Training with Tristan Sutrisno

 

 

Back in 1979 I first met Tris Sutrisno on the tournament kata floor as a fellow competor. And in time we became friends warming up together and talking. He at that time would do superior kata only to mess up on the last move. Then one day he no longer made the mistake and began winning. Then in time he became dominate in kumite and kobudo competition too.

 

As we became friends, eventually he asked me to train at his dojo in Hazleton,I took him up on the invitation. When I got there, it was about an hour drive, class had already begun so I hurried up to change and joined in. I did not practice his system so be began by showing me his heian 1 – 5. As I had previously studied Tang Soo Do which had similar forms, and Funakoshi’s book at home I made sure by the next time I went down I could do them his way. I guess that impressed him, we never did them together again. That first class I also saw his students doing 8 aikido drills in a group. After watching them for 15 minutes he asked me if I wanted to try. I said yes and did them (for I had been paying very close attention. After that he showed 4 more and explained the original drill was 20 techniques.

 

That was the only instruction I received on them, but seeing their worth I eventually began showing them at brown belt to my own students. A decade later he came up to NH to do a clinic for my students. He was amazed they could do his drills, but explained because his students were faking several of them, he had made changes to 2 techniques. Where up what I taught changed.

 

For someone so skilled in kumite, over the years I observed he never used kumite in his classes. His skills came from 120 2 person drills. Though I only saw/learned a fraction of them. I wasn’t his student and he made an effort to explain much to me, that divide would not change.

 

One thing I began to realize is that what you see on the tournament floor give you no idea what is being taught by any instructor. It only is a small piece of any art. For I saw so much from what Tris taught that others had no idea of.

 

Soon after I began training with Tris I heard him constantly use the term ‘Bunkai’. This was the earlyu 1980s and in the NE no one used the term. He would constantly lament that when he tried to talk about bunkai with the senior instructors at tournaments, they never seemed to understand.

 

Shortly after that the magazines started using the term, and it and the concept lept into karate. But how he used bunkai and how others used the term was not the same thing.

 

In his teachings, other things were used to develop kyu students. Bunkai was a dan practice. And about that time his first 2 students reached shodan, and I observed how they were taught.

 

Let me try and make this simple.

 

At each of the 5 dan levels there is an entirely different ‘bunkai’ taught for each kata. The applicaitions may or may not have anything in common with the kata. And to help tie it together there was a private dan version of the kata, to mnemonically reinforce those techniques.

 

Each ‘bunkai’ was a complete way to end an attacker. And bunkai could just come from a starting point in the kata flow and have nothing to do with the kata, more of that as dan advanced.

 

I was living in NH and down there for a summercamp when his first two black belts showed me the 1^st level bunkai for bassai dai, and the bunkai version.

 

About a year later he brought his senior students, all of then then black belts, up to my place to train for the weekend. He loved my back yard and liked training there, it reminded him of when he trained in the forests of Indonesia.

 

That Sunday morning he woke us all up and explained he decided to show us the bunkai version of bassia sho, and in the process some of the bunkai of bassi sho at the same time. This was not deep instruction, more a walkthrough, but the skills those bunkai used were plain to see.

 

The following video shows that instruction. It is not very long and I am sure there is much more that was not explained. But this is a clear example of the Sutrisno family Shotokan method.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REcP4vWjIO8

 

(I should note this  video at times is hard to start to play, Just keep trying until it starts.)

 

There is a short dark section on this video after his instructon. and then part of a clinic he put on for my students, They were not his students, he was just showing some of what his kyu students studied. Of course each technique series shown is dynamic and good it its own right.

 

Over the years he shared some more. Explained at 3nd and 4^th dan the bunkai were focused on takedowns and throws, sharing some of them for heian 2 and 3. Another time he showed aikido uses for Heian Yo Dan. As for the 5^th dan he once hinted at what that would be, but that is another topic.

 

My evaluation is that his bunkai is a fusion of aikido, karate and tjimande. It is a private definition not like anyone else uses. I have watched bunkai on youtube from around the world and they are not the same thing. This is something unique and deep.