Kyan on Sai

 

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