Kanku Dai. Asai Tetsuhiko
Kanku Dai. Asai Tetsuhiko — Tetsuhiko Asai performing Shotokan kata. Preserved as part of the Asai karate video collection. #karate #asairyu #shotokan #kata
Grand Champion at the All Japan Championships
Asai Sensei also employed his impressive fighting skills in competition, holding several impressive titles to his name. He even became Grand Champion at the All Japan Championships in kata and kumite, impressively beating the likes of Shirai Sensei and Mikami Sensei.
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| Osaka Sensei and Asai Sensei |
The Grand Champion title is one of the most demanding honours in karate, because it means winning not one division but two: kata and kumite. Kata tests form — precision, balance, power, and control performed alone — while kumite tests fighting — timing, distance, courage, and the ability to read a live opponent. To win both at the All Japan Championships is to prove that a karateka is complete, equally strong in the art's two halves. That Asai did so against opponents of the calibre named in this post — Shirai Sensei and Mikami Sensei — shows the level of the competition he faced. The photograph of Osaka Sensei and Asai Sensei is a reminder that these championships belonged to a generation of masters who shaped modern karate, and that Asai stood at the very top of it.
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Tetsuhiko Asai was born on June 7, 1935, in Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku in Japan. He began studying karate at the age of twelve, training at a dojo near his home. At high school he also practised judo and earned a second dan grade, so his early years were shaped by two martial arts at once. The combination of judo's throwing and grappling with karate's striking gave his later karate an unusual range. After school he moved to Tokyo and studied at Takushoku University, where he became one of the leading members of the university karate club. He was a flexible, fast-moving fighter, and he developed a distinctive counter of his own: diving low beneath an opponent's kick and striking back before the opponent could recover. He called this movement the "submarine," and it made his name known across the karate world. The video below shows Asai in a kumite demonstration from 1987. Source: the official biography of Tetsuhiko Asai, International J...
Asai karate video collection
http://master-karate.ru/video.html This video is devoted to Asai karate video collection. This video is part of the Asai kata collection, an archive of seminar and training footage connected with Tetsuhiko Asai's school of karate. Asai-Ryu is rooted in Shotokan and enriched with principles of Chinese White Crane kung fu, and the material collected here shows how that approach is taught and practised in the dojo. The collection is updated every week with further kata and seminar recordings. This video belongs to the Asai karate video collection, an archive of seminar and training footage connected with Tetsuhiko Asai's school of karate. The recordings in this collection show the same principles across many settings: basics, kata, kumite, and teaching, all performed with the relaxed power and precise timing that characterised Asai's karate. Watch each recording more than once — the first viewing gives the shape of the performance, and later viewings reveal the details of foo...
