Diana Frese

Seriously, I am still studying this thread, and since my husband has practiced both judo and karate I plan to discuss it with him....starting with the "floating moment" in the original post. I do remember him saying something about attacking the leg that the opponent is standing on, so the whole topic will be a nice conversation for us, we have been too busy with work lately and need to get back to at least analyzing training, and hopefully get back outside to do some.... Thanks for the inspiration, everyone.

One thing stands out in my memory that may or may not be relevant. Mitsunari Kanai Sensei was famous for strong stances at the beginning and end of a technique, and I tried to emulate his use of hanmi, as I am rather tall (though he wasn't many of his early students were very tall) and needed to be aware of my balance. What surprised me when I watched a video of an irimi nage of his, when our computer could still play videos, that was on the New England Aikikai website at the time, is during the actual throw between the two solid stances, he seemed to be in the air, almost whirling around and I couldn't figure out what was going on, even though the computer replay kept stopping and then going forward slowly. It was almost like those cartoons where two combatants are off the ground in a cloud of dust that is spinning around in several directions.

Hope this isn't too far off the topic, I am still studying the original post at the top of the page...