I'm not quite sure the point you're trying to make, Van. Maybe you can make it to me, or maybe I will see it another way.
Do you know what I see? I see the kind of Uechi I've been trying to teach my students. The only freeform exercise that I teach which causes people to see the light is my barroom brawl. There the idea of posed, dueling, frontal attacks becomes dangerous to irrelevant.
I saw the light on this while working with Dr. King. He started in judo, then did kyokushinkai ryu, then Goju with Yamaguchi Gosei, then was "stolen" by Kimo Wall
, and then picked up all kinds of martial expertise before going into special forces. King taught me both Goju and aikido. And in doing so, he taught me as much about Uechi Ryu applications as any Uechi instructor I ever worked with.
There's a story in George Mattson's Uechiryu Karatedo that describes what that tiger did to the crocodile. When I first read it as a teenager, I totally didn't get it. According to George's rendition of the story, Kanbun is walking home from training. Alongside the road in some bushes was a fellow hiding with a knife tied to the end of a stick. As George tells the story, the attacker lunged at Kanbun with his makeshift spear, and Kanbun jumped on his back.
Er... WTF???
When I read the story, I just assumed Kanbun was some kind of freak, and jumped in the air like a grasshopper. Not quite.
Later on while working with Dr. King, he was teaching the
ate waza. The one in particular that he was teaching was
ushiro ate. It translates roughly as around the back and toss. First we practiced the stepping. We did it over, and over, and over... And then we learned how to latch onto the person from behind and slam them down. The harder they charged at you and the more gracefully you did the 180-degree walk-around, the more dramatically you could grab them by the shoulders and shake them like a beach towel. In fact... get the timing right and their legs keep going while the head gets slammed down on the ground. Nasty!
And then one day it hit me. Uechi Ryu's tenshin exercises - done in the hojoundo and in Kanchin kata - are nothing more than a 90-degree version of a simple stepping pattern. You do the same steps to achieve a 180-degree turn against a bad guy coming at you, and you're on their back just like Kanbun jumped on the hooligan's back in China. And in football, the same 4-step pattern done with a 360-degree turn allows you to spin out of a tackle and keep running. In fact... that translates to self-defense as well. As a group of predators surrounds you, you charge at one, do a 360-degree spinout, and keep on truckin!
Watch the tiger. He does the same move that Kanbun did to the criminal with the make-shift spear, as I did in my aikido class, and as any grappler does (including yours truly) to turn an assault against you into a rear naked choke opportunity. And on that latter front, I'll show you how hawk chases sparrow sets you up to do just that.
My point? We do that. THIS is Uechi non-sport fighting as it was meant to be. The tiger will bite the cervical spine of the crocodile until he kills it. Similarly we can tenshin and use a Uechi elbow as a vise instead of a spear. Leg up and down (as in hawk chases sparrow) is nothing more than bending them at the knee joint so that the angle and position of the head is just so. And then, out go the lights.
Nice video, Van. Thanks for that.
- Bill
it's not compulsary to do them all, and acceptable to favour certain techniques over others that's why you have kickers,punchers ...and in every system there are things that you do just because they are there ( although sometimes they are there for a very good reason that you may not know)...........and there are levels of ability, and experience within the system.....so there are things that a beginer may find more valuable than some one who is more experienced. I remember a thread where somebody had a female student who just couldn't spar 
....to somebody like that a first step may be very slow pre arranged drills..but that wouldn't work with somebody else who has switched from kickboxing to karate or changed from another style and could spar from the get go...... 
