Most brown and black belts spar on instinct! They never really study the art of fighting as much as go out their and see what happens. We have moved away from training in the art of fighting because it is not as PC as the type of “nice” training we do now. In the old days (And I hate using that term) we used to study set ups, we used to train to find openings and we used to…well bludgen the heck out of each other to work on Kumite…and sometimes much less successfully than others.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not going to be a “we did it better back then” kind of post, no its going to be a “we can do much better than we did back then, and better than we do now” post. Back in the day we were not pretty fighters, we were bruts that threw arms and legs at each other in a violent ballet of thrashing and hoping to hit a spot. Even the fastest and best fighters were a bit brutish and were not thinking when they trained. They had no idea about strategy. The best fighter I knew back then was a missile, he would find an opening and dash at it like a hungry panther seeing a steak!
The problem is that most sport Karate is much like that, you get some infrequent fighters that study the strategies and follow them, but for the most part the fighters find that they have a Tokui waza and then look for the all-important Ippon and basically don’t have a clue how to get that technique in effectively or when to change tactics….if they know and understand the tactics at all.
Two reasons I shy away from sport Karate, other than it tends to create butt-heads and not good people is that its not realistic and it silences the actual study and application of techniques that you can use for defense and deepening your understanding of strategy in combat. First off let me say that the comment about butt-heads is not 100% accurate, its more like it “tends” to bring out the worst in people and if you train specifically for sport…it makes your ability to realize that “ippon” is not the end all be all and you WONT be smacking someone in a game of tag on the street, or at least you wont live if that’s your strategy.
Now, the study of strategy in Karate actually is something that was taken from Kenjutsu and Kendo. That’s right, all our strategy and deep study of kumite…comes from a Japanese school of fencing. Anko Azato was also a student/master of Jigen Ryu Kenjutsu and a lot of the self-defense style strategy, or Senryaku, comes from his training in this Samurai art.
Azato was Shizoku, or the Okinawan equivalent of a samurai and he studied the stratagy of battle deeply and imparted this to his longest standing student, Gichin Funakoshi, also a Shizoku class family member. Funakoshi brought his brand of Karate to Japan and taught Masatoshi Nakayama. Nakayama was a son of a famous Kendo master and part of the lineage of a great school of Kendo that his father was a master of. It stands to reason that the terminology and the use all come from this common denominator in the Karate masters line. They all used the terms that we have today, with some modification, and the theory stands today.
This article is to show the students the different “strategy” that we actually should be studying, what it means and how to apply it. Most of the strategy for Kenjutsu comes from the Go Rin No sho, or book of Five rings by the famous Miyamoto Musashi which was written after Musashi retired from challenge matches as a active Samurai, around 1645. The whole book is a great resource for learning the art of fighting, but in the book of fire (Each book representing an element) he goes into detail about the different strategies using the “no-sen” terminology, which we will get to. Being an aggressive system with little blocking, You would never block a sword with a sword for fear that the blade would break and then you would be defenseless, it was far more important to learn when to attack than how to block and counter…so it is somewhat limited in that respect but can and does still apply to Karate.
The first of his strategies that he talked about was Kake-no-sen. Kake-no-sen is when you perceive your attacker is about to attack you and you beat him to the punch as it were. You basically see that your attacker is at the ideal distance to attack, they are in a position to make an attack and you feel their intent…and you bash them first. This is the same as Sen-no-sen in Karate. Now, I know what you are thinking….”but the Niju Kun says “ Karate Ni Senti nashi” or “there are not first attacks in Karate”. Well, yes, but if the mugger that wants your money flicks out a knife and steps close to you, close enough to strike…you best push his face in backwards. The term “Attack” used in the Niju kun basically means “don’t start a fight”, it does not say “Wait to be hit, then return fire”.
The next strategy that is used is called Tai-no-sen. In Jeet Kun Do this is called the “Stop hit” techniques, which basically means that your opponent begins his attack and you block and counter before he lands the attack and before they have a chance to end it. So you basically block the punch, kick and counter at the same time. This does not give them a chance to reset and start another technique. You can also avoid the attack by moving out of the way, but complete your attack before they complete theirs. A perfect example of this would be Enoeda sensei pivoting out of the way of a mae geri and landing an Uraken before the Mae geri is completed. Tai-no-sen is virtually untaught in the organization we came from, it was basically Sen-no-sen and Go-no-sen only.
Go-no-sen is the last concept. It basically means that you allow your opponent to complete their attack and then deliver a counter. There are some important points that have to be made about Go-no-sen however that many fail to grasp. This is not a block and counter feel, We don’t let them finish, take a breath and then smack them. Far to often we train in Go-no-sen and the students end up completing a full technique, land, set and then they are countered, this is wrong! Go-no-sen would be the easiest of the strategy to do if this were true, but the truth is that we would be totally off base if that was our understanding. Go-no-sen is the end of a chain in movement understanding.
The first is Sen-no-sen or Kake no Sen in which you attack before the actual movement starts, you have to be fast, accurate and ready. The second phase is they just started moving and they are almost half way through the movement and you catch it and counter at the same time. You have to be very fast and to be safe quick movement should be used to pivot out of harms way. And the final phase is when you complete your counter as the first attack is at its completion and before the attacker can restart a new one.
You may choose to do some reading on your own, realize that we A) took these terms from Kendo and much like the Kake/Sen-no-sen variance there are others out their that use some very different terms to describe the same situations. Don’t be confused, its just one instructors take on a term over another. And B) you will see that some instructors teaching Karate don’t have a clue about these terms, were they came from or their purpose. Some say that Sen no sen means you attack first and Go no sen means you counter after you block. They don’t truly understand sword fighting (nor do I but apparently I have a small clue), and they don’t understand the strategy of fighting as well as they think they do.
These are three concepts in Karate, they are not the end all be all of strategy. For that you need to first get the basics down, like how to attack and when…then you can look at other strategies and work on them.
1 comment:
How can you apply age uke, soto uke, gedan badai ecc on Ju kumite?
Post a Comment