2008 Tokushima Training Day

This past week­end, I trav­eled to Tokushima for a one-day train­ing camp and learned a few things. All together, there were almost twenty of us com­ing in from Tokyo, Kansai, and Hiroshima. Among these were a few peo­ple I hadn’t met before and a few I met at the recent camp in Tottori.

Tokushima Taido

Tokushima is located on the island of Shikoku and takes about two-hours to get to by bus from Osaka. There’s actu­ally no Taido dojo in Tokushima, but a guy named Izumi is hop­ing to change that.

I met Izumi in Tottori. He was a cou­ple of years behind my friend Takeo in uni, and now lives in Tokushima for work. He’s been get­ting lonely out there, and he’s been com­mut­ing from Shikoku to Honshu for prac­tice when he has the chance. That’s not sus­tain­able, so with some help from Takeo and Uchiyama, Izumi is try­ing to set up a dojo in Tokushima.

As yet, there are no set train­ing times and no stu­dents. But if this weekend’s train­ing was any indi­ca­tion, Izumi will have all the sup­port he needs once he gets things organized.

Training

The theme of this train­ing was jis­sen. With the stu­dent cham­pi­onship next week and the all-Japan tour­ney com­ing up in a lit­tle over a month, every­one is try­ing to get their skills together. Who bet­ter to lead a jis­sen train­ing than some­one who has won just about every award at just about every tour­na­ment for the last few years? You can’t do much bet­ter than Tetsuji Nakano.

Nakano is basi­cally one of two guys in the world that con­sis­tently wins tour­na­ments at every level (the other is Kaneko). He’s won both jis­sen and hokei in the all-Japan, kicked ass in the world cham­pi­onships, and pretty much only loses any­thing when he is injured. I’m not a huge fan of tournament-oriented Taido, but I have to respect Nakano’s abil­ity as a com­peti­tor as well as his athleticism.

The train­ing was bro­ken up into two ses­sions, and each of those con­sisted of two parts. In ses­sion one, Izumi and Nakano led the train­ing; in ses­sion two, Nakano took the first half, and Kitamura from Hiroshima led the sec­ond half.

Session One

Izumi started things off with a thor­ough warm-up and basic unshin. Then we went right into some games to prac­tice unsoku. The goal of the prac­tice was using unsoku to con­trol ter­ri­tory on the court. We tried sev­eral vari­a­tions on the theme of pro­tect­ing our own ter­ri­tory ver­sus advanc­ing into the opponent’s territory.

In the most basic ver­sion, one per­son stands at one end of the court and tries to pre­vent the other per­son from cross­ing to the other side. First, we just ran, and then we repeated the drill using unsoku. After every­one had got­ten the idea, we added the rule that the defender could punch. Then we added the rule that the attacker could use any tech­nique. There were a few vari­a­tions as well, but you get the idea.

Then Nakano took over, and we worked on some more tech­ni­cal drills. Nakano is best known for his unshin, but he’s also fast as all hell, and he showed us a few tricks for beat­ing our oppo­nents to the punch (lit­er­ally). Roughly half of Nakano’s jis­sen strat­egy is based on how to score with ejizuki, he devoted a lot of time to drilling his method of scor­ing with punches in jissen.

Nakano’s main point was that scor­ing with a sin­gle tech­nique is not a fea­si­ble strat­egy — the oppo­nent will prob­a­bly be able to avoid your first attack. Why? Because you have to cover a lot of dis­tance to attack from the out­side, and this takes time. Nakano sug­gests using your first attack to close the dis­tance and force your oppo­nent to react. Then you have the chance to punch — if you’re fast enough.

Nakano is def­i­nitely fast enough. For those of us who aren’t quite as fast, he shared a cou­ple of tricks. The first one can best be described as a sta­tion­ary sen­tai. Think of pulling the front foot back (as if you were doing in-soku) and imme­di­ately step­ping in with the rear foot for sen­zuki. Then com­bine both move­ments simul­ta­ne­ously. If you are already close enough (after feint­ing with your first tech­nique), you will be able to hit your oppo­nent easily.

Of course, punch­ing quickly is noth­ing new, and there are a hun­dred ways to do it. But how can we make sure that our punches score? There are two keys: cor­rect eji and strong gentai.

Nakano empha­sized using a proper ejizuki instead of sim­ply throw­ing a punch from what­ever posi­tion. Putting your body behind your punch aligns your power and makes it look as if you know what you’re doing. The same thing goes for putting the knee towards the ground. This sounds like a very sim­ple thing to do, but lots of peo­ple do half-assed punches and won­der why they aren’t get­ting points. Nakano says that if you want to get a point, you need learn to punch prop­erly. I couldn’t agree more.

The other thing about mak­ing sure you get points for your punches is to empha­size your gen­tai. Don’t just punch and then wait in eji­dachi for the judge to blow the whis­tle. Kiai like hell and back up into a con­fi­dent look­ing kamae. It won’t make your actual punch any bet­ter, but it will increase your chances of get­ting points. If you want to win tour­na­ments, points are your num­ber one goal.

Nakano drilled us for about an hour on exe­cut­ing a strong ejizuki with gen­tai. We prac­ticed apply­ing this strat­egy to a num­ber of sit­u­a­tions includ­ing defenses to com­mon attacks and as kimegi in rengi situations.

Session Two

After a break to eat, Nakano picked back with more jis­sen strate­gies. Since we worked on punches for the morn­ing ses­sion, he devoted the after­noon ses­sion to kicking.

Basically, there are two keys to hit­ting your oppo­nent with a kick. The first is to kick where the oppo­nent is going (not where he is now), and the sec­ond is to keep your oppo­nent in sight. We did a lot of drills on watch­ing the oppo­nent while you are kick­ing. We also tried var­i­ous tech­niques for antic­i­pat­ing where the oppo­nent will move when we begin attack­ing. These drills are dif­fi­cult to describe in words.

After Nakano was fin­ished, Kitamura took the lead for about an hour. His pre­sen­ta­tion was pretty much sim­i­lar to the prac­tice he lead in Tottori (devel­op­men­tal kobo drills) with a lit­tle more empha­sis on con­tin­u­ous techniques.

The Real Basics

In all, it was a good day of prac­tice. A lot of the actual con­cepts we worked on are very basic — dis­tance, com­bi­na­tions, eye con­tact — but that doesn’t make them unim­por­tant. The fact is, the thing that most peo­ple have the most trou­ble with is apply­ing the basics con­sis­tently. For exam­ple, how many times have you prac­ticed avoid­ing man­jigeri? And how often do you still get hit with man­jigeri? Probably too often. We all have holes in our games, and those holes usu­ally come down to a prob­lem with the basics.

Basics are impor­tant. Everyone knows this, but we tend to make the mis­take of con­fus­ing “basics” with basic tech­niques. The true foun­da­tions on which Taido is built have only a lit­tle to do with the shape of the tech­niques and every­thing to do with apply­ing cer­tain core ideas in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions. At the heart of all mar­tial arts are a finite set of prin­ci­ples that define what hap­pens when two human bod­ies are set to the task of con­trol­ling each other.

The day’s stated theme was jis­sen, but the actual prac­tice was about apply­ing the “real basics” of com­bat. Without these basics (out­lined in the seigyo chap­ter of Taido Gairon), win­ning in jis­sen is sim­ply a mat­ter of strength and luck. Practicing the basic prin­ci­ples is the way to build true skill in Taido, and I think everyone’s skill level went up a notch in Tokushima.