My Art Bushi No Te Isshinryu

At essence my art is what my instructor’s taught me. I was not taught that I should search of a better way, in the states or on Okinawa. And what I was originally shown is what I based my art on.

 

Along the way I trained with many extremely skilled instructors, all of who worked with my students on aspects of their arts. I never adopted their arts, but I paid attention and learned many drills and kata that later became subsidiary drills and kata  for my advancing students, well into dan training.

 

Never replacing the Isshinryu. But reinforcing other dimensions to the arts, providing skills that would also prove useful for my students. I never taught them anything  that I, myself, had not spent 5 or more years working on so I knew the material intimately.

 

I studied as much about Okinawa and Okinawan Isshinryu as I could, but it was for personal knowledge not to teach that to my students. In reality there was too much to work on and developing Isshinryu skills always came first.

 

 

Often even when learning something good it would take me over 5 years to know when and how to introduce it to appropriate student (lifetime) training. After all the training they already had was also successful. And many times I received excellent material there was never time to introduce.