Hi Victor
I see this on a link below:
"As the article in a recent issue of Classical Fighting Arts claims Kyan Chotoku taucht sai techniques but did
not transmit kata as a study"
In my 2005 interview with Joen Nakazato he said he
never saw Kyan with sai, and that Kyan had told him that this was because
sai was more for lower classes and that bo was the (essentially,
gentleman's) weapon of the upper classes of which his family had been
a member.
Happy new year and always glad to see your selections, thanks. Seems to me
Classical Fighting Arts and its contributors are ploughing their own
furrow on Kyan and what he did/didnt do.. yeah, so whats new? :)
1) the description of the naming of Kyan no sai is as my understanding: that it
was in honor of this student of Nagamine, not anything to do with Kyan Chotoku
whatsoever.
2) the lineage claimed of Seiki Toma and his
followers has always been disputed by Seibukan - therefore they do not
acknowledge Odo as being of a direct Kyan lineage either.. I did
not discuss Toma with Nakazato as he fell into a category of folks who I had
come to think of as kind of "lineage-opportunists" relying on the
ignorance of their students as to where they'd got stuff and from who.. I'd
kind of put Kuda and Kise in the same kind of category as to where they got
their "Kyan lineage" kata from - in their case - a student of
Zenryo's. This doesnt reflect on their karate per se, just a
lineage/transmission issue.
I cant remember the exact 'skinny' on Toma and who he got his kata from but I
think it was either as a p/t student of Zenryo's or at the very least his
presence with Zenryo wasn’t enough for Zenryo to consider him one of his
students or of his lineage and he left to found his own school as soon as he
learned the kata.
This was a situation of a number of post war students in that they went to
Zenryo because he was the senior (in Japanese terms) of Kyan students and
taught in the populated area around Chatan. I think likely these folks did
come to Zenryo but (perhaps) not for long and (perhaps) with more interest in
making a living out of it as quickly as possible and founding their own schools
and making a few bucks out of teaching.
That’s the long and the short of my knowledge of Toma (without looking things
up) but some background to the "rush to acquire lineage" follows as
additional material, below.......
I'm not absolutely sure why they would have chosen Zenryo over Nagamine
given that
Nagamine's time with Kyan was (potentially, at least) a little earlier when he
was stationed at Chatan Police Station, but then again this time was supposedly
short, and the fact that other folks acknowledged Zenryo was clearly a
phenomena that Nagamine himself was aware of. So, it seems that,
yes, Zenryo was acknowledged as the Kyan guy to go to at that time in that
area, and both Zenpo (relaying from his father) and Nakazato both alluded to
Nagamine essentially trying to 'muscle in' on the Kyan-lineage organization/ryu
ha that eventually came to be "Shorinji ryu". (I use this
term because this was the name adopted by the eventual group headed by Zenryo,
with Nakazato, and the fella who was to take it to the mainland, Isamu Tamotsu,
founder of Renshinkan Shorinji ryu in Kagoshima).
The story is that Nagamine apparently saw himself as the more natural political
leader of any development/acknowledgement of a formal "Kyan
school" post war, this at a time when things were starting to
coalesce and organizations starting to form and be acknowledged by governing
bodies. It seems he particularly felt that he was best nman to spearhead the
effort to formally recognize the Kyan lineage given Zenryo's only semi-literacy
(yes!) and Nakazato's youth.
Nakazato and Zenryo, on them other hand, already knew where they stood
with each other ("In karate and in life (Zenryo) was my sempai"-
Nakazato) and they both took umbrage at being condescended by Nagamine.
Despite them both being the surviving Kyan students of note and the ones
with way more time than Nagamine, Nagamine was essentially attempting to come
in and pull rank on the basis of class/suitability rather than student-time.
Both Zenpo and Nakazato have referred to Nagamine in these terms: Zenpo, that
Nagamine was a "Snob" and Nakazato slightly less obviously but
compared his relationship with both Nagamine and Tatsuo as very
different, describing Tatsuo as always being rspectful to him "unlike
others" - refering to Nagamine.
NB. I exclude Tatsuo here because he was doing
his own thing at least in part based on his studies outside Kyan whereas the
other two remained 'pure' through only having Kyan as a teacher.
cheers victor, harry davis
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