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Old 09-22-2007, 08:49 AM   #56
David Orange
Dojo: Aozora Dojo
Location: Birmingham, AL
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 1,511
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Re: The Wave Motion/Theory

Quote:
Tim Fong wrote: View Post
The video was interesting to me specifically because it resembled some Okinawan karate I have seen. I would guess (and could be wrong later-- I'm okay with that) that he's using the attributes/strength from that conditioning to power his other movements. Sort of like what some people are trying to do now with the sanchin they are learning from Ushiro Kenji.
And when you consider that the man in that video (Hiroo Mochizuki) is over seventy years old, it adds a little dimension.

It does look a lot like Okinawan karate, some of the more subtle kind. But, of course, Hiroo Mochizuki will find commonalities among the arts and then express those in his own way. He's really something. I don't know him that well. I knew his father and can see some commonality, but they are also very different in many ways.

Quote:
Tim Fong wrote: View Post
I really like what I've seen of Yoseikan Budo, from the perspective of integrating weapons, grappling and striking.
It also seems that Hiroo Mochizuki was much of the driving force behind his father's move in that direction. Of course, Minoru Mochizuki had been working a long time with the truth that aikido comes from the sword and he had cross-trained in all the major Japanese arts as well as most of the minor ones, but as I understand it, it was really Hiroo who began using the term yoseikan budo as he blended all the arts increasingly into a single expression. largely unified around aikido and karate. His father began using the term but he organized the arts technically more around judo than karate and the resulting art is different. Minoru Mochizuki once told me that he had tried to recreate the gyokushin ryu, of which he was then the only living rank-holder and that was a low rank (around nidan, maybe). So now there is no one, to my knowledge, with rank in gyokushin ryu but we might ought to think of his "old" yoseikan budo as "gyokushin" and Hiroo's art as the real and original "yoseikan budo."

There are many elements in that yoseikan budo that irritate budo traditionalists, including many of the practitioners of Minoru Sensei's total style but one thing that impresses me more as time goes by is the "all-out fighting" type of attacks you see in many of the videos as opposed to the "one-attack-at-a-time" approach we practiced in the father's dojo. As I've said before, if you didn't neutralize the attacker on the first attack, he would immediately follow up and follow up and follow up, but in Hiroo's style, it seems that the attacker enters with five attacks in a split second, followed by twenty-five follow-ups in the next half second. That's far more realistic, though some of the padded-sword demos show the attacker keeping on even after he has been hit by the "sword," which I can't say I understand.

In any case, my meetings with and observations of Hiroo Mochizuki have always been impressive as he gets down to tiny details and is always concerned with developing a strong body and performing tehcniques and ukemi in ways that protect the body much more than traditional martial arts, which can actually damage the body when they place form over function. Hiroo Sensei is not afraid to change the form to support the function.

Best to you.

David

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu

"Eternity forever!"

www.esotericorange.com
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