Okinawa female rank

I would be 15th Dan :evil:

 

Video or it didn't happen.

 

would that be a dan per milimetre?

 

Only if they count double....

 

I can't believe I'm going to stick my neck on the chopping block for someone else but here goes.

To be fair to OP, some karate techniques usually require the hands to cross very close to the torso and having an ample chest size can force you to have your hands further out than would normally be acceptable.

Image example of one of the techniques from a kata I used to practice in Wado Ryu karate:



One of a generic jodan uke (upper level receiving movement) as well. I was trying to google a good breakdown of jodan nagashi uke (same thing but slightly more emphasis on evasion than a lot of places do) but my google skills suck. Basically in the transition from the first position to the second (the Wado Ryu instructor I trained with insisted the hand shoulder be higher and the top arm should come back a bit more) that the arm should practically hug the body on the way up:



I had to ask my wife to explain this one for me. She basically said the problem with doing the second technique if you have large breasts is that the hand has to come away from the rest of the body in order to go past the breasts on the way up so your body doesn't get in the way of the technique. Does that makes sense? :dunno:

However that goes without saying that the technique is still the same and it should be recognised the hands are as close to the body as they can be anyway during that technique. The application should also be essentially the same, it just looks a bit odd from a visual "prettiness" approach.

It should also go without saying that I don't support the sentiment of people wearing different colours of belts due to gender either.

 

I hadn't realised you'd gained that much weight recently .

 

If you've got bulging protrusions on the front of your torso, whether male or female, it does make it very difficult to get your elbow on your centre-line.

What that has to do with segregated belt colours, I have no idea...

I do know that if an instructor can't tell the difference in structure between a woman and a man from across a hall, they are in the wrong game... or so short-sighted that a different coloured belt would not make any difference.

 

It should be if it's trained properly.

No karate style out there is supposed to be concerned with visual appearance over effectiveness (unless you're doing XMA) and I'm sure if you asked pretty much any instructor or student out there, they'll tell you that "function matters more than form!". Then proceed to tell you that function is their priority and how great they are at self defence .

But I found in the short time I was practising karate (only about three years) there are a lot of clubs that put a big emphasis on visual appearances of a technique and "correct form" to the point you often had a lot of higher kyu grade/some dan grade students in a lot of clubs that can perform beautiful technique against the air but in practice have terrible application or very limited knowledge. Especially ones where sparring and drilling of applications in forms were at a minimum.

Honestly I think the other karate folks on the forum (JWT, Fish, Bassai, etc) would be better suited to answering this one than me.

One instructor I used to train with once told me that the further the arms get away from the body, the weaker they become when applying techniques, thus you wanted to keep it in close. Another told me that since most "blocks" are more "receiving" techniques, you allow them to get quite close so you can exploit their technique to create an opening to attack, often by using your free hand to "trap" the offending limb or redirecting an attack at the last second.

Beyond that...honestly I'm not 100% sure. :dunno:

 

The hand shouldn't be too close to the body (in goju at least). The entire structure of the shoulder girdle, arm and hand should be engaged and 'alive' in both portions (primary and secondary arm) of the uke-waza. If the hand/arm is too close to the body, it doesn't achieve the structure required to intercept and break balance. You want to intercept the technique as early as possible - deliberately allowing an attack to come close sounds like a recipe for disaster in most instances.

As a basic (ie. open to variation and rule-breaking once you got it) way to think about uke-waza structure, in chudan-uke, the elbow was approx. two fists away from the body, the shoulder had been rotated back, down and out (engaging the lats and linking it to the torso for power transfer) and the arm was at an angle of a bit more than 90deg. (activating the muscles on the little-finger side of the forearm). The feeling from this position is the same in pretty much all the other blocks.

The centreline shouldn't be an issue, as it is covered as in applying the technique, hip rotation puts it out of the way at the moment the arms intercept the technique. But as I said, this is just how I understand it in goju. Other styles may vary.

But doing it this way, no person, male or female, in our dojo has had any difficulty in doing techniques with correct form or function. And we have all shapes and sizes and generosities of chest amongst our students (both female and male).

 

Im curious as to how someone choice of belt colour is an issue when you consider the belt system wasnt introduced until 1924 by gichin funakoshi and that was 6 kyu grades (3 white & 3 brown) and ten dan grades.

 

i agree, choice of colour doesnt matter.
formalised different colours for male and female do though, purely because there is no need to differentiate between male and female, they are either that rank or they are not, gender does not factor in.

 

The thing thats got me is that nowhere in the original post has it been said that this is something being considered it was a question that instantly got him labelled as sexist surely as martial artist respect is important and i find labelling someone for asking a question disrespectful

 

i havent seen a post labelling the OP as a sexist but labelling the practice of differing ranks for male and female as being sexist

 

Actually, that's a really interesting question you raise right there. Is respect important in martial arts? If so, why? and is it universal respect, or is it only for certain things or circumstances or people?

But that's probably going to derail this thread even further, so this is probably not the place to discuss it.

 

Yes i misread about the sexist comment. And personally i think respect is important although not every one does i knew someone who used to brag that he had used what he learnt in fights and i think respect no matter what i disagree with what he does with is training but respect its his choice to do so

 

you adapt the way you move to your body, not the other way around. anything else is just asinine. hell, here's taiji kase, one of the most respected sensei ever produced by the JKA, and senpai of the first sensei to get sent abroad to spread shotokan, and also owner of the some of the wonkiest proportions ever to grace an able-bodied karateka:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvGPGUf37M"]Sensei Taiji Kase and Shirai Hiroshi - YouTube[/ame]

the guy he's demoing with? hiroshi shirai, also part of that first batch sent out by the JKA (he got italy while kase gor france, if i remember correctly). shirai once said about kase "if he ever sparred seriously with us, he'd kill us all". i believe that speaks for itself regarding how many rats' arses they gave about him crossing his arms all the way around.

if someone believes that you can't do an outwards technique (which both outer and upper blocks fall into) because you can't cross your arms, then they simply don't fully understand how kihon training works, and possibly how the blocks themselves work.

@aaradia: the crossing is generally done because kihon training (that is, basics. think it's analogous to jibengong?) is abstract and isolated, so the techniques don't directly correlate to the position you're in when you start to do them. since we default to having the hand at the waist of hip, to execute an outwards technique against nothing at all (ie isolated and abstracted, no opponent, no context, nothing), the hand must first go in, so that it can then go out. some styles and schools (shotokan foremost among them, being the closest thing to a "longfist" within karate) took this and milked it for all it's worth, making every kihon movement HUUUUUUUGE (which makes sense, because the point is to start the movement from as close to its complete opposite as possible, to eliminate extraneous movement and learn to instantly jumpstart all the motions involved in performing the technique, at any potential point along its range of motion), which leads to the misconception that the hand has to go AAAAAAAALL THE WAY inwards for you to block out, and similar such silliness, where IRL if you had to do that, you wouldn't, you'd just block inwards and be done with it, with the outwards movement drilled for movements that actually come from the outside of where your arm is. unfortunately, we still get tons of krotty people who will try to train to block a straight punch with a reactive motion that literally moves around the punching arm and takes 3x as long to perform. it generally makes me weep.

edit: also, you turn when you block. that has the happy side effect of getting mammary obstacles out of the way of your upper extremity

 

Surely, you are not serious, are you?

 

didn't we already have that discussion in another thread?