your karate gi).
Maybe it’ll make you a little healthier, and that’s a good thing. Maybe it’ll make you a little stronger, and that’s a good thing. Maybe it’ll help your coordination, and that’s a good thing.
Related posts:
- The Unified Field Theory of Shotokan, Wado, Shito and Shorin Karate Kata Bunkai
- Shotokan and Wado Karate Bunkai and Iain Abernethy
- Yet Another Nifty Website with Bunkai of both Shotokan and the Higaonna Lineage Kata
- The Unified Field Theory of Karate Bunkai, Part II
- Karate Kata Bunkai Techniques I DO NOT LIKE, Part I: The Fishhook
