Always a great comfort to find friends while traveling. During my travels throughout the US, most are to visit friends to say hello.

Thanks. The article is very involved. Agree with Cagney's decision to cast a known Judo expert as his opponent in Blood on the Sun to make the fight scenes as authentic as possible.

Behind the Rising Sun has an interesting “style-versus-style” match-up which makes great storytelling.

Thanks for the video link. Amazing control! Fists stopped so close to the face that the slightest miscalculation will result in teeth getting knocked out. Blocking the Ryote Tsuki Uke looks challenging because of needing to track both hands.

"In any case, martial artists in China were certainly not a part of the upper classes" Agree. The upper class can afford body guards. In according to ancient Chinese legends, the villagers asked the lion to protect them from the evil monster coming to lay waste to their village. The lion s...

Funny how this thread listed "Iron Shirt" in the topic header, but so few people mentioned anything about it so I decided to do some research. Basically, Iron Shirt is a technique developed to protect the body from blows--as if he wore an iron shirt. A more advanced form of protection is c...

No this isn't about Trump. Hungarian-born Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld had developed a form of martial arts which uses European boxing, wrestling, and street fighting. It emphasizes aggression, simultaneous defensive and offensive maneuvers to defend himself and his Jewish neighbors agains...

Kime (pronounced kimee) are often used in the daily 7:00 AM basic exercise class in Zoom. Searching for the word "Kime" in this forum will return three pages. It's obviously an important word. Kime is a Japanese word translated as "to decide." In the context of karate, it means &...

"Meiji Shrine"

After Emperor Meiji passed away in 1912, Japan's national legislature passed a resolution to commemorate his role in the Meiji Restoration. It restored imperial rule to Japan and rapidly industrialized and adopted Western ideas and production methods.

"I wonder if they killed the bandits in the Tebira section of Kanagawa" I asked that question not as a racist White man who talk down to foreigners as savages. My impression of Kanbun, as a man who used deadly force, comes from what I read. "... it was said of him, 'One strike, certai...

"As a youth his body was honed by farming the rocky soil of Takafuto..." Later, while Kanbun Uechi was wandering in China, Master Makabe Udon, had ridiculed Kanbun Uechi as a “Fat belly Uechi.” It goes to show how quickly isolation, loneliness, and hardship can turn muscle into flab, in my...

It's interesting how even though Kanbun Uechi came from a samurai clan in Izumi, I don't hear of him or his followers practicing or teaching weapons fighting. True the westerns visualize samurai as a man with a sword, but they also studied hand-to-hand combat. Why did he focus on unarmed combat? At ...

In my opinion, besides being familiar with kata, the two most important skills in a martial arts career are the love for teaching and good knowledge of character. A great sensei would spend hours lecturing the students on proper techniques, correcting them. I never taught karate, obviously, but I di...

I am interested in hearing about the use of karate, kung fu, and other form of martial arts in the older popular media. Dick Tracy comics, September 1959, has policewoman Lizz using Jujitsu to toss Matty Munkie into a TV camera. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that her throwing Matty several met...

Using virtual reality may be the best option for the near future since we already have primitive hardware which can work by tracking both hands and feet. It can buzz certain parts of the body if you make a hit. Some options: are Skywin VR Tracker Belt, Tracker Hand and Feet Strap Bundle for HTC Vive...

I tend to be skeptical of ancient health practices since I know at least three who died young or were gruesomely crippled after refusing modern medicine and relied on wholistic health practices. Thomas Hale's "Don't Let the Goats Eat the Loquat Trees" book is filled with horror stories of ...