Openhand on Tuite

More than a few times lately--well, shoot, over the years--I've read comments and blogposts about tuite and kyusho from people that are--well, they're just interesting, I'll put it that way. People will tell you to rap someone in the temple with a backfist--a technique involving a striking surface about the size of a fifty-cent piece impacting a target about the size of a fifty-cent piece--whilst simultaneously deriding nerve strikes (I am not making this up. I read a piece by one of the highest-ranking Isshin Ryu masters in North America doing this very thing.) They'll tell you that tuite is too complex, too much of a "fancy technique," to work in combat, under stressful conditions.

God knows I don't claim to be an expert on either kyusho or tuite, but I am pretty sure that anyone telling you such things isn't all that good at either one. Tuite is not very complex, not really, at least what I have been shown. It is simply the practical application of anatomy and body mechanics in a defensive situation. You are drilling the motions, over and over and over, in kata. You do not, under stress, have to rummage through your memory to find appropriate techniques any more than you have to rummage through your memory for appropriate driving maneuvers when you are trying to avoid an accident. Just like striking techniques, tuite kind of "pops out" of you when appropriate, if you are doing the practice. And if you are seeking techniques that do not require that you practice them in order for them to be readily effective for you, I would suggest that you are kind of wasting your time practicing martial arts in the first place.

Tuite is darned effective, once it becomes natural to you. I keep going back to the example of my own instructor, but that's because he's the perfect illustration. Doggone it, the man's a fairly smallish, ill, weak, oxygen patient of sixty-two years age, and he can quickly and easily overpower either me or my son with tuite. It doesn't require muscle. It can slam you to the deck in a heartbeat.

All I'll say about nerve strikes here is that in my limited experience, as you become more familiar with them, the vulnerable areas become easier to find and hit. I have learned painfully from my son that eventually, it becomes darn hard to miss those nerves. Dadgummit, the booger hardly ever misses my nerves...

All of which is to suggest that if you are interested in the subject, you visit this post by Openhand. It's a short education in the subject.

The Weird Thing About Kata

It wasn't that many years ago that you could very easily find people in the martial arts world completely dismissing the practice of kata. A lot of people thought it was stupid.

I never thought kata was stupid, not even when I had no real clue what I was doing with it. You see, I took it for granted that the people who created and preserved the kata weren't idiots. I had enough common sense, just barely, to realize that there had to be a purpose to those things we called "chambers." Had to be. Only an idiot would take such a position without a darn good reason, so I figured there had to be a reason. I just didn't know what it was.

The other day, over at Okinawan Fighting Art: Isshin Ryu, Mr. James published, making reference in the process to something that Shotokan's Rob Redmond wrote, Elmar Schmeisser's rules for interpreting kata. There are, of course, other sets of rules for interpreting kata. There are the rules that Toguchi Seikichi said that Miyagi Chojun gave him (read this), which the authors of The Way of Kata expound in even more detail. Then there is the approach that Javier Martinez takes in Okinawan Karate, The Secret Art of Tuite. (This seems to be out of print. Amusingly, someone has priced the only used copy that Amazon lists at almost a thousand simoleons. It was an interesting book, but I guarantee you, it ain't worth that much. You could buy the whole set of Taika Seiyu Oyata's tapes for half that, and you could buy everything that Yang Jwing-Ming has written about chin na for less than a couple hundred, I'm sure.

On the other hand, I do own a copy that's in pretty good shape. I'll let it go for a comparative pittance--say, five hundred bucks. Anybody up for that?) Bruce Clayton seems to take another approach in Shotokan's Secret. The RyuTe Renmei, under Taika Seiyu Oyata's guidance and leadership, uses yet another approach. It will surprise no one that I am most impressed with RyuTe's approach. It consistently produces an effect known in the blogosphere as either headdesk or facepalm, that is, when you, if you come to RyuTe from a different system, as I did, and you see some of the RyuTe applications for all those movements you've wondered about for years, they are so intuitively obvious that you immediately want to slap yourself silly for not having seen it before.

But you know what's weird? It seems to me that all of the interpretive approaches I mentioned above (and I'm sure that I've left some out) yield at least some usable techniques. This is in spite of the fact that sometimes those methods seem dramatically different from one another. One method I've read insists that the movements of the kata be followed in order; that method produces at least some usable techniques. Another method considers the movements as though they are linked in modules. Here is what you do if the opponent grabs your wrist. Then, if he does this, you do that. And if that, then this. That method also produces at least some usable techniques. They all produce at least some usable techniques.

It seems to me that no matter what approach you take to interpreting the kata, if you do the creators and preservers of the kata this one favor, that of assuming that they weren't complete fools and really look hard for useful techniques, the kata will do you the favor of yielding up at least some of its secrets to you.