Shotokan Karate Jutsu Seminar

This post is a bit on the technical side of the art. Most people who don't practice martial arts might have some difficulty understanding, so I'll try to be as clear as I can.

This weekend, I attended a kata bunkai seminar given by Paul Lopresti and his father Sal Lopresti from the Shotokan Karate Jutsu Academy. The seminar itself was a lot of fun for me. I did see some relatively new ways of doing some applications, but (and I guess this is a good thing) I wasn't truly surprised with their interpretations of the kata. At least not as much as the other people coming from the other Montreal JKA clubs (more on this later).

Flying in from Philadelphia, these two teachers were teaching what they claim as "forgotten applications for Shotokan kata". That is, very well-hidden and forgotten fighting techniques embedded within the dance-like series of movements. What was cool about the whole seminar was the way they demonstrated that throwing, locking, choking and even ground fighting techniques (normally associated with Judo, Ju-jutsu and Aikido) were actually part of the original "karate curriculum".

According them, these individual techniques, in addition to the strikes, kicks and blocks, were put in a geometric order that we now know as kata . Now, if you watch a Shotokan kata performed, however, you'll probably only see the moves as striking, blocking and kicking. Apparently, the people who have propagated the art outside of Japan decided to teach karate as such because of a shift in the mentality behind the art. They went from teaching the battlefield-oriented "jutsu" to the more philosophically and morally-oriented "do".

Hence the change in names from karate-jutsu to karate-do, aikijutsu to aikido, kenjutsu to kendo or jujutsu to judo. Get the idea?

Of course, this theory isn't new. Well-known "karate heretics" like Rob Redmond have postulated the same thing.

In any case, the result is that modern-day Shotokan Karate-do practitioners have only been focusing on the basic block-strike applications to each kata technique. Consequently, the vast majority of them have no concept of joint locks, throws, chokes and ground fighting. This is definitely a weakness for the Montreal JKA members, especially in self-defense situations. Yes, we have developed a group of great punchers, kickers and strikers, but they are limited.

The proof of this? About 90% of the students in this seminar (who by the way were advanced brown and black belts) acted as if they've never seen anything like what they saw during that weekend. People who have been training for at least 5 to 10 years were seeing something that they never thought existed in Shotokan. It's a bit sad when you think about it.

Luckily for the members of my dojo, a good number of us, including the instructor, have been exposed to other martial arts. This exposure has given us more insight on how the human body works and has allowed us to make the connection between these techniques and kata.

Of course, we can argue that all this is simply kata "reverse-engineering". That is, the teachers of the "forgotten applications" have simply taken the joint locks, throws, chokes, etc. and attributed them to kata techniques. This, however, is the subject of another post.