Stupid horses, Welding, and Calf Frys. (or Zen, Connection, and Confict)

  I realized a long time ago, I was never going to be the most interesting man in the room.  I also realized that I was never going to be the smartest either. My Aikido adventures have also ruled out the most skilled. I used to read Zen Mind ,Beginners Mind a lot. It has a story about four kinds of horses.  The first horse gets going when he sees the shadow of the whip.  The second horse gets going on the cracking sound of the whip.  The third horse needs a pop on the backside.  The fourth horse needs to be beat half to death before he moves on down the road. 

Fourth horses suffer a lot  from I dont trust you or the shit that your selling syndrome.  The less you talk to us the better. We like renshu(shut up and do it) and only trust in your keiko( talk about it, explain it.) if you have actually used it in a fight or used it to impress chicks.   But eventually if you give us enough renshu to where we lose 30 pounds and can get up off the floor without moaning we'll listen to some keiko.  .

   
The Tomiki system as we know it has basically 25 movements (8+17),  a walking kata, plus Randori.  Its a renshu model,  We don't complicate things with ura and omote, irimi and tenkan.  Those are issues to be figured out in randori.  When I do an Ikkyo(what I call #6 neighborhood) on a Morty-ryu guy, I get corrected alot because I go ura when its supposed to be omote.  It's probably because I've been trained to feel for resistance and head the other way. or I'm just stupid. 

The thing about our school is that we are more renshu than we give ourselves credit.  We have 25 movements.  25 movements can be separated and repeated pretty damn easy.  That's why I'm a fan of doing everything all the way through 3 or 4 times. (It's only 25 movements, folks.) Then back tracking and doing reps on some trouble spots.  With this type of training it doesnt take long to integrate something new.   This is why the koryu kata should be practiced, all of them.  The koryu show the morty ryu side of things, the basics are there to figure Morty out. 

A bitchy digression: Nobody seems to know why everyone just dropped the koryu kata.  I think everybody went to KooKoo for Tanto Randori in Japan, and Judo Guys with Bad Knees couldnt handle the seiza and Knee walking.  But where its left us is that people have to guess(real bad), make shit up(worse than bad), relate everything to judo(Thank God Tomiki was a Judo guy), or pray for ten years worth of good randori partners. 

Anyway, to get back to that zen and the stupidest horse thing.  The notion is that anything that finally sinks in stays in, and the fourth horse knows it better than anybody else.   It was beat into his bones.

I was having a discussion with Jack about how people throw around the word connection.  How a lot of Aikido types throw it around but they have no idea what the hell it means in concrete terms. I got the best lesson on connection from a morty-ryu beginner who was trying hard to be a first horse.  He told me not to allow my palm to separate from his wrist, so when he did his fourth release I was double bent trying to keep connected.  He tried to get me to choke up on his arm so I could stay connected better but I wanted to be a stubborn fourth horse and stay welded to his wrist and see where that took the situation. What he got out of it was double kuzushi points.  

Check out Crocodile Dundee doing the fourth release.  He talks about Ki, but the trick is really in the Fu Manchu dude keeping his palm welded, if Dundee curls his wrist and Fu keeps the weld on then his balance is broken.  If there is a pocket formed between Fu's palm and the Dundees hand then it doesn't corrupt the other guys posture so much. 

This is where we get our wrist curling ideas from.  Only we dont expect the Uke to stay welded.  I think we work on matching speed and blending to keep the weld. It may also explain why Daito Ryu hand work is more proactive than reactive. Its hunting the weld, and if the weld isnt formed they tend to clock the guy with something else.  Reminds me of those first two dumb moves in Yon Kata.      

I suspect now that this connection business starts out as UKE driven.  It's simply a matter of keeping your palm welded to the guy, and not allowing a space to develop.  Grab your own wrist and allow some space between your palm and the back of your hand. Now raise the back of your hand into your palm and perform a tegatana/daito movement.  When I randori with Jack I get the tori driven connection/welding.  I try to get away but I can't.   Hell, I dont' want to connect but I'm forced to stay welded to whatever is going on.  I suppose you can call it Ki if it makes your hakama fit better.

A thought experiment with this is applying atemi and maintaining tori generated connection.   Check out Aiki Guy here.  I was thinking that if you shomenate the guy and keep the connection with his other hand as he reflexively pulled back and away with it.  You could do # 3 release and the hand change in mid air and keep your maai a bit better, instead brushing your hand down, fitting in and  bowing in, you could shomenate, follow/weld to the the reactive gripping hand/change into Kote mawashi and back out or turn your whole body weight into it.

   As a side note, if the UKE had a knife in his off hand, then that would present some problems in the Calf Fry department for Aiki Guy.   

Anyway, In the 8 releases it may be instructive to do a rep or two where Uke welds his palm to Tori.  It makes the wrist actions make sense.  Then do a few reps where tori trys to maintain the weld, with hand action and footwork.

A tsukuri and a kuzushi walked into a bar....

"throughout history, the most famous exponents of arts such as karate and judo have typically employed set-ups(tsukuri)well matched to their own bodies, taking advantage of their particular physical characteristics."   --Shoji Nishio


I have been told that all successful techniques have three things going for them.  They have kuzushi, tsukuri, and kake.   I've been told they mean off balance, fit, and execution.

 Kuzushi is where you got a guy either mentally a step or two behind you.  He's trying to identify the source of his problems, and these problems tend to multiply quicker than he can identify and deal with them.  They usually have to do with  joint lock pain and that sloshing fish bowl feeling you get in your gut that tells you you are falling. Structurally it has to do with your hips and head getting jacked with to the point of where they seem to be working against each other.  The feet tend to feel around like a person lost in the dark. It's more of something to be exploited rather than something that is made.    The Sun Tzu  Art of War says something along the lines of, "victories can be known, they can't be made."   This is a fact about kuzushi. 

The 4 releases and their related 14 movements in Koryu Dai Yon kata are actually studies of tsukuri/ kuzushi/kake.  Especially if you take them out of the kata and play with them bit and piece and in connection with one another and apply them to the 17.   

T
he foward sheering offbalance (tejazushi) idea that I've bullshitted about is somewhere in the motions of Yon Kata especially crosshand grabs that cycle into an iriminage motion. It's been said that this forward sheer is related to a judo technique.  If we use Shoji Nishio's definition its not an kuzushi concept at all, but a Tsukuri concept.  In nishios words, it is a "set up."  

When you look at the schools of Morty Youshiba they teach their basic techniques in a joint restraint framework.  They have the ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yon kyo, gokyo format.   The tsukuri and kake are  emphasized.  The tsukuri is a matter of stepping offline and clearing a workspace where tori can exert a joint manipulation from a position of strength.  The Kake is the pin.  Techniques are often divided into an  omote/ura.

In my continuing quest to try to figure this shit out, I can tell you that I'm more impressed what Tomiki and Ohba actually put together for us.  Our   8 releases and 14 Yon represent kito-ryu/rise and fall points. Nick Lowry describes it as hanging a man on a wire. In Yon Kata the Kito points are marked by the rise and fall projections of the first 7, they are then "released"  from the same point in the second 7. They separate the Omote and Ura of other schools, because there is a Kito ryu pause that registers whether a technique is going one way or the other based off of feedback. 

Tomiki folks are omote and ura blind.  We understand the point in between and wait to see where its going.  We learn that through Randori. 

Imagine a Yon Kata overlay on these iwama ryu techniques.   These are the releases but they aint the releases if you get my drift.  They have some set ups/tsukuri, in that a workplace is cleared by using footwork.  If you can imagine a yon kata movement before a technique then you can see possible kuzushi points. 

I have often had the suspicion that Tomiki Aikido was about the midpoints.  Shoji Nishio said that all aikido techniques have five or six ways to down an opponent.  And Tomiki seems to have worked this concept in under the radar.  There are branching off points in aikido, and Tommy seems to have mapped those out for us.  If we pay attention to it.