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Tuesday night I visited a dojo while out of town on business. They practice Iwama style, which as the instructor explained at the start of class is an old friend of Yoshinkan. Apparently the founders dojos used to visit each other on a yearly basis. The style is supposed to be on the "hard" end of the scale, like Yoshinkan.
The night was dedicated to Katatori techniques and for the most part I was fairly comfortable with at least the naming. Some of the interesting differences were things like an emphasis on "live hands" and the fact that their takedowns were a bit more direct than ours. For instance with an ikkyo type move, after the initial movement where you take the opponents hand/arm and turn it over, they kind of turn the hips towards the front foot that you stepped with (away from the oppenent) to break the balance, then do a single step with the inside leg into the opponent and do the takedown at that point instead of taking the extra step away again like we would.
The instructor also talked about irimi a bit and doing it directly as an option. I.e. from what I typically do, the most direct is to kaiten, then turn to face the other way and step through. He was saying that an even more direct way is just to step in and skip the kaiten all together.
I noticed a (to me) larger emphasis on hand movement than what I am used to. No break falls all night, the single black belt in class commented to me "You are used to break falling aren't you?" no clue how she could tell, maybe because I have the ingrained habit of slapping the mat a lot, or maybe I have a tendancy to face into techniques, not sure. The called breakfalls "high falls" also, which I found interesting. How come nobody calls them "pain falls"? (Just kidding! )
Techniques I remember were Ikkyo, Nikkyo, Kotagaishi, Shihonage and a couple of Irimi variations, all from Katatadori. The last 3 were all interesting, he called them something slightly different because we were attacking shomen with the lead arm (that the opponent was grabbing katadori) to cause them to block attack, then we would open backwards as they stepped through then switch hands and step through.
02-15-2005 02:17 PM 
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