Saturday, April 27, 2019

A study in Chinte


Original Shorin Ryu Chinte Version
  


 CHINTE , the 3 hops in the JKA Shotokan version.

 

There seems to be many different points of view on the purpose of the 3 hop backs at the end of Chinte kata. For me the hops are simply to get you back to the starting position. Others see possible self defense applications to the hop backs.


I was taught the form from the Shotokan of Tristan Sutrisno. His father trained in the Naval War College in the 1930s before the war, Funakoshi was the one in charge, but others did most of the instruction. His version did not use the hops, just ended without them. His father kept to the way he was shown. 

Their version was their family version of Shotokan back in Indonesia. His father was a doctor drafted into the Japanese Navy at the time Japan owned Indonesia. As he was a doctor, hence the naval war college as he was to be an Officer in the Navy and a doctor. Just before the war Japan freed Indonesia to show they were not warlike, and his father was released. Then he served in the Indonesian Underground working against the Japanese.


The hops were introduced by Yoshitaka Funakoshi after he lowered and stretched the postures of the original kata and nobody could return to the starting point anymore. After only one generation of students everybody forgot this point and someone introduced the legend of an “ancient unfinished kata” with a certain halo of mistery and sacred, and then other people started to imagine absurd and ridiculous bunkais for the three hops introduced by Yoshitaka. 

The historical truth is under your eyes: the original kata, Chinti or Chintei, is still transmitted in its pristine form and it ends perfectly on the starting point without any hop. 

You can still see the original form in the Shorin Ryu Kyudokan and even in the Shito Ryu school (even if a little bit “japonized”). 

It’s time to recognize and to distinguish the original Okinawan forms from their modern distortions introduced by the Shotokan school. And above all it’s time to wipe out all the bullshit created by disinformation in karate.

 

 

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