Recently, I’ve started blogging on a new platform called WordPress.

It’s a little more complicated than Blogger, but it’s also a more powerful platform than Blogger.

I like the templates that WordPress has available, as well; let me know what you think when you take a look at my new Shotokan Karate Website!

I have started a new blog on the WordPress.com Platform, to see if I use the greater power and flexibility of that blogging platform to share Shotokan Karate with more readers.

Take a look, and see if you like the design and the posts; it’s still very new, but I’m happy with the initial version of my new Shotokan Karate blog.

And I hope you like it, too!

No, you don’t get to see the video.

Loyal readers will recall that I have the privilege of studying privately with Sensei Shojiro Koyama, of which privilege I am absurdly proud.

Recently he called a break to basics and kata, and said he was going to teach me a self-defense lesson.

He prefaced it by telling me that in Japan, policemen are often highly trained black belts in Judo, Karate, and Aikido (in that context, please read “Angry White Pajamas”, because it is wildly entertaining and instructive, simultaneously).

He continued by pointing out that because they are highly trained martial artists, the police in Japan tend to believe that they can use their martial arts techniques on knife-wielding bad guys.

And he concluded by pointing out that many such superbly-trained Japanese Policemen then die as a result of knife wounds, because knives are very effective tools for letting the life out, and bad guys don’t attack in the ways that a trained martial artist attacks.

Bad guys never learned how to attack correctly! As a result, when the frenzied stabbing starts, the technique (really, non-technique) is one that has never been taught to the bad guy in a dojo, and no defense was learned for that non-technique by the policeman.

The conclusion of this short discussion of self-defense against a knife is pretty simple. Don’t try to defend, empty-handed, against a deadly weapon in the hands of a determined bad guy, because your odds of success are not good.

If you can interpose a chair, good. If you can interpose a chair and poke the bad guy with the legs of the chair, good. If you can swing a chair into the bad guy while you are repeating the mantra, “Feets, do yo’ stuff!”, all the better.

Generally, a contest of armed verses unarmed men does not turn out well for the unarmed man. Or woman. So don’t enter into that contest unless there is literally no other choice.

End of lesson.

p.s. consider trying this for fun: put on a fencing mask, and give a magic marker to your buddy. Bet him you can keep him from dotting or streaking your t-shirt with the magic marker, and bet him enough to make it interesting (unless that would be illegal in your jurisdiction, of course).

The point of the exercise is to see if you can keep your torso from being dotted or streaked by a fully motivated guy of similar size and build.

And if you are that one person in a million who can keep the t-shirt clean, take a look at your arms, and ask yourself how deep the cut, and how fast the bleed-out.

And remember, it’s just for fun; make sure there’s a medic present at all times, right?

I like karate demonstrations. This one is a little quirky, from my perspective, because it’s narrated in Russian, but the punches, strikes, kicks and throws do not require much translation.

Sensei Kanazawa won the first big Shotokan Karate Tournament in Japan by besting Sensei Enoeda (who is now sadly passed away), and he has fun in this demonstration.

The impressively brave Terry O’Neill assisted Sensei Kanazawa in this demonstration, which must have been a little difficult for him; Terry was himself a remarkable kumite competitor until a knee injury ended that part of his karate career.

I have read much about the ways that karate degenerated when it was adopted and modified by the Japanese.

Many writers who have studied with Okinawan instructors have waxed ecstatic about the ways that the pure version of Okinawan Karate beats that silly Japanese stuff all hollow.

Maybe true, maybe not. I’ve seen great exponents from both traditions, and both of those, after all, are offshoots of Chinese Martial Arts.

But Okinawan Martial Artists were more effective after Japanese domination for one simple reason, which was discussed by Funakoshi in his autobiography.

After Japanese domination of Okinawa, the wearing of the traditional Okinawan hair arrangement, a sort of top-knot, was forbidden. Gichen Funakoshi writes about how difficult it was to shear them off some schoolchildren in Okinawa.

But long hair (and, for that matter, beards) have always been great handles for hand-to-hand combat.

Which is why Philip of Macedon and his son (a guy named Alexander, remember?) told their troops to keep it short.

So after the Japanese took over control of Okinawa, they provided one gift to local martial artists, even if it was not intended as a gift.

And you can see how effective the use of the topknot grab was, because it shows up in bunkai to most of the kata!

I like Christmas, and one reason I like it is the gifts! I particularly liked that Merlotte’s Bar and Grill Mug, by the way.

But I ran into a gift recently that left me amazed, because it is so valuable, and because the gift is so generous.

And that gift is the free, online rare karate book and monograph collection on Charles Goodin’s Hawaii Karate Museum Blog.

Some gift, neh?

I love practicing the Tekki Kata. Donno why. Just do.

And I’ve written recently about them, and the fighting techniques embedded in them.

Now, Rob Redmond has a great Shotokan Karate Blog, and you should read every single post he’s written. You may not agree with him, but you’ll learn a lot about Shotokan Karate.

One of his suggestions is that the best martial art for real fighting might well be one that’s composed of all the techniques forbidden for competition in every other martial art!

I thought that was smart, as well as funny.

And then I considered the Okinawan Karate Masters who indicated that Naihanchi had everything you needed to know about fighting. 

So let’s think about Naihanchi/Tekki Kata for a moment, and consider which techniques are embedded in it, and are also prohibited in all martial arts for competition.

On the one hand, you’ve got elbows to the head, while you’re grabbing his head for target control. Check.

Arm breaks? Check.

Hair grabbing, neck crank? Check.

Smashing your opponents knee to do structural damage to it? Check.

Head butt and eye gouge and bite? Implied in the kata, I think, so check.

Finger breaking? Yep. Check.

Choking and neck breaking? Check.

Head snap taking your opponent to the ground? Check.

Forearm smash to the back of his neck? Check.

The one thing I don’t see anywhere in the kata bunkai is a groin attack.

On the other hand, there’s a nice response to your opponent’s wrist grab after you attack his groin!

Naihanchi is not for the faint of heart!

It looks to me, by the way, as though it’s among the very best kata for applications that start after the perp has rung your bell with a roundhouse right sucker-punch. It teaches moving from the clinch to counter-attacks more clearly than any other kata I can think of today.

Remember, boys and girls, running away from a fight may make people laugh at you, depending on the neighborhood.

But they’re going to laugh at you anyway once you get your front teeth knocked out, right?

So run if you can. If you can’t, consider the techniques in Naihanchi for self-defense, unless of course they’re illegal in your jurisdiction. Always obey the law.

See, if looking pretty won fights (or even sparring matches), the world would be a lot nicer and more predictable place.

But no. Looking pretty when you fight doesn’t win fights, and the world is not nice and predictable, and fighting is particularly unpleasant and chaotic.

Back around 1964, before most of you were born, I started taking fencing classes from a world-class instructor. There were other kids in the class, and all of them were far better than I was in basic technique and form, because I’m a little coordination…challenged.

But after we had picked up the rudiments of lunging and parrying and beating and disengaging as solo drills, we started actually “fencing” with each other. We were so bad that calling it fencing is far too kind.

But I really envied one of the guys in class because he had a natural talent for fencing; his lunges were perfect. His parries were beautiful.

And I beat him every single time we fenced, even though my technique looked like poop, and his looked like Errol Flynn in Robin Hood.

I had simply stumbled upon a technique that worked for me in competitions, and it clicked.

It was a simple beat, disengage, lunge combination. When I slapped his foil (which moved it out of line) he frantically over-corrected and threw it further out of line on the other side. Which left an opening in his guard through which I could drive a truck. Or, in this case, a foil.

I used the same technique decades later (rapiers, instead of foils) in some competitions in the Society for Creative Anachronism and a couple of other living history groups, and it worked against most of the people with whom I fenced ( not all, of course).

See, in martial arts, you have a combination of skills that are developed over years, and you have to decide which of those skills and techniques you want to develop, and whether you want to do well in formal competition for trophies, or in self defense on the street, or just self-defense against aging (you can’t win, but you can draw out the fight, which is itself something of a victory. But, hey, if Thor couldn’t beat Old Age, nobody can!).

Watch boxers and it will be obvious; some boxers imitate Cassius Clay, and drop their hands to taunt their opponents, and get away with it! Some stay buttoned up, and do very well. Some use a funny guard with their left hand down and their right hand up, and do well with that.

Marital arts classes do a lot of things; they expose you to a lot of different techniques, and depending on the art, they may also teach your warm ups and strengthening and flexibility and timing exercises.

But if you watch competitions between very good competitors in any martial art or system, including MMA, you’ll see that simple techniques work, and complex techniques often don’t, and that everybody has a pet technique or three.

The reason that world-class competitors have a relatively small bundle of techniques that they actually use in competitions is that they have found, through unpleasant trial and error, that some techniques that they have learned don’t win for them!

And you don’t win in world-competitions with a hundred techniques that you know. You win with one to five techniques that you’ve mastered.

p.s. If your martial art doesn’t involve contact, you’ll want a remedial contact course somewhere along the way. In the same way that people react predictably when you beat their blade to the side in fencing, they respond predictable to a blow to the solar plexus.

Some drop their arms a little and lean forward a little, some a lot. But just about everybody has a reaction, and that reaction is often the beginning of a combination that will finish that fight. But not in their favor. Note that you’ll want to develop your ability to take a blow, but that’s a topic for another day. Don’t stand in front of moving cars to toughen yourself up, or do anything else stupid.

One of Sensei Funakoshi’s senior students, Shigeru Egami, was so unhappy with the lack of stopping power of the punch he used to strike the solar plexus that he wrote a book about his frustration and his solution. And he came up with a pretty good solution.

A different solution is known by many boxers who hit people for realsies all day long: if you want to stop somebody with a shot to the solar plexus, the most effective angle of attack is up, as in uppercut.

p.p.s. some of this discussion relates to controlled sparring matches; some to real fights. The two are completely different. If you don’t know the difference, never get in a fight, and run away in every case. Mind you, running away from a fight is normally the best martial arts technique available.

Some martial arts, on the other hand, may be useful when you are vic and the perp has already rung your chimes with a sucker punch. The primary marital art used by perps, by the way, is simply getting in close enough that your reaction time is no defense whatsoever.

And I know that this is obvious, but you won’t be looking pretty, with snappy, good-looking techniques, once the first sucker punch has landed. Hopefully, you will have developed some version of the clinch so your head will clear enough that you can begin a defense (which means offense, once the other guy has belted you five times).

And your teeth? Well, try to find them on the floor after the flurry of sucker punches and your successful defense. And you may well be able to re-implant them if you act quickly, says Mayo Clinic!

Road rage is quite real.

Maybe it’s a function of breathing in carbon monoxide mixed with lead-laden particulates.

Maybe it’s that you’re using mostly small muscles to pilot your car, and your adrenaline can’t get burned up by the use of large muscle movement, as it would be if you were sprinting or jogging.

But it can turn ordinarily mild-mannered folks of all sorts into quite dangerous people indeed. With I.Q. levels below that of a newt.

Here in Phoenix, we have a special sort of road rage, fueled by 120-degree temperatures in the summertime. And you need to keep very careful watch for cars with the windows rolled down (indicating that they don’t have air-conditioning in their car).

If you make a driver with no air conditioning even slow down when it’s 120 degrees in Phoenix, you take your life in your hands.

Now, martial arts or self-defense classes or boxing expertise are unlikely to help you a lot during episodes of serious road rage. Either one or both of the participants will have a weapon (remember that tire irons are perfectly good weapons, as are big flashlights, small flashlights, screwdrivers, and wrenches; putting it a different way, cars are almost as full of weapons as kitchens).

And it may sound like I’m kidding about this; I’m really, really not kidding.

What you need to do is to be aware of the point at which you are tipping into irrational anger, and dump the contents of that entire Super-duper Size Slurpy down your back so that the shock can make you lucid again.

Anybody, apparently, can have a sudden loss of I.Q. when hit by a wave of adrenaline; a former prosecutor named Dan Gukeisen was recently sentenced to five years for manslaughter committed with a knife.  And that’s a former prosecutor; if he can suffer a lapse in judgment, there are few mortals indeed who are capable of perfect self-control.

There’s nothing funny about going over the top emotionally and either starting a fight or getting stomped by somebody who has himself gone off.

And I just watched a comedian named Ben Bailey talk about road rage. It was hilarious!

It was also sobering; this guy is a game show host, and he depicts the experience of road rage brilliantly, having experienced it. While being a televised game show host. With two contestants in the back seat!

Another part of the story which was interesting was the entry of his posse on the scene; you should always expect that the six-foot six-inch guy you think you can take has a bunch of buddies with him.

And that at least one of them will have a pistol.

Opinions differ.

Choki Motobu, who was never a shrinking violet when it came to brawling, said that Naihanchi contained all that you needed to know about fighting, and that it was a martial arts system (!) no longer practiced in China, only in Okinawa.

Rewind: Tekki as a martial arts style, or system? That’s kinda big talk, you know?

Kentsu Yabu said “Karate begins and ends with Naihanchi”.

Gichen Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Karate, spent a decade practicing three versions of this kata under one of his principal instructors, Itosu Sensei. Clearly, Itosu Sensei thought that Naihanchi was a pretty useful training exercise.

Iain Abernethy says that this kata is deep, and that it constitutes a “complete fighting system”. When Iain Abernethy says that a kata contains a complete fighting system, I take notice; he’s a very smart guy, and generous with his vast knowledge.

Now, some folks have suggested that this kata was designed so that you could fight with your back to a wall, or on a narrow strip of dry land between a couple of rice paddies. And some folks are terribly concerned with the precise way the hand is angled in performing the kata, and some may insist that their version of a stance is the only usable stance.

I, personally, do not give a rat’s keester exactly what variation of the kata is being used in training, as long as it contains the fundamental information encoded in the kata. For that matter, if you look at the early kata books by Sensei Funakoshi, you will see higher stances than those used in Shotokan Karate today.

To get an idea of the practical ways that Tekki Shodan (the short, simple, bland, boring kata, right?) can be employed, you might want to watch this short video posted by Iain Abernethy, a Wado Instructor who has spent a career studying and teaching bunkai:

Note: the above short video is a commercial for a dvd, and if commercials for great products offend you, I’m deeply and terribly sorry. Myself, I recently ran across the little commercial.

I’ll be ordering the dvd…today.

And here’s another take on the bunkai to Tekki, or Naihanchi, or whatever you want to call it, by a gentleman named Didier Lupo. His version of the kata is closer to mine, and he looks like he would be happy to explain his version of Tekki to anybody who wants to learn it from him. Putting it another way, he looks like a tough hombre:

And I haven’t been able to track down a source for Sensei Lupo’s dvds, or I’d have a buncha those, as I have a buncha Iain’s.

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many kata dvds, right?