JAPAN KARATE ASSOCIATION
WORLD FEDERATION SCOTLAND
JKA SPRING JOINT TRAINING CAMP, Tokyo, Japan - APRIL 2009
Congratulations to Sensei John Hazel (Chief Instructor), Sensei Gordon Williamson, Sensei Jim Murray & Sensei Roy Bower
who all sat and passed exams taken at the recent JKA Spring Training Camp held at JKA Hombu Dojo, Tokyo, Japan.
Sensei John Hazel Sensei Gordon Williamson
Passed Examiner 'C' Level Passed Instructor 'C' Level
Sensei Jim Murray Sensei Roy Bower
Passed Examiner 'D' Level Passed Examiner 'D' Level
Passed Instructor 'C' Level Passed Instructor 'C' Level
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The JKA WF Scotland had an impressive line up of 13 students who attended
this 4 day course which is a record by anyone's standards. The committee
would like to thank everyone who attended this course for their continued
support for the JKA and would hope that their stories of this trip (which
will never be published on this web site) would encourage all DAN grades
to try and attend these camps. No DAN grade requires the permission of any
instructor to attend these courses and everyone is made extremely welcome
by all who attend.
The course is made up of various seminars aimed primarily to increase the
technical knowledge of the student whether it be for Kihon, Kata or
Kumite. Over the course of the 4 days each element of these was examined
and all students will agree their knowledge and understanding of certain
aspects was fully enhanced.
Day 1 consisted of registration, the opening ceremony was performed by
Nakahara Sensei during which he explained the up to date position of the
JKA and the plans to introduce KYU grade registrations similar to that
currently only enjoyed by the DAN grades. This will be adopted by the JKA
WFS and will result in certificates being issued by JKA HQ to all students
passing KYU grades from the grading to be held in June. Students who have
already passed KYU grading in the past can also register their KYU
gradings and have certificates issued retrospectively. Please contact one
of the committee members for more information regarding this matter.
Following this we were given some sharp lessons on basic one and three
step attack sparring which was followed by perhaps the best (or worse)
event to date. The JKA possess without doubt the best Kumite exponents in
the world and for some reason they thought it would be a good idea just to
show the students how good they actually are. What followed was a session
of freestyle fighting involving all of the JKA instructors including the
current world champions and us.......what followed will be remembered by
all involved as we got to fight with the best of the best. Many lessons
were learned including how bad we are at Kumite and how to treat bruising.
Over the course of the next three days we enjoyed many seminars dealing
with Sentei-Kata (Bassai-Dai, Empi, Jion and Kanku-Dai) along with
application for Unsu, Chinte and Nijushiho, the level of instruction being
second to none.
Perhaps however the lasting memory of our trip was on the Sunday morning
when we were "warmed up" by one of the junior JKA instructors
who was obviously double jointed and took great pleasure in showing us
just how inflexible and unfit we actually were. Was the only person I have
known to get a round of applause just for doing a warm up. One to look out
for in the future.