Unsu-ed

One of the signature katas in shotokan karate is Unsu. It is a very athletic and flashy kata with its roundhouse kicks from the ground, a dramatic 360 degree turning jump, and my favorite sequence of circular blocks followed by double palm heal strikes in sanchin-dachi (hour glass) stance. An accomplished karateka can put on quite a show by performing it with technical expertise and personal passion, as in this clip of Mr. Yahara, who is famous for his beautiful, gravity-defying leap near the end. 


The clip shows three separate Unsus by Mr. Yahara. The second is probably the best filmed of the bunch. Notice the flawless four-point landing after the leap. Exquisite. Love it. Wanna jump up and do it right this minute!


There is an instructors' training clinic at the central dojo in Phoenix on April 3rd. Mr. Shojiro Koyama will be teaching Jitte and Unsu. My Jitte is fair, but my Unsu needs lots of work. Today is Saturday and so it's off to the dojo I go, with rolled up gi, ready, willing, and, thanks be to God, able to work on improving Unsu. I'm totally Unsu-ed.

Clean and Empi

One of the lifts I'm working on in CrossFit is the power clean. I love the transition of the elbows from straight to bent to receive the weight on the shoulders. This has to be quick and sharp, like the empi uchi technique in shotokan. Power cleans lead to powerful empi uchi. Powerful empi uchi lead to sharp elbow transitions in power cleans.

Zanshin and the Burpee

Last night Dave, my CrossFit Sensei, had us do 75 burpees for time with a 12 minute cutoff. He gave us a pep talk before in which he said because it was a simple own-body weight exercise, basically drop to the floor, do a pushup, hop up and clap hands over your head, there was absolutely no excuse for not maintaining continuous movement. Don't stop. Keep going. Don't hold back. All out. That is, zanshin.

It reminded me of lessons from three of my main karate influences, my Japanese teachers. I had the gift of learning the basics of shotokan from Shunsaku Koga, a graduate student in sports medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the late 1970s, now living in Japan with his fine family. We still communicate, thankfully. I remember during kumite drills Koga-san would assail his much larger opponents and literally explode through. The club of about 60 of us formed a circle for full speed free sparring on Friday nights. I still see the image of Koga after launching one of his utterly fearless but controlled attacks and rocket-propelled punches to the upper lip, which would have killed the target had it landed full force two or three inches further than allowed. The attack began, followed through and ended in a flash, a blink. His whole body would quake as the glass shattering kiai erupted. He was behind his opponent having gone through all blocks and evasions. It scared the crap out of me and I was sitting on the floor. The look on the face of his opponent is also unforgettable. Looked like a facial prayer. Thank you God for sparring me. From those days I saw zanshin in action. Go forward no matter what.

I heard the word itself in Sugiyama Sensei's Chicago dojo. He defined it in those hot, humid summer clinics in the 1980s and 1990s as mental determination, mental follow-through before, during, and after an attack. Koga-san. I imitated what I had seen Koga do in the Madison dojo and tried to apply what I was experiencing in Chicago. My kiai got louder. My techniques got focused. Confidence replaced fear.

Nishiyama Sensei taught follow-through too. I was always shocked at what he saw that I missed in people's kumite and kata. When two karateka performed the same kata side by side I always thought the more athletic kata was better. But Nishiyama looked for more. He looked for evidence of zanshin. Like in the duel scene between the samurai and villager Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. After that fight, the villager is still standing, dead, while the samurai stands behind him, calm, ready, balancing between mindfulness and mindlessness.

Thank you Koga-san. Thank you Sugiyama Sensei. Thank you Nishiyama Sensei. Dave Sensei, domo arigato senor roboto.

I did the 75 burpees in 6 minutes and 59 seconds.

Corruption and My Favorite Movie

The word corruption comes from a Latin root meaning "destroy," especially in the sense of ruining principle, integrity, or virtue. I wrote about the theology and economics of corruption in the Judas lesson of my high school Apostles and Markets curriculum. I described corruption as betrayal of benefactors' trust, as when Judas betrayed our ultimate benefactor Jesus Christ. The New Institutional Economics uses agency theory, problems between principals and their agents, to analyze corruption. Copying someone else's homework is often described as cheating. My lesson stresses that cheating is also a violation of an implied contractual agreement between student and teacher, between student and parents, and between student and school reputation.

One of my favorite depictions of corruption in film is the 1962 Japanese movie, Harakiri. This three minute trailer summaries the story line well and suggests how ugly is the hypocrisy of corruption in medieval Japan. The film builds tension by slowly revealing the story of a young samurai too poor to own real swords. His money-raising scam was to threaten clans with committing seppuku unless given money to leave. One clan calls his bluff and the poor man is forced to follow through with the ceremony. The rest of the story unveils how the young samurai's father extracts revenge on this clan by systematically challenging and defeating its top swordsmen. Tatsuya Nakadai, my favorite Japanese film star, plays the father.

The duel between the father and the clan's number one swordsman on the plains of Edo is unforgettable. The wind howls, the tall grass whips wildly as the samurai face each other. After the battle, and the father's work of exposing the clan's hypocrisy and cruelty is complete, the clan survivors try to cover up. There is a final scene that captures evil's desire to remain hidden, or at least to appear ordinary, normal. The stone pathways and gardens are raked smooth again, hiding the battle that took place there only moments ago.

And this just in!  I found a really good review of Harakiri on YouTube here. The author has a brilliant blog called Constantine in Tokyo. Her reviews are outstanding. Treat yourself to a visit!

Fighting Spirit

Last night we did a classic benchmark workout called "Fight Gone Bad." It was designed by Greg Glassman, founder of crossfit, to help prepare mixed martial artists for the intensity of a fight. It consists of three (sometimes five) rounds of five exercises; sumo deadlift high pull with 75 lbs., 20 lb. wall ball thrown 10' high, rowing for calories, push press with 75 lbs., and 20" box jumps. Athletes perform each exercise for one minute then move to the next station. Scores consist of the accumulated total of repetitions and calories burned rowing. My score was 191. The monster athletes in our gym racked up scores in the low 300s. There is a one minute rest between rounds.

Fight Gone Bad, or as I like to call it, Fight Gone in a Direction I Hadn't Quite Anticipated or Hoped For, is intense. I felt like my lungs were going to get up out of my chest, turn around and say, that's it, we're outta here.

Kumite matches in most shotokan tournaments are only two minutes long, with occasional overtime matches to settle ties. Fight Gone Bad would help train shotokan athletes for endurance. Kata training also is supposed to train fighting spirit. Fight Gone Bad has helped my kata tremendously.

Aristotle said virtue is the habitual practice of doing right. In a way, Fight Gone Bad and crossfit training is habitual expansion of ability, and shotokan is the physical, outward expression of doing things right.

Yahara. Yeah, Hara

Hara is a Japanese martial arts concept referring to the belly. I read that it can be translated from Chinese or Japanese into "red field," or "golden stove," and is considered the location of "ki" energy. It is located about three fingers below the navel and two fingers in.

Mikio Yahara (get it.... "Yeah, Hara"... uh boy) is one of the Japan Karate Association's most amazing athletes. Here he is as a young man, kickin' Japan Karate Ass'n.

And here, he is as an older man kickin' Japan Karate Ass'n.

I love to watch Yahara Sensei's spinning movements. Attack from this side, then like lightening attack from the other side. His techniques are quick and powerful because they come from hara, from the red field, golden stove, or just the core.

CrossFit strength and conditioning effects the hara area, the core. Many mixed martial artists love crossfit training for this reason.

I love crossfit. Love shotokan too. The two re-enforce each other multiplicatively. For a treat, watch this clip of Yahara's hara in action! Be sure to turn up the volume. If you aren't inspired to get right up and do kata or hit a heavy bag, check your pulse.

Better than Sin

The dojo kun, or training hall motto that we recite at the end of each workout in shotokan starts with these words from our school-teacher Okinawan founder, Gichin Funakoshi: "Seek perfection of character." What does this mean?

I prefer to interpret it as striving to get better and that that is good enough for now.

The noun perfection and the adjective perfect have at least two connotations. Perfect in the sense of not possible of further improvement, without any flaws or defects, and perfect in the sense of complete, or fitting, or unmitigatedly conforming to some ideal, as in perfect gentleman. It is this second meaning to which I think we are referring in the dojo kun.

Pursuit of perfection in the former sense is the devil's call. It is tempting a person to commit the sin of pride. Be perfect so you can be worthy of Christ. It is sneaky and dangerous. During Lent, I am thinking about what a huge undertaking it is to "seek perfection of character," especially in my case. But the good Jesuits taught me that the first sin, the sin of the angels against God, was all about pride. You mean you're going to lower yourself and enter history to save humans, asked Lucifer of God in disgust. Adam and Eve, our first parents, thought they knew better than God what was and what was not authorized.

Then, our sins. How trivial they are compared to the sin of the angels and our first parents, observed St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises. And how awful. Dante taught me in l'inferno to hate the sin not the sinner, as when Virgil discusses the pitiful sight of Paolo and Francesca whirling around in hell. Sin keeps Christ nailed to the cross. How unjust. How unfair is sin.

But then there's grace, the free gift from our loving Father in Heaven. And what grace means to me is that striving is pleasing to God. The "arriving" is up to God; the "striving" is my freely given response to God's love. And in this sense, seeking the perfection of character means keeping open to trying, even though I stumble, even though I fall, I get up and keep heading in the direction I know is right. I keep trying to be true to my nature. Keep trying to do a correct reverse punch. Or, a (nearly perfect) gyaku zuki. And to live virtuously.

Because getting better is good enough for His children. And so it is good enough for me.

Bar Fist

My hunch is that the human hand, no matter how strong or well conditioned, would be damaged if used to strike a human face. Though non-contact in theory, those summer shotokan clinics in Sugiyama Sensei's Chicago dojo in the 1970s and 1980s had frequent accidental encounters between fists and faces. I remember seeing noses in places where they weren't meant to be. But I also remember seeing the offending hands in a damaged state as well.

I wonder if gripping the iron bar in the lifting exercises of CrossFit makes the fist stronger in shotokan karate, not in the sense of being able to withstand the boney content of the human face, but in the sense that striking the MAKIWARA board becomes easier. By the way, watch this woman hit the makiwara. I would want her on my side in a fight.

My makiwara is stored in the garage. I must set it up somehow. But where to anchor? I'll figure something out. Because I remember Sugiyama Sensei asking during those grueling clinics in humid Chicago, "Oh. How many strike makiwara board today? (No hands raised) Oh. I don't have any karateka in dojo today."

Nijushiho Power Clean

We did skills work last night at CrossFit Works on the clean and jerk. Two reps at the top of each minute for 15 minutes, for a total of thirty clean and jerks. Of course, I always do a split jerk because it reminds me of zenkutsu dachi (front stance).

During rests I walked through the moves of that most magnificent kata, Nijushiho, which means the twenty-one steps. Wonderful kata. I love the ageuki-empi (rising block-elbow strike) sequence followed by the slow, sweeping movement of the arm. I can still hear Nishiyama Sensei's voice in my head saying "go catch" as fifty of us would perform this sweeping movement in the Chicago dojo during one of his clinics. May God smile on the face of Hidetaka Nishiyama.

My power clean and jerks are getting better. Can't imagine clean and jerking almost 600 lbs. like Mr. Leonid Tarenenko did in the clip I linked to above. But I sure can do a front stance like he does, though my legs don't look like those tree trunks. And whenever I do Nijushiho I always say in my mind during the sweeping move, "go catch!"

Snatch Kata Part 1

I am blessed. At karate training Saturday, I mentioned in passing to my Sensei Enrique O. that the Olympic lift called the snatch was a "mystery movement" to me, not unlike the golf swing. It turns out Enrique Sensei was a Mexican national champion in Olympic lifting.

Because he knows both karate and Olympic lifts, he can draw from both to teach one or the other. After training was over, out in the parking lot, he made up a snatch kata to illustrate how the hands/arms should move quickly to the overhead position. I imitated and got that part of the snatch drawing on that part of my brain devoted to countless repetitions in karate, but this time applied to a different objective.

He also demonstrated what he called the S-shaped curve for the body's route during the snatch. This was easier to watch than to do, but it is helpful to have the image of my karate sensei doing it in my mind's eye, there in the sunny parking lot on a Saturday morning. Can't wait to attack snatch again during CrossFit training this week. That is, if we do it. We may not. CrossFit exercise variation is great. Part of what I enjoy so much about it is its variety.

But it is certainly a blessing to be around so many knowledgeable people. Sensei Enrique O., Dave S., Jen H., and Carl W. I am so grateful to know them.