Bushi No Te Isshinryu Gojushiho

 

 https://isshin-concentration.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-bushi-no-te-isshinryu-gojushiho.html

 

 

Tristan Sutrisno performing Gojushiho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyVT5pkJqf4

 

 

 

The Gojushiho does bear a similarity to several of the Shorin versions, but it has just as many differences too.

 

I never heard it’s origins.

 

When he taught it to me in the early 1980s I had to learn to form the old style fist to use with it. It took me a week of work before I was comfortably forming it. In his system that fist normally is taught as the standard fist after 3^rd dan. The standard Shotokan fist is what is taught for kyu and remains for 1^st and 2^nd dans.

 

Another difference is there is a long section of the kata toward the end where the entire section is done with one continuous exhalation. That is what allows the speed for that section.

 

While the first person that used the word bunkai for me (It was not used or taught by my Isshinryu instructors, nor was it done with the other karate instructors I visited with and who shared with me), but it was a unique paradigm for bunkai, unlike any I have seen around the world as on YouTube, and I have looked very hard. In fact that is the only definition for bunkai that I personally accept.

 

[Aside] For myself I learned not to use the term bunkai for my studies, While he shared much with me, I was not his student and there was even more I didn’t learn.

I developed the terminology Kata Application Analysis… and the greater study Kata Application Realization.

 

Essentially you can not see the kata and workout the bunkai he teaches. An each point of the kata, the bunkai is extremely efficient series of techniques to deal with an attack. They mostly do not reflect the kata movement.

 

Bunkai is not a kyu study, instead for kyu there are other drills, etc studied along with kata. All of which are also very efficient. An 1^st day you eventually learn a whole set of bunkai for each of the kata he teaches. Then at 2^nd dan you learn a completely different set of drills for each kata. That continues to be the case for 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th dan. So you are continually learning new material, each of which is explosive and works. A lifetime of study there.

 

So while I was shown some bunkai (like for Bassai Dai, Nijushiho, examples of 3rd and 4^th heian kata bunkai, in order to understand what that might be, some of the opening for hangetsu, but not for gojushiho or other kata.

 

In fact years after he shared the kata with me, he also shared it with my senior students, teaching them the form.

  Young Lee performs the BNT Gojushiho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4m95IbL8vs