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yinshangyi
yinshangyi's picture
Grappling in Okinawan styles

Hi fellow karatekas,

When I look at bunkai of Uechi-Ryu Karate, I feel the applications are rather very straightforward (mostly striking at vital spots) while Goju-Ryu and Shorin-Ryu seem to have much more grappling into it.

An Uechi-Ryu practitioner on Reddit even told me that Uechi-Ryu is heavily striking oriented while some other Okinawan styles are a more grappling oriented.

The guys from the great YouTube channel of Karate culture made this awesome video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyanT_0zoM&ab_channel=KarateCulture 

Once again the Uechi-Ryu is not that much represented in the kata applications.

If there's few grappling involved in Uechi-Ryu, I guess it makes the bunkai kind of less interesting compared to those other styles.I can't stress this enough, I have a very shallow understanding of Okinawan styles, I would love to hear what you guys think about this.

Stay safe and train hard. Osu!

colby
colby's picture

So my buddy is a big Uechi-ryu guy, which caused me to check it out a little. So most Oakinawan karate is a combination of Incense Shop Boxing, Wooping Crane, and Tegumi. So i would propose that the only difference in style is the amount percentage of each kung fu system within its style. I would say the anount of Tegumi is the same. So i am a shorin guy so i would say i have more incense shop than i do Crane. Theres some but not to the level of a Goju-ryu guy.

With Uechi-ryu i think its mostly mostly Crane, maybe some Tiger and Dragon too, not alot of incense shop or Tegumi. So i would say look at those animal styles for their kind of trapping and grappling.

Zach Zinn
Zach Zinn's picture

I refreshed my memory of what Uechi Ryu kata are like with some videos, there are definitely a couple throws in there (Seisan at least), and a bunch of places that I think are probably indexing and hitting or indexing and throwing elbow strikes.

Really it all comes down to training though, you can have whatever you want theoretically "in Kata", but if the Dojo you train in has no hands-on knowledge or practice of throws, it doesn't matter much. It's one of the reasons it's a good idea to cross train in an art that does throwing once one is of sufficient rank, level or whatever.

There's arguably less throwing in those kata than some others sure, but in my opinion that could be a good thing in the right circumstances, with the right teacher. Knowing a couple throws or takedowns well is much better than knowing 30 different throws.

PASmith
PASmith's picture

I think it's a truism that if you follow any fighting art or lineage back in time they start to resemble one another more closely and all end up being a mix of grappling and striking. As that is the reality of combat/violence.

Humans aren't strikers OR grapplers. We are strikers AND grapplers. Strapplers? Grikers?

Any division between the two is often just down to personal preference, sporting expression or some other style agenda.

colby
colby's picture

Thats true but I've found I get more intrigued in differences between styles. Why does this syllabus really harp on these subjects. This one drill that this one style does i really like. Or this basic excercise thats really intriguing. Like in Crane. Crane's got an entire quigong method. Incense Shop boxing produce power in very interesting ways. Its really annoying that in the transfer of knowledge to Oakinawa, these things didn't make the transition.

Zach Zinn
Zach Zinn's picture

I don't know if i'm in full agreement PASmith, historically martial arts and combat sports are designed for specific environments. You can read accounts of Roman generals complaining about their troops spending too much time on competitive grappling and not enough on weapons, etc.

An art designed created for civilian self defense (such as Karate) would logically and neccessarily contain grappling, but that grappling would be fit to the purpose of the art, wehre grappling is a means to an ends, and generall speaking ont something to go looking for, rather something to know should you find yourself put there. Similarly, if we want to go to early Jujutsu, it was grappling-centric, but it was battlefield grappling, combined with some come-alongs and other techniques related to essentially the function of ancient Law Enforcement.. which some combat sport grappling, self defense -oriented systems, etc. overlapped with and put into their own context.

While you can trace one from the other sometimes, it's often a chicken or egg thing and  the same stuff being used in an environment of competitive grappling, it looks different and functions different.

Take pins for example, the original purpose of pinning was likely to hold someone down while your friend came to dispatch him, more than likely with a weapon. You remove the friend, the battlefield, the weapons, zero in on individual skill and intense athleticism, and you get a different animal.

Martial art, combat sport, self defense training are context-specific, they often contain the same basic ingredients for sure, but are very different recipes, from my point of view.

colby
colby's picture

Zach Zinn wrote:
I don't know if i'm in full agreement PASmith, historically martial arts and combat sports are designed for specific environments ... {snip}

Take that a step further and you look at northern Chinese arts and they had to back engineer their weapon arts to develop their empty hand arts. So xingyi was a spear art first and then they developed the open hands. Which explains their different way of developing force.

PASmith
PASmith's picture

Yeah I'm not saying that arts and training were identical or anything. Just pointing out that boxing/pugilism had throws and grappling. Karate had throws and grappling. Even Taekwondo, back in the day, had throws, grappling and rudimentary groundwork. While ostensibly "grappling" arts like Judo and Aikido had a much bigger striking element than they do today. I was really surprised a few years ago to discover that Judo has a dedicated striking/atemi kata! I mean...it's not the level of striking you see in boxing or karate but at least the remnants of striking are there.

Zach Zinn
Zach Zinn's picture

PASmith wrote:

Yeah I'm not saying that arts and training were identical or anything. Just pointing out that boxing/pugilism had throws and grappling. Karate had throws and grappling. Even Taekwondo, back in the day, had throws, grappling and rudimentary groundwork. While ostensibly "grappling" arts like Judo and Aikido had a much bigger striking element than they do today. I was really surprised a few years ago to discover that Judo has a dedicated striking/atemi kata! I mean...it's not the level of striking you see in boxing or karate but at least the remnants of striking are there.

Ah I get what you are saying now, thanks for clarifying. This is definitely true. I tend to look at it through a strategy and tactics lens. Karate is an art where the main strategy involves trying to quickly dispatch someone, usually through striking, but there are peripheral tactics like throws, grappling etc. when needed.

Judo has both a sport and martial art component, but as you point out here, in Judo things like atemi are usually neglected in favor of the combat-sport oriented stuff, where strikes are completely disallowed. I think that over time (especially given how ritualistic Judo kata is) most of the practical value that could have been gleaned from this kind of material was set aside in favor of focus on the shiai tactics.