12/31/2025
Wish I had had more opportunity to spend time with this teacher. This one is worth sharing!
On Catching Karate (Or, the secret karate handshake)
After a pretest for black belts, Iha Sensei gave the following advice.
“Don’t ask what I am doing. Ask what is my feeling in my body, what I am thinking, and then where that feeling is in my body.” Why? Because that is what drives the “doing”. Then the secret will suddenly reveal itself, that Iha Sensei is not teaching more than a few common principles, and the rest is the variables of the attack.
Sensei went on to say that the older Okinawan karateka were not interested in the names of techniques as much as words that gave a feeling: muchimi, kankaku, chinkuchi, kukuchi, atefa, and so on.
Moreover, he said, when you will begin to learn through your body and not just through your ears or eyes you will be able to “catch” techniques by feeling, with just a handful of exchanges and maybe even only one. This is “most important” he said.
This also shows us that the meaning of things is always before us, but we must have the ability to perceive, to digest. “When the student is ready the master appears.” This is the higher level of learning. It will be like a musician hearing a piece once and then being able to mimic it in its entirety, or play upon its theme, like the precocious Mozart at the Vatican as a child.
Another time Sensei said that he can watch someone walk, sit and stand, or open a door and from that know if they have karate. (It’s good he didn’t say “drive a car”, because that wasn’t his forte.) “But”, he continued, “if I can feel their technique, I can copy it right away.” He said in the old days people didn’t shake hands like in America, but that now everyone does. Rather, they would simply bow. He said in America everybody shakes hands, and you can tell someone’s personality from their handshake and sometimes their power. He said he doesn’t ever shake a hand tightly. “Just enough to match.”
This “just enough” feeling is that the heart of his art. He almost never grabbed us when he was doing a technique; it was always at most more of a hook with his pinky and thumb. This made it very difficult to understand his intentions until it was too late. But he was always listening to our bodies’ overreactions.
Side note: I can only think of one time when he actually grabbed me at the wrist and squeezed. He put me to my knees.
