Shu Shi no Kun

[Guest]

Thanks Glenn & other gents for the direction and research. That the name probably goes back to Shinko Matayoshi's instructor seems on the right track to me and eliminates the possibility of any relationship to Shushiwa.

One of the guys at our dojo said that Guishi Sensei told him he thought Choun no Kun related to men surrounding the king, or the king's company. Perhaps that's how the cloud imagery gets involved. Surrounding and concealing the king with a "cloud" of protection.

Which leads me to a personal "discovery" in Sakugawa no Kun... I think maybe like in the third part of the kata in the alternating nuki and zuki pokes and thrusts that the side stepping combined with the thrusts comes right out of a military guard formation where the guards advanced sideways in a line in front of the king and cleared a path maybe thrusting with spears.

Wasn't there a man named Snider out in Nebraska who did Pangainoon and Kobudo back in the early 1990's? Many of the Uechi Pangainoon sensei who learned and taught weapons adopted the Matayoshi system.

[Glenn]

Wasn't there a man named Snider out in Nebraska who did Pangainoon and Kobudo back in the early 1990's? Many of the Uechi Pangainoon sensei who learned and taught weapons adopted the Matayoshi system.

Tim Snyder in Lincoln.
http://www.kouburyu.net/
He's still here and teaching...although making headlines in different ways. He was a student of Nishiuchi (who lived in Omaha Nebraska in the 1980s/early-1990s before moving to California). My instructor, Dave Lamb, was a student of Tim's until about 1990. Tim is more directly under Takashi Kinjo now, and they call their style Kobu Ryu.

Dave is under Bill now.

But yes, we all do Matayoshi kobudo.

Matayoshi kobudo is also taught at John Roseberry's dojo here in Lincoln, he's a Gojo Ryu practitioner and the most senior martial artist in Lincoln and Nebraska.
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/200 ... 549456.txt
We regularly interact with their kobudo instructor, Brian Gorman a student of Franco Sanguinetti.

Lincoln actually has a surprising number of traditional Okinawan karate and kobudo instructors for a city its size and located in the middle of the Great Plains.

[Glenn]

Speaking of Tim, something of interest from his website:

Koburyu versus Uechi Ryu
- Exhale at the moment of contact rather than after (breathe on the power move like a weight-lifter)
- Block with both hands used together to add power to the block and position the hand for a counterattack
- Use both left and right side of body to conserve energy (blocks and counters alternate from side to side)
- Move whole body powerfully and efficiently rather than remaining stationary and using  arm strength alone
- Use lower body and leg strength to add power to the strike
- Movements are elastic rather than rigid

Given we're the only Uechi Ryu dojo in the state, I guess this is directed at us.
Too bad he didn't actually find out something about Uechi Ryu first.

[Bill Glasheen]

Man, I have GOT to get Van's reaction to that.

Love your tongue-in-cheek commentary. You're a smart lad, Glenn.

People love to put "Uechi" in this box. Meanwhile we have folks out here cross-training in other arts who weren't told that their Uechi couldn't do certain things, couldn't be certain ways, or couldn't use certain elements within.

Wonder what Tim would have said about my Great Body Mechanics thread.

That's not Uechi!!!

Sigh...

One of my great joys of the most recent Gushi Visit was meeting George Schriefer. We bonded like super glue to cement once I started watching him do his eiku form. We then got into the most incredible discussions afterwards as Gushi Sensei was leading us through kata. Seeing George do shoken sukuiage uke in Sanseiryu was a real treat. If you could only see that man use his hips on that movement... I've been doing so, but failed to add in a certain key degree of freedom of motion (a rotational snap of the pelvis) that George does. George says he brought it into his Uechi from kobudo, and then later saw Narahiro Shinjo doing the same - for the same reason.

Works for me!

Keep your bloody hands off of MY Uechi! And I was never one to fit well into boxes anyhow...

- Bill

[Glenn]

And keep in mind Kobu Ryu is an offshoot of Uechi Ryu. In 1978/9 Takashi Kinjo and Seiki Itokazu broke away from Uechi Ryu and formed Pangainoon Ryu. In the early 1990s it was renamed from Pangainoon Ryu to Konan Ryu. A couple of years ago it was renamed again to Kobu Ryu. They do the same 8 kata as Uechi Ryu (with a few technical differences) plus a kata that Kinjo developed.

Our favorite is the one about "movements are elastic rather than rigid". They use to be very rigid when training under Nishiuchi, but I think after coming more directly under Kinjo he has been breaking them out of that hard rigid mold in recent years. So now apparently everyone is rigid but them.