Part2: Yumi Uesugi ~Female Team Kata World Champion~

In the last blog, I introduced Yumi Uesugi and her responses to some of the questions regarding her Kata.  My questions were more geared towards individual performance and practice.  However, I did also ask about the team Kata at the 2014 World Gichin Cup, as I found the team very interesting.  I think, not only was their Kata one of the best performances among historical Japanese female team Kata, but it was interesting in a sense that the members were all university students.  Sure - Japanese university students are known to be at the top in terms of their performance, backed by their youth and long training times; however, what was interesting to me was the fact that the members were from different universities.  Yumi was from the Waseda Unviersity, and the other members were from the Komazawa University.  

There are two things that were interesting about it:

1. Waseda and Komazawa University Karate clubs, in a good sense, have a rivalry.  Obviously it’s because they chose the best Kata performers, but it’s still interesting.  (I wished that I followed more major sports that I can come up with some baseball-related examples or something)
2. Komazawa Unviersity has a reputation of having a large group of very good club members.  They could have chosen someone else from the Komazawa University club member, which would have increased the training time (virtually every day)

And again, despite what seem to be challenges, the performance was top-notch.  So I asked her the following.

Q1:   How did you feel about the team in general?

Yumi:   I was slightly concerned about the team before we started training because Waseda and Komazawa are the schools with rivalry and competing against each other at tournaments.  However, the teammates were very extremely nice.  We were able to openly communicate our ideas and thoughts with each other, which ended up creating a great atmosphere among ourselves going into the championship.

Q2:  How long and often did you train together?

Yumi:  We started training together around April (makes it about 6 months of training total).  The team got together 2 - 4 times per month and had a mini-camp.  We spent out 2 hours within each mini-camp.  I felt that we weren’t able to spend a lot of time together due to our school-related activities such as representing our school at tournaments, but I also felt that we had a very deeply focused training when we were together.

Q3: What did you pay most attention to in your team Kata training?

Yumi: Based on my experience from forming team Kata with different people, I feel that we get nervous and go off-timing by trying hard to be in-synch.  So instead of being our training goal to be in-synch, we tried to synch our feeling so that we can perform the best Kata that we all can.  We tried hard to share and synchronize our feeling and thoughts.  Also, this was the first and the last time that this member would form a team, so we agreed from the beginning that we should enjoy the tournament as much as possible.  

Q4:  Could you please elaborate what you mean by “We tried hard to share and synchronize our feeling and thoughts?”

Yumi:   That’s hard to describe…but instead of each of us thinking differently on various subjects, we openly communicated what was in our mind, and we also listened to what each other had to say.  By doing so, we tried to build a good spirit through training towards the tournament.  For example, each of us have the parts of Kata that we really like to show our appeal, and we all talked about them so that we are all in sync about them.  This goes the same for our attitude towards to the tournament.  By these exercises, we focused and shared our “mental vector” towards the tournament.  Sorry, maybe I’m not doing a good job describing.

Q5:  Finally, how did this team come about?  It’s quite interesting to me to see 1 Waseda and 2 Komazawa University member team Kata.

Yumi:  I actually don’t know at all how it came about.  Coaches decided on it and told us that we’re forming a team.

(I guess that would give me a reason to go after their National Team Coach - Ogura Sensei, Naka Sensei, Taniyama Sensei, Kobayashi Sensei)

ONE CLICK ON BELOW IMAGE HELPS!!:

La Actitud de Hidemoto Kurihara al entrenar- Campeón mundial de kata de la JKA

Estaba hablando con el campeón mundial de Kata 2014 de la JKA, Hidemoto Kurihara .

Hablamos de varios temas, pero  también decidí preguntarle algo que yo pudiera compartir con todos los demás. Así que le pregunté ...

" ¿Cuál es tu actitud al entrenar ? "

Antes de escribir  la  respuesta que el me dio, permítanme decirles que ellos entrenan muchísimo. Mucha gente piensa que los japoneses son buenos en Karate porque son japoneses pero no, la verdad es que ellos entrenan varias veces al día y fuertemente. Hidemoto va a la Universidad de Komazawa, y su Club de Karate tiene una muy buena reputación e historia.

Según Hidemoto, su club entrena 2 horas y media cada noche de lunes a viernes y 2 de esos días también entrena temprano, además de 3 horas el domingo por la mañana. Esta es la agenda NORMAL de entrenamiento, la cual estoy seguro que no incluye el entrenamiento opcional que tienen que hacer. Así entrenan por  4 años, desde el primer año de universidad hasta el último !

No hace falta decirlo,  obviamente mi pregunta tiene mucho mas peso en Hidemoto que en mi por que yo solo entreno de 1 a 3 horas por día y eso sin referirme a la diferencia en la intensidad del entrenamiento.

Su respuesta fue la siguiente ... Estoy tratando de traducir también su tono de voz :

   "Básicamente , yo entreno sin quejarme .jajajaja . Incluso algunas veces en el entrenamiento me siento como << ¿Qué es esto? >> al final lo tomo todo de manera positiva y saco una conclusión que me beneficie ... y sólo hago lo que tengo que hacer. yo soy un ser humano también, así que hay momentos en los que mi motivación no es la mejor. Incluso entonces sintiéndome así tengo que hacerlo cuando es el momento de hacerlo. yo trato de no ponerme sentimental ni de  enojarme . "

Fue una respuesta sencilla , y me encanta. Tengo que mencionar que él es uno de los jóvenes más educados que he conocido . Incluso cuando lo saludé y me presenté en la fiesta después del campeonato del mundo, fue muy agradable hablar con el. Ese día que nos conocimos inmediatamente hablo de su hermano ... el cual es su entrenador  de Kata en  la universidad :) Bueno ... tal vez  podremos hablar de la Universidad de Komazawa en este  blog en un futuro :).


Hidemoto Kurihara
21 años de edad
En el antepenúltimo año en la Universidad de Komazawa
Hermano menor de Kazuaki Kurihara



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Yumi Uesugi ~Female Team Kata World Champion~ Part 1

I want to write about Yumi Uesugi.  I didn't have much in-person interaction with her, but I felt like my experience and her thoughts lined-up like a good story.  I tried to write a short, 1-pager blog like I have been, but I simply could not.  In fact, I ended up splitting this blog into 2-parts.  Please accept my apologies in advance for a long post with my not-so-perfect writing skills (please feel free to volunteer to proof-read my posts!!)....

At 2014 JKA World Championships, I was warming up with my USA National Team Member, Khim Torres, in the Tokyo Budokan's warm-up small dojos.  We shared one of the small dojos with the Japanese Team.  Japanese female Kata team looked incredibly sharp, and they were training so hard, as if they were training at the dojo instead of warming up.  They were training so hard that, at one point, Kazuaki Kurihara said to them 

"Don't over-do it.  You'll get too tired by the actual tournament."

Even then, they continued to train very hard.  A member in the center was paying extra attention to the details that I sometimes didn't even understand what was "off" about it.  All I could tell was that there was a true passion for perfection.

The Japanese female Kata team won the 1st place with Goju Shiho Sho - absolutely rightfully so.  I want to arrogantly say that it could well be the best Japanese female team Kata performance in the recent JKA history.  I want to go as far as saying that (and I will accept being yelled at for saying this) it was better than the Japanese men's team Kata.

I got to meet a member from this team briefly after the elimination day.  This person was the Yumi Uesugi, who was performing at the center in the team Kata.  As many people found out at the post-tournament party, she was a very short and small-framed, charming, smiley, and polite lady.  Like the case with top JKA Karate-ka, it is so hard to imagine where from this small framed person the incredible Kime and snap comes from (look at Hidemoto Kurihara from the previous post too!).

Yumi is a senior at the Waseda University, which is one of the top universities in Japan.  It's amazing that Waseda is such an academically tough school, yet their Karate Club has been performing very well.  Yumi has been doing very well recently with her favorite Kata, Unsu.  I wanted to talk to her more in-person during my extended stay in Japan, but her schedule was literally packed with training and the tournament.  

So I wanted to learn from her thoughts and decided to ask her a few questions after I got back to the United States.  I learned so much from her response that I decided to make this into a two-part blog.  This one focuses on her individual Kata.  My question was

"What is your ideal form of Kata, and what do you pay attention to when you are practicing your Kata?"

Her reply was this:

"There are no real opponents in Kata, but I want to perform my Kata like I'm fighting in real life.  I want the audience to feel like they can see the opponents who I'm fighting against."

This is what I always like to hear from the JKA Karate practitioners.  I don't want to go into criticisms, but let me say that I do not like the Kata that steered away from this spirit and became closer to a dance.  JKA Karate has always been the same - Kihon, Kata, and Kumite are all inter-connected.  

She continued onto her attitude at the tournament/practice site:

"I also try to train myself to 'OWN' the environment and the mood of the tournament-site or the practice-site.  I want to make sure that I can capture the attention of the audience to my Kata performance."

I have to say that this is one of the most important factors in training.  Though certainly not at the same level as she is, I also try to have this attitude.  I trained most of my life alone, and I always felt like I didn't belong there at tournaments.  After learning so much from Mikami Sensei and other great Senseis, Sempais, and friends at JKA American Federation, I started to do ok at the tournaments here and there.  I don't know if my technical ability changed over the years (I hope maybe a little bit better), but I think the biggest change was on the mental side.  I noticed that my friends and Sempais who always perform well have this quality of "owning the mood".  Even if they're in the far-court, your attention is always caught.  I have to remember to train my dojo members this way too, because there are so many people who are fantastic at the dojo but underperforms at tournaments.

And lastly, Yumi concludes:

"From the technical side, I am always trying to be stronger and faster."

It is so impressive to me that her response on technical side is simple and short, and most of what she pays attention is on the mental side.  As martial arts pay so much attention to the mental aspects, I learned so much from her response, and I also witnessed at the Budokan how her attitude translates to the way she trains and performs.  

On the next blog, I will extend into her thoughts on her Team Kata.

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¡ El comienzo !

Amo el Karate de la JKA . Cada vez es más y más fácil comunicarse con otros karatecas en todo el mundo. Me divierte mucho poder conocerlos y quiero compartir con ustedes las cosas que he aprendido.

Hablo un poco de japonés y un poco de Inglés (^ _ ^) , por eso estoy conectado con algunos Karatecas en Japón. Sin embargo , este blog no se trata sólo de la JKA de Japón , y puede que a veces la información no sea solo de la JKA . El karate es mi pasión , y yo quiero compartir con ustedes este sentimiento ¡Eso es todo !

Voy a empezar contándoles mí propia historia, pero voy a hablar también de amigos , Senpais y Senseis de todo el mundo en este blog.“ Egoístamente” yo voy a elegir el contenido del blog, pero me encantaría recibir sugerencias y solicitudes acerca de diversos temas, personas, etc.

Y una cosa más ... este blog pretende ser una pequeña ayuda para el equipo de karate de los Estados Unidos también. Así que gracias de antemano por el apoyo.OSS , Arigatou gozaimasu !!

Toshihide "Tony" Nakamura
JKA Federación Americana

Ray Tio - the Canadian JKA Spirit

This year's JKA World Gichin Cup was a notable one in many ways. One of the ways in which it was significant was due to Canada's Ray Tio retiring from competition, following his brother Stan Tio's retirement from competition 3 years prior.

I have known of Ray for a long time. I started to tryout for the US Team back when I was in college around 1998 or so, and I noticed that Canada was VERY good. Then I saw them in action at the JKA/ISKF (back when ISKF was part of JKA) Pan-American in 2001, and Ray and Stan were stunningly good. They were not just good, but they were "JKA-Good". Kihon, Kata, and Kumite - very well rounded in the way that JKA practitioners should be.

Being anti-social I am (yes, laugh. I'm better now but was way worse back then), I did not introduce myself to them when I saw them in 2001. I stopped competing (or very little, at least) for 7 years, so I never saw them then again after. I saw their unbelievably amazing performance online at the JKA World Championship in 2011 in Pattaya, Thailand, and I decided that I will finally introduce myself to them *if* I see them at the worlds. Luckily, I got to go to this year's world championship, and I was able to say hi.

Team Kata led by Ray placed 2nd place, even without Stan Tio, and that ended Ray's competition career with his 6th JKA World Cup medal. I have to say that Ray and Stan must be one of the most-medal winner at JKA Worlds as non-Japanese. It really is stunning - especially winning even after the JKA - ISKF split (very sad, but political breakup sets the country's Karate back a lot).

Canada is a VERY good inspiration to me, especially because I'm driving-distance away from Toronto. So it gets my spirit going by thinking "If they can do it, we should be able to - and WE WILL" :)

Anyway, I'm sure that I will find more and more about Tio brothers to write more about it, but I can already tell their love towards Traditional JKA Karate. Yes, they just love it. So I asked him the most basic question:

 "What made you (both Tio brothers) get to the World-podium level?"

 and this is what he came back with:

 1. Stan was very athletic in everything he did. Ray says that he was an average athlete but loved performing artistically. Traditional Karate was a perfect blend of the both worlds that they fell in love with it right away.

 2. Stan and Ray pushed each other very hard. No negative brotherhood rivalry, and instead they worked together to push each other higher and higher. They set goal together in phases: Winning nationals in Kata, then Kumite; winning Pan-American, then worlds, etc... And one by one, they pushed each other to accomplish it.

When you see them, you can tell that his words are true. I envy their healthy brotherhood that they share towards the same passion. I also believe that his "love for Karate" is very contageous. Because of their passion towards Karate, their spirit is carried down to the younger generations like this year's Colin and Thomas Chin, who were the Canadian team members (Colin also placed top 8 in individual Kata, and was part of the Canadian team 3 years ago too).

I would love to uncover more about them, so there's only one way to do it - VISIT THEIR DOJO :) I shall visit their dojo soon and write about what I learn. Meanwhile, what I learn from his answers is this:

"Love Karate. Find good friends to push each other (we can't "make" brothers...), set a goal, and keep trying".

OSS!

Tony Nakamura

Ray has an EXCELLENT blog that's worth reading!



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NEW JKA Grading System!!

Many studying materials are available on JKA's website.  Unfortunately, there are more materials
available in Japanese, and Japanese materials are more updated.

One of the materials available is the "Grading System" - the content of the Kyu and Dan exam.  When I first read this a while back, I got a little confused because it didn't make sense to me.   It is SO MUCH different than what I have seen the last 25 years.  

Take a look at the new grading syllabus:

   http://www.jka.or.jp/ja/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/7395872968769c52e4aade65f2fa013c.pdf

OK, I'm kidding.  If you can read this, you probably wouldn't be reading this blog :)

I forgot to ask about it to JKA HQ Sensei at the World Cup, but I also read about it on Andre Bertel's (now back to JKA) website.  He also does a good job translating the syllabus to English:

http://andrebertel.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-new-jka-grading-syllabus.html

I'm not go into the nitty gritty details, so let's talk about something obvious like Kata.  In the US, the trend has been:

(Testig for) 

8Kyu - Heian Sho Dan

(Syllabus has it that, Jr. beginners are also tested as 9Kyu, but I haven't seen anyone follow it in the US).

7Kyu - Heian 2 Dan

6Kyu - Heian 3 Dan

5kyu - Heian 4 Dan

4kyu - Heian 5 Dan

3kyu - Tekki Shodan

Shodan, 1 kyu, 2kyu- Bassai Dai, Kanku Dai, Jion, or Empi

Now the new syllabus is this:

10Kyu - No Kata

9Kyu - No Kata

8Kyu - Taikyoku Shodan

7Kyu - Heian Shodan

6Kyu - Heian Nidan

5Kyu - Heian Sandan

4Kyu - Heian Yondan

3Kyu - Heian Godan

2Kyu - Tekki Shodan

1Kyu - Bassai Dai or Kanku Dai

Shodan - Bassai Dai, Kanku Dai, Empi, or Jion

Yes, so you will learn Heian Shodan as a (in most dojos) YELLOW BELT, not WHITE!  The document says that this is in effect as of July 1st, 2014.  

There is a lot more change than just the Kata.  Basics are quite different too, all the way up to high Dans (5, 6, 7 Dan).  

I'm sure that there will be some transition period, but instructors must pay extra attention to their examinees, especially for 1Kyu and above.  You don't want to choose Empi or Jion as your Tokui Kata (favorite Kata) for 1Kyu exam and realized that it's not even one of the Kata choices...

I will call the JKA HQ Instructor soon and ask whether this is actually in effect and the intent behind it.  Either way, sooner or later, this is going to be the standard.  I better start transitioning now!

===========================UPDATE=============================
Thanks to our JKA friend from Bahamas, Brian Stapleton, as well as Cmark Hilario.  I think it's 100% confirmed that the new grading system is in-effect.  There's been an official letter sent to the JKA Organizations in each country to notify the new grading content and the effective date previously written.

Thanks to Brian Stapleton and Cmark Hilario.  Cmark sent me the link to the JKA's website with English-translated syllabus:

http://jka.or.jp/en/karate/dan_rank.html

Brian also sent me the PDF version of the syllabus.  

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JKA Kata World Champ - Hidemoto Kurihara's Attitude Towards Training

I was chatting with the 2014 JKA World Kata Champ, Hidemoto Kurihara.

We talked about different topics, but I decided to ask something that I could share with everyone else.  So I asked...

"What is your attitude towards training?"

Before I write his response, let me say that they train a lot.  Many people think that Japanese are good at Karate because they're Japanese.  Nope - they just try and train harder and longer.  Hidemoto attends Komazawa University, and their Karate Club has an extremely high reputation and history.

According to Hidemoto, the club trains 2.5 hours every weekday evening, and 2 days out of those weekdays also have morning training.  In addition, they train 3 hours on Sunday morning.  This is their STANDARD training times, which I'm sure does not include optional training that they go through.  And yes, they go through this schedule for 4 years from Freshman year to the Senior year!

Needless to say, I feel that my question weighs a lot more on him than someone like me, who only trains 1 - 3 hours per day, let alone the difference in intensity of the training.

His response was this...I'm trying to translate his tone as much as possible too:

   "Basically, I train without complaining.  lol.  Even some general or Kumite training that I feel like 'What is this?', I take it positively and draw a conclusion that fits me right...and just go through it.  I'm a human too, so there are times when my motivation is lower.  Even then, you gotta do it when it's the time do it.  I try not to be emotional or get upset."

Simple response, and I love it.  I have to mention that he's one of the politest young man I've ever met.  Even when I greeted and introduced myself after the world championship at the party, he was very nice to talk to.  He immediately commented on respect to his brother ...who is his Kata coach at Komazawa Univesity :)  Well...maybe we'll get into Komazawa University in the future blog too :)


Hidemoto Kurihara
21yr old
Junior in Komazawa University
Youngest brother to Kazuaki Kurihara


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