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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