Wednesday 9 December 2015

Passai Bunkai and World Champions

This morning we went to the Budokan to train with Mr Ulf. 
We did bunkai for their version of passai. Mr Ulf studies Kishimoto- Di. They only train four kata in their system and it does seem very fluid, yet strong. We did some very interesting (and painful!) bunkai. 
Some viscous stuff going on! Recently with the Naihanchi bunkai and now the new passai bunkai we did- my elbow joints are really feeling it! 
It was fun though, halfway through Sakumoto Sensei and his students (including Ryo Kyuna- current world champ!) showed up and started training. Really hard to keep concentration on our bunkai when they're there snapping away together!
Their kata was impressive, but a million miles away from what we were doing a the other end of the room. Theirs was beautiful, elegant, snappy and sharp. 
Ours was messy and unpredictable but realistic. 
It all comes from the same tree. It's all karate but there's differences between the branches (styles), leaves (bunkai) and flowers (kata). They're all important in making the tree what it is. 
However I feel you need to choose your path and follow it- you can't do it all. As the old saying goes 'jack of all trades, master of none'. However, that's not to say that you can't experience and learn something from every different martial art, as Habu Sensei said 'try everything, steal the good, drop the bad', add it all to your  knowledge and use it to improve your base style. 
Knowledge is power, so surely the more you have, the more chance you have of being effective should you ever need to use your art eh... 

1 comment:

  1. I've trained with Ulf, before, and he taught me the first two kata of KishimotoDi, as well as applications. I found it to be very beneficial to my Shorin-Ryu.

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