Search for the Difficult - If Monkey Do, Anyone Can Do

This past Saturday, I was teaching two students their first weapons kata.  They were learning the beginning basic moves of Chizi kun.  As many new students do, they kept asking about the movements as we went.  I started out showing some of the bunkai initially, before I finally told them to learn a little before I spoon feed you everything.  This is typical of students and just human nature.  You want to know why.  Heck, I most always want to know why when I’m learning anything.  The techniques I showed were primarily grappling.  There are strikes in this kata, but there are a lot of grappling moves.  Usually, you are grabbing the opponent and then striking.  We discussed this and a lot of the things Taika had taught us (Tony was there as well). After class was over, Tony ran off to another dojo where he had been hired to teach the owner’s son Shodo (Japanese Calligraphy).  When he gets to this dojo, he finds a group of long lost Ryukyu Kempos teaching a Tanbo seminar and for some strange reason one lonely student working on Chizi kun.  He listens and watches as they swing with wild flourishes and talk about both of these weapons as striking weapons.  Absolutely no mention of grappling is covered.  Of course he wasn’t there for their whole seminar, or we’d have probably had to talk him down off a watch tower or something.  After Tony told this to me, I decided to do some net and specifically Youtube.com searching for both weapons.  I was amazed when almost all I could find for these weapons was striking.  Taika showed lots of grappling with both weapons over the years and I spent the last five years or so of his life working on Tanbo kata fixups, bridges and new kata that were primarily grappling in nature.  Taika would always say that, just striking with a weapon is easy.  “Easy, monkey can do.”  I spent months on hand changes.  There was lots of laughter on his side of the basement, and lots of frustration on mine.  I learned a lot and learned to look at the weapons from a different perspective.  Everything he had me do was so different from the original ways I learned these weapons, and the old versions on decades old VHS tapes. Taika loved to lock somebody up, and contort their body.  When you watch old videos of him, he was like a puppet master.  Sure, he’d sometimes do the open hand neck strike for demos, but he frequently would grab a weapon where he didn’t just strike somebody with a stick.  He would wrap them up, make their body contort and usually their vocal cords scream. I guess the point I’m trying to get across is, when you are performing your kata and everything feels easy, it is probably time to ask yourself, “What hard bits am I missing?” Don’t be a monkey, they throw poo.