Kaze Uta Budo Kai Forum Archive

I had a strong "ah ha" moment this morning in judo class while working with Danny and David. Danny was talking about using a cam action movement against a resistive uke in order to get kuzushi for a hip throw.

In this case, tori is using standard grips and drops his center while moving backwards to extend uke. As uke's center drops, tori gently places his left hand on uke's right shoulder. From this position, tori completes the cam action and rises while closing centers with uke. During this rising and closing action, uke tries to rise, but leans towards his right because tori is preventing uke's right shoulder to rise by using his left hand. Thus, uke's posture becomes compromised, which presents tori with a window to get tsukuri.

What made this so interesting to me was the fact that tori achieves kuzushi by allowing uke to enter a position that will jeopardize his posture, but then does not allow uke a chance to exit this position. Prior to this morning I had only considered kuzushi in terms of moving uke, rather than trapping uke.

a beautiful lesson-- you describe it well -- kuzushi is an interdependant state that is created/discovered/acheived by a large number of methods-- it is both proactive and reactive , both yin and yang-- it has expression in all the variety of sente and ukemi ( literally -the reception of energy) is the only way to really internalize it cleanly, which is why you have to feel it as uke to do it as tori-- a far as i can tell so far there is no bottom to it--