Thoughts from Charles about Nukitsuke.

One of the biggest things that I stress, is not to do empty kata. People can move with great form etc all they want, but unless there's a certain feeling to it, I consider it empty. I believe great form gives you a great frame, but you have to fill up that frame with weight. Most people's kata, their finishing cut is strong, but if you watch their nukitsuke, it looks like they just do it to just get to the finishing cut. So we do an exercise where you do gekken from the draw. I posted a video recently and got some interesting reactions but even better is to let the receiver try from the position of drawing to see how difficult it can be without the proper "weight".

I asked Charles for some thoughts about being in the position of the person fighting from the draw. This is what he wrote....

Nukitsuke, the act of cutting from the draw, is the first move in many Toyama Ryu kata, including the first one, ippon me. Although we all practice nukitsuke from nearly the very beginning, I found that an exercise early this year where nukitsuke was practiced in a gekken setting was when I first started really learning lessons regarding seme.

Seme is the act of pressuring your opponent. Seme not only keeps opponents at bay, but can also be used to lead opponents into believing you will move a certain way, allowing you to move a different way and hopefully catch them by surprise.

I had a basic idea of what seme was, but I had never really done it myself, so my views on seme had no real basis. That changed during an exercise where we had a chance to alternately practice nukitsuke on an opponent and to defend against an opponent attempting to use nukitsuke.

The exercise involves a shidachi, a defender, and an uchidachi, an attacker. The shidachi carries a sword in a saya. The uchidachi wears a helmet and kote to protect the hands. The sword we use is plastic, but it's not some light, flimsy toy — sensei Sang Kim has a plastic sword that is a lot like a bokken, and can easily break bones. This made the exercise feel a lot like gekken against an habiki (blunt steel sword) — there's a much more genuine sense of threat, a sense that you should not charge stupidly into a suicidal attack.

At first we just tried striking or blocking as quickly as possible. Then sensei Kim suggested that we rely less on speed and more on strategy, to try setting up our opponents, so they attempted to either attack or block where we wanted. As we tried doing so, lessons from kumitachi came back to me — how the uchidachi in kumitachi uses subtle tells to telegraph intentions so the shidachi knows enough to move in synchrony with the uchidachi. It then occurred to me that those same lessons could be used to broadcast intentions — not to work with a shidachi, but to set up and manipulate opponents. It's a lot easier to fight opponents when the opponent does what you want them to.

Recently, we ran through this nukitsuke exercise again. I practiced different lessons from it this time. As an uchidachi against sensei Kim, I practiced seme to keep an opponent at bay, with more aggressive postures usually being more successful in that regard; I tried (usually unsuccessfully) to not fall for intentional tells; and, in the case of cutting from waki-gamae, I learned the hard way that one should not lead with the left hand so much. As a shidachi against sensei Kim, I felt extremely slow and vulnerable, which emphasized to me the importance of basics such as keeping the sheathed sword in front and in center, and how the right hand should be sneaky during the draw to not attract attention, and how pushing with the right hand is much faster than pulling, and the importance of minimizing unnecessary movements in order to both reduce tells and increase speed. It also gave me a new way to think about nukitsuke during kata — to perform the kata as if under threat, but to not perform in a panicky or rushed way.

All in all, practicing nukitsuke in a gekken setting is very valuable. The lessons it brought home to me are all things that are taught during class, but understanding viscerally why we do those things is important for both the mind and body. I highly recommend it, as long as it is done with a keen eye to safety.