Shima Dojo 01/10/2008

We had a pretty full class last night with only three kyu level students. I started my portion of the class with a short talk on what I felt were the most basic ingredients for good taijutsu（たいじゅつ）: flexibility, ukemi（うけみ）, and kamae（かまえ）. Each of these skills are connected and if one lacks the others will suffer. I suggested that if you're early to class, which you should be, do your stretching then. Also practice the ukemi and kamae as perfectly as you can with honesty about your skill level. I mentioned a couple of other things before practicing zenpou kaiten（ぜんぽうかいてん）, koho kaiten（こほうかいてん）and ichimonji no kamae（いちもんじのかまえ）。

Doug followed with this technique: Uke（うけ）does katamune dori（かたむねどり）followed by a jodan tsuki（じょだんつき）. Tori（とり）strikes down with the forearm into the bend of the uke's arm while stepping back into jumonji no kamae（じゅもんじのかまえ）. The strike is performed with the same side arm. The free hand can deflect the incoming strike as you assume kamae. I don't recall a specific take down. The reversal to this was as the tori strikes down into the arm move in with the strike. While holding onto the uke's lapel apply a fudoken（ふどけん）to the face while sweeping the leg with ihen no kamae（いへんのかまえ）. You could also just perform ganseki nage（がんせきなげ）or kick the uke's leg out to help with the throw.

Doug then showed the second Togakure Ryu（とがくれりゅ）kata from the Santo Tonko no Kata（さんととんこのかた）: Hidari Kata Ude Tonsou Gata (ひだりかたうでとんそうがた - left side arm escape form). Uke grab's tori's wrist on the same side. Uke pulls tori back three times. The tori resists the first two pulls, the second one slightly less than the first. On the third pull tori pushes the uke's wrist/arm outward and kick's the uke in the groin. Hold the uke's shoulder and drive uke to the ground like o-gyaku. With the arm trapped zenpou kaiten over the uke. Next we did the same thing while wearing shuko.

We finished class with simple senban shuriken（せんばんしゅりけん）throwing. One person was a target while the other walked toward the target throwing them and then walked away while throwing them.

Good times.

がんばってください！