Yahara sensei seminar in Italy, June 6, 2010

The 6th of June, it was a nice sunny day in Almese, near Torino, Italy. KWF Italy had invited sensei Mikio Yahara to held a one-day full immersion of his karate. He arrived the day before and in the evening was welcomed by KWF Italy representatives with a little party in the countryside.
The day of the seminar, at 8am people began to arrive, even if the start of the training would have been at 10am. About 130 karateka arrived from all parts of Italy, some of them even from Sicily and Sardinia, and other from central Italy or from the north-eastern Venice.
Also a group of karateka from abroad arrived for the event: Russia, Malta, Tunis, Greece, Germany.
At 10am a long line of black belts and also a second line full of kyu belts were facing shomen.
YS was ready and entered the big arena, where all bowed at him in a ritzu-rei. The lesson started. YS called everybody to come around near him to listen to some introductive words.

His question was: what is karate for you? In this cases many karateka give firstly a spiritual explanation of their practice. But this aspect of karate is mainly a personal individual approach. So, YS insisted about the technical aspect: what’s the difference between karate and all other martial arts? The answer, at the end, came from someone at his left hand side: karate is the practice of blows potentially devastating, ikken hissatsu, the killing blow.
But, how we can do that? The answer to this question is the core of Yahara-karate, and the core of this seminar.
So, YS began to explain the right use of the hips: with a movement parallel to the ground, without up and downs of the body, to the limit. Seems easy, but having a look at many of the karateka who crowd seminar around the world, a fact comes clear, and YS told this clearly: this concept seems clear to be understood with the mind, but extremely difficult to be practiced with the body, for most. So, we made gyakuzuki, oizuki, and also series of gyakuzuki coupled with all classic blocks,
but focusing mainly on the correct use of the hips, to the limit. YS use to call some participant he notices doing some evident mistake in his/her movements, to help everybody to understand how to correct them.
Sometimes he jokes saying the only thing is good about them is their face. Than he start correcting them, and becomes evident of the difficulty to have a correct position of the body. All the body, to assume the correct position for an effective blow, should be directed towards the target. An ideal triangle should be formed between the body and the arms and the legs extremities. In this way all the power can be focused to the target, and the body is in balance.
After having clarified and practised these points, we passed to the other important step: what we learn in kihon, practising basics, should be maintained in kata, and than in kumite. Why we should train, YS says, kihon and basics, if we abandon all this practice when we do kumite? It would be a non-sense. But most people unfortunately forget everything when facing an opponent! This is why in KWF we give such importance to kihon kumite and particularly to jiyu ippon kumite. It is the only way to force and train ourselves to practice kumite with the same basics we do in kihon and kata. But to do jiju ippon kumite correctly we shall add to the use of the hips, another fundamental movement, that is compression and expansion. This means that in order to have explosive techniques and blows and kicks we shall use our body like a gun. YS said exactly this way: we should imagine what soldier did with the powder of ancient guns, pushed inside to be ready to explode. Ideally, we should do the same way with our bodies: to push them down, bending the legs the more that we can, keeping the trunk vertical, using the front leg only for balancing the body, but concentrating mostly on the rear leg ready to explode. Than the rear leg is pushed violently and all the body explodes towards the target. Here, YS explained that timing is very important. All the body shall move so that 5 point can be stopped at the same time, when the blows or the kick get the target. This is kime. These 5 points are the elbows, the knees and the abdomen/pelvis. If even only one of these points is not coordinated with the others, most part of the power is lost. All the body shall arrive and stop at the same instant to be effective. We trained many times this concepts in couple, but without any contact at first, so it would be easier to understand the correct movement. Than, we practised these same movements with the right contact distance. YS moved around verifying our practice and correcting our mistakes. Shomen-hanmi-shomen and than them again alternatively, directing all the body and its power towards the target, contraction and expansion, timing of 5 points at 1 instant for kime, kihon basics also in kumite, these were all the points analysed in depth by YS during the first 2 hours of the seminar. Than we stopped for a light lunch, and than the second part started.
In the afternoon, YS explained us 3 kata: bassai-dai, jion and unsu, his tukui kata. He told us that probably we all knew these kata, but the real way to do them is ? even in this case ? to apply exactly the same principles we studied in the morning lesson. Bassai dai and jion are perfect to understand the correct use of the hips. All the first sequence of Bassai dai is good for the extreme hanmi “to the limit” followed by gyaku hanmi to give maximum effectiveness to the following block. We repeated many times this sequence, to clarify the timing of the preparation of the block. When we bring the punch near the body to prepare the block, the trunk shouldn’t move. If we move the body in this phase, we loose the effect of the hips in the block. So, the sequence must always be: preparation (no move of the trunk); block movement and hips movement (together); all the body (5 points) stops together when reaching the target (kime).
There is something better to train this than all the first part of bassai dai? Than, after the kamae-tate shuto sequence, uchiuke with extreme hanmi and than push the leg correspondent to the zuki to give power. The hikite shall be always complete, with the elbow strict to the side of the body. Another point focused by YS was the turn of the body to 180o, and than fumikomi gedanbarai. In brief: no useless movements of the arm, quick preparation of gedan barai and speed and moving balance forward towards the target. Also other points where focused, as the position of the internal hand in the 3 successive gedan barai, or the position of the trunk in yama zuki. Also in Jion, YS focused on the correct use of the hips: shomen in the 2 sanbon zuki of the first part of this kata, and hanmi-shomen to the limit in the successive Ageuke ? gyakuzuki Ageuke ? gyakuzuki, ageuke oi-zuki. We practised also many time the sequence of fumikomi otoshi uchi. Also in this case, the focus was the fast movement of the body moving the balance vehemently towards the target: looking at this we felt the power and energy in this movement. The last part of the seminar was focused on some main point of Unsu: first of all, again the extreme use of hanmi/shomen in the sequence of the 4 tateshuto/gyakuzuki, than the passage of the double kicking from the ground. Here YS showed his personal application of this passage; asked to a black belt to attack him with a strong maegeri, and was evident that only going vertically down sharply it was possible to avoid the kick and than counter attack from the ground: awful!! The 4 hours of seminar were come to an end, so after the bowing all participants went near YS to take pictures and autographs. Excellent! This was the most diffused comment. Thank you very much sensei Yahara, also this time your teaching is precious for us.

Roberto Riccomagno, KWF Italy