Ghosting and why if you do not yokogeri your Seishan kata will suck.
(reposting this in the wadopedia kata seishan section).
Seishan. You just did a fake maegeri with your left leg as you did a sukui uchi up their face.
You then relaxed your mind and body and let the arm go. You then sense that all is not well directly behind you so you turn in that direction as you land in shiko dachi and perform an ura uchi down the front of the opponent’s face crushing it with your body weight and a bit of tanden force thrown in to boot.
This is the setup.
So here you are just hanging out in shiko dachi minding your own business when all of a sudden someone grabs your hand that just so happens to be shaped in ura uchi.
So Houston, we have a problem. Not only has he grabbed my hand but because he sort of knows what he is doing he now has control over me. Not only does he have me, but he really has me. What do I mean by that? You can grab someone and not have access to their center or you can grab them and get access to their center. What is the easiest way to grab someone and get access to their center? Simple. You grab then pull. What is happening in this particular scenario? Not only is he grabbing me, he starts to pull on me.
This is a critical element in this kata. Kata always has a set of assumptions. If any of the assumptions change then the kata can change. The assumption in this scenario is that the guy has grabbed and pulled, therefore he not only has me, he has now gained access to my center. Not very cool if you are a jujitsu guy because we are all about keeping people out of our center while we move from our center. So what’s a jujitsu guy/gal to do? Simple. Ghost it. What does ‘ghost it’ mean? You must temporarily disappear. But eventually you will have to reappear so wouldn't it be way cooler if you could disappear and then reappear in a superior position? Think about it. It would be sort of pointless if you just vanished but then reappeared in the exact same disadvantageous position. That would be like Captain Kirk being beamed off the top of a crumbling cliff only to reappear on the said cliff a few seconds later. Rather pointless. So what would a Jedi Knight do? Disappear and then reappear in a superior position. Most smart people would just disappear and run but then you wouldn’t be a kick ass Jedi Knight. And since we are kick ass Jedi Knights we will reappear in a superior position so we can then proceed to make them regret ever having disrupted our perfectly good day.
Before I go further I need to introduce a Japanese word that might be new for some of you. Chidori ashi.
Chidori ashi or the crossover step as many of us call it in the West is a cross step that is rather commonplace in Wado. Chidori ashi is the footwork we use if we want sideways mobility. You can move sideways by shuffling like a crab or you can use the crossover step to move sideways. Kushanku has chidori ashi. Naihanchi has chidori ashi. Seishan has chidori ashi.
What is so special about chidori ashi? If performed correctly it allows you to cover much more distance than trying to just shuffle sideways like a crab. And if done properly it allows you to move in such a way that you constantly remain in the center of you. The importance of remaining in the center of you is worthy of its own dissertation so I’ll have to do that at another time. Just believe me when I say that all Jedi Knights feel it is imperative to remain in the center of them.
So then how to initiate the chidori ashi correctly. For the sake of this visualization you are in shiko dachi. You want to go to your left. (If this was Naihanchi you would be in naihanchi stance.) Most people fail on the initiation because when they go left they push off their right foot. As soon as you push off with your right foot to initiate the crossover your center has been compromised. The correct way to move is to pull from the left foot, not push from the right foot. We are taking about the initiation phase. At some point there may or may not be a baby push off the right foot but that is more an issue of balancing out the forces. The initiation must be done by the pull of the left foot otherwise your STRUCTURE gets compromised and what internal power you have will fizzle.
So chidori ashi. In the initiation phase we pull with our left foot to go to our left.
There is a drill Sensei Threadgill and I did in Berlin. We made the students stand in shiko dachi. We then made them go left or right. So let’s say we told the person to go left. We had another person place their hand on the squatter’s left shoulder to offer resistance. The squatter had to move thru the person offering resistance. If you push off your far leg (right) then your pusher man feels like a wall. You collide with the opponent and don’t get very far. But if you can correctly pull with the left leg then you can actually move the opponent. This simple drill can be done on many different levels.
For example:
1) Push with far leg. Doesn’t work.
2) Pull with closer leg. Kinda get movement
3) Feel the sokuto edge of your (left) closer leg. Cant your foot (turn it) so that the leftmost edge is dug in more than the inside edge. That creates a sort of tension in your left inner thigh that then should help your stability when you try to displace your opponent.
4) Feel the point of contact. His hand placement on your left shoulder. Feel the pressure. Now expand yourself left to right. Use intent. Expand. Then imagine a laser beam shooting out from the elbow of your left shoulder that is being pushed on. Intent. Then with your hyper sensitive Jedi Knight powers sense his center. Then take that laser beam and project it below his center. Intent. Now you are under his center. You just took away his base. Now pull with the left foot. Poof! You easily move him.
5) Go into Heaven Earth Man. 6 directions. Expand fully. Now pull with your left leg.
6) Combine steps 4 and 5. You will move him like he is not even there.
7) Establish Heaven Earth Man. 6 directions. Spiral down the left leg. Spiral up the right leg. Have him push on you with all his might.
Unless he is King Kong you cannot be moved. Now pull with your left leg. You will blast him off his base.
For most of us we will stay at number 2. Number 2 is already using a certain level of internal power.
Steps 3 and above you are enrolled in Jedi Knight Academy. In all seriousness, I think I can teach most people how to do this with a few months of practice? It is not that hard.
Anyway, so at least go to step 2.
Back to ghosting. He has acquired access to your center because he has grabbed and pulled. So you must first disappear. How? It’s actually quite simple and is a standard jujitsu technique. You agree with him. What does that mean? Let’s say he pulls with 5 units of power. (5 units..strictly arbitrary). Relax your elbow and issue 5 units of power into the direction of his pull as you begin your crossover. You must issue 5 units, not 4, not 6 but 5. At that moment you will disappear. At that moment he will lose access to your center because you just agreed with him. You cancelled him out. One second he is yanking on your arm and pulling you. The next second BECAUSE you initiated chidori ashi and agreed with him by extending your elbow you have vanished. He is holding air – similar to Wile E. Coyote
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq_bjaI0NTo. It is critical that you remain in the center of you. It is critical that you maintain your structural integrity as you do this.
So one second he has full access to your center. The next second because you agreed and moved your structure he loses access to your center. Then you reappear on your own terms. How? By you yanking right after you disappear. You reappear by your pulling on him. All of a sudden you are now the master of the universe. You are now accessing his center. The tables got turned. He had it. Then he lost it. Now you went and got his center. And just as he realizes the tables got turned (he is having an ‘oh crap’ moment) he gets blasted to smithereens by a yokogeri. Pure jujitsu followed by pure karate.
So as jujitsu people pretending to be doing karate how are you suppose to do this part of the kata?
Just as you start to pull with your left leg in your chidori ashi you extend your left elbow in agreement with the phantom pull. My elbow moves about 6 inches? That extension is the agreement with the opponent. The rest should be self explanatory as you yank him back to you as you blast him with your yokogeri and land in junzuki no tsukkomi stance.
Try doing this with maegeri. It doesn’t work as well. You blow your structure. Your internal power goes down the drain because in this particular setup you are being grabbed from your side and the vector force of the pull is sideways. So keeping all the bits sideways makes it a whole lot more efficient to blast them if you are a sophisticated jujitsu man. If you just do karate then I can’t help you. This is why Otsuka Sensei did it in yokogeri. And this is why it drives me nuts when I see people do maegeri. They are changing the kata and thus negating all the cool stuff in between the sheets. Every time you thoughtlessly change the kata you are throwing away centuries of sophisticated martial knowledge.
So all of this and more is in the sequence from shiko dachi to chidori ashi yokogeri.
Each kata sequence is loaded with all kinds of jewels. There is enough in the 9 kata to mine them for treasure to last you a lifetime.
Otsuka Sensei once said that martial arts is as deep and profound as the Universe, that there are no limits to the depth of waza. This stuff is endless.