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Best Karate Book, Volume 5, HEIAN, TEKKI by M. Nakayama |
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Best Karate Book, Volume 5, HEIAN, TEKKI by M. NakayamaSo, you want to do kata? You simply must have this book. This is THE kata book that will take you from the first day you put on your flimsy white belt to the day you decide that you are going to take your black belt exam. This important text is a must-have when it comes to kata. It is the best text to date on the Heian and Tekki kata for beginners. In this book you will be tutored by Osaka-Sensei, who in his prime, was mostly unrivaled in terms of what “textbook” form should look like. The man's body proportions are such that they can be mimicked by large folk and stout folk, tall folk and willowy folk, adults and children of all ages. He is a pleasure to see in action today, and it is interesting to see him in these pages as a younger man. His form is excellent, and thus the perfect model for this book. The only criticism I have of this book is that it on the front cover we have a nice shot of Nakayama-Sensei posing during a sequence of Heian Yondan and his name emblazoned on the top right corner. Should you flip through the book you should see Osaka-Sensei through and through, and not a single photo of Nakayama-Sensei. I did a quick count of the photos in this book. There are 1250 photos. That is a lot of pictures, and they are all of Osaka-Sensei. The back cover has a nice write-up and biography of Masatoshi Nakayama that is 7 lines long. A single line above that we can read, “Demonstrated by the author and Yoshiharu Osaka.” Well, that can't be right. The only photo we have of Nakayama-Sensei “in action” is also on the back cover while he is officiating a match between a moustached foreign competitor about to be tossed to the ground by a Japanese competitor taken in Japan, 1977. Not much of a criticism for sure, just an odd little thing that should have been addressed somewhere early in the book. It would be nice for beginners to karate today to know the name of the man actually teaching them the kata from the very beginning. So, the long and short of it is that this book is not really a book by the long-deceased Nakayama-Sensei. This is Osaka-Sensei's book. And the man is very much alive today. Should you have a chance to attend his seminar, or come to Japan and take his lesson, I recommend it. The first couple times I did, it was quite interesting and I had a wonderful experience. Granted, from then on out he repeated the same material, but that may have been because he teaches a lot of people the basics of karate, how to move, how to stand, and how to shift your weight and momentum. All very important things. All fundamental things to good karate. And you get that in spades in this book.
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