Genkaku: What's the Point?

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Q&A

Genkaku is prob­a­bly the most-reviled rule in tour­na­ment Taido. Players hate it. Judges hate it. In fact, most judges never force genkaku in jis­sen. Many tour­na­ments explic­itly for­bid it.

I don’t think genkaku is all bad, but it’s def­i­nitely not my favorite part of jis­sen. I’m more into the meat — the part that involves hit­ting peo­ple. However, I can see some value to train­ing genkaku and even in occa­sion­ally using it in jis­sen. After all, it was good enough for Shukumine…

Could it be that genkaku has some mean­ing besides giv­ing peo­ple a chance to flip out like nin­jas dur­ing jissen?

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How to Learn Japanese

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Q&A

Note: Lest I come off as if i were try­ing to sound like an expert, I should men­tion here that my Japanese is not great. I am not flu­ent in Japanese, but I am fluid in using Japanese to the degree I under­stand it. My Japanese lan­guage skills are exactly as good as they need to be in order to do…

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How Do I Learn Taido Theory?

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Q&A

Gabriel wrote this: I feel that in recent years there has been a move away from (in US Taido) teach­ing the the­ory and under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples (i.e. why mov­ing a cer­tain way is effec­tive). I’m not say­ing that this reflects poorly on the instruc­tors, who I hap­pen to look up to, but i def­i­nitely feel that the vast major­ity of participants…

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Are You Good Enough to Teach?

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Q&A

Andrew posted about one of the clas­sic sticky issues in the “mar­tial arts indus­try”: Random ques­tion: how impor­tant do you think it is for a teacher to be as good or bet­ter than his/her stu­dents when teach­ing them some­thing? I don’t have any stu­dents per se, but I do try to help peo­ple out when I see them making…

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Is Taido Too Difficult To Be Popular?

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Q&A

In America, there are basi­cally just two types of mar­tial arts schools: big ones that make money and small ones that don’t. There are a lot of stereo­types regard­ing which extreme is bet­ter, but as with all flat gen­er­al­iza­tions, the real­ity is not so sim­ple. In con­verse to the pre­vail­ing trend, there exist very large dojo…

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