Bunkai, Kyusho, and the Death Touch – Part VII

My primary lifetime instructor, Soke Takayuki Kubota, used to enjoy playing a little trick on people who thought they were tough. If someone like that, especially someone with a bad attitude, came into his dojo or attended one of his workshops, he would get into a stance and invite them to footsweep him. When the guy kicked his front leg, he would never use all their power. They’d just make his leg wiggle a little. Then, Soke would chastise him for being so weak. His ego injured, the guy would put everything into his next attempt. But as he did, Soke would quickly half-step back with his front leg, rotate his hips, and come around with a hard shin to shin sweep with his right.

Those of us who had been with Soke for many years would always watch the faces of those he had setup. The looks on their faces when their shins met were classic. And their attitudes were immediately adjusted down several notches.



Old photo of Soke Kubota and IKA karateka.



One of my first memories of Soke was of him in the elevated boxing ring at the old Long Beach Auditorium, where Ed Parker held his International Karate Championships for several years, before moving into the larger new arena. Soke started his demonstration by “warming up”. He set his hand on a wooden pedestal and beat it with a sledge hammer. Then, he set his foot on the pedestal and beat his shin. I’d seen people who could break stacks of bricks before so that didn’t really impress me. What did impress me was what he did next.

As his grand finale, he sparred three of the black belt finalists from that year’s event, individually and then all three at once. I think these three included Chuck Norris and Tonny Tulleners. I forget who the third was. Everyone else that night had done these well-rehearsed demos, where they were attacked by their own students and everyone fell down right on cue. So I was impressed with both Soke’s skill and confidence in his methods. (I had the “good” fortune to be selected to serve as Soke’s demo partner a few times over the years. And he never pre-rehearsed any I was ever a part of. He would just say to attack with kicks or punches or a weapon.)

I knew top people at the time who were great fighters but never produced anyone who came even close to them in ability. The question I asked myself at the time was “Is it his system that makes him great? Or is it his personal skill and natural qualities that makes his system appear great?” The former means I may benefit from studying his system. The latter means it likely has nothing to offer me. A great athlete can make even a bad system look good. Soke Kubota was not only a great fighter but his system (his tactics and strategies), instilled under his very tough training methods, produced many very strong fighters over the years.

In 1990, I read Bruce Everett Miller’s book, Pressure Points: The Deadly Touch. It was the first book on the subject I’d come across that wasn’t based on chi or ki and that esoteric system. Miller’s approach was based on western medical systems, using the same objective and verifiable structures and the same familiar descriptors and terminology. He divided pressure points into 7 types: 1) Ligament points, 2) Tendon points, 3) Nerve points, 4) Muscle points, 5) Organ points, 6) Bone points, and 7) Reflex points. (Check his website for his books and dvds - http://quanlikan.com/.)

In his shin to shin sweep, Soke Kubota was attacking what Miller would label a bone point. But, having studied directly under legendary Okinawan grandmaster, Kanken Toyama, and as the son of one of Japan’s top taiho jitsu experts and law enforcement advisor, Soke was very familiar with the huge number of sensitive spots throughout the human body.

In Japan, Soke had been very active in law enforcement. He was brought to the United States by Harvey Eubanks, then training lieutenant for LAPD and former student of American karate pioneer William Dometrich. (Harvey would go on to become one of Soke’s senior students and organizational heads.) Once here, Soke was sought out by our top law enforcement agencies. At one point, he and I hosted a law enforcement instructor’s course at my dojo. Instructors from the FBI, Department of Corrections (DOC), local police, and sheriff’s office attended the event.

The FBI and the DOC instructors had to occasionally transport some of the toughest and most vicious people within the entire prison system. The three FBI instructors were all muscular and intense young guys. They questioned everything. They were not disrespectful, just wanted to make sure what they used to move prisoners would be effective. Their lives (and those of the agents they would teach) could easily depend on it. They had recently had to move Hugo Pinell, who could reportedly bench press 450 lbs and was one of the most feared prisoners within the system. He was kept in maximum security, away from the other prisoners, at the request of the other prisoners! I knew Pinell’s name as my former black belt student, who had worked at San Quentin before transferring to Soledad Prison, had also been assigned to transport him on a couple of occasions.

Plus, they had to vary the procedures they used each time they moved the same prisoner. Those they moved had nothing to lose and nothing but time on their hands to practice, over and over, methods for escaping whatever procedure the guards had used to handle them on previous occasions. They would, for example, practice how to come off a wall while being frisked in spread-eagle. Or, they would practice how to get out of a chicken wing, etc. So those who had to move such people kept extensive notes on their procedures and would make sure to vary them, never moving them in the same way twice.

During the training session at my dojo, one of the FBI instructors asked Soke how he would get out of an especially difficult pin. Soke allowed the instructor to apply it, then began struggling as would a normal suspect. The instructor, being significantly larger and more muscular, was able to handle that relatively easy. But, then, the instructor yelled and his arms flew opened, releasing Soke, who had attacked a specific point in the instructor’s chest with the knuckle of his index finger.

I’d better stop for now. I got somewhat sidetracked. I'll try to get back on subject next time. Again, thanks for bearing with me.

Bunkai, Kyusho, and the Death Touch – Part VI

In my last post, I stated that “…(strikes) to points often far from the effected internal organ can produce serious, even lethal consequences,” is scientifically possible. Before going further into this, let me explain why I think that.

First, we have statements made by some of our greatest traditional instructors. The Bubishi, which outlines these types of vulnerable points, has long been held in extremely high regard by our martial arts forefathers, people who were clearly far more knowledgeable and skilled than I am or will ever be. The Bubishi had, until recently, been considered a highly secret document. The following quote is taken from Patrick McCarthy’s latest edition of his masterful translation of the Bubishi:

     “   the Bubishi is a historically important document whose secrets, until only just recently, have remained closely guarded by karate-do masters in Okinawa.

     “In addition to the copious amount of intriguing information contained within the pages of this profound document, the Bubishi also reveals the original application of orthodox kata and the moral precepts that govern the behavior of those who understand these secrets. Disclosing the principles of tuidi and kyusho-jutsu (art of attacking vulnerable points of the human body), the reader will come to understand that which was been kept secret for generations.

     “The Bubishi must be considered mandatory reading for all serious enthusiasts of true karate-do and is therefore an essential addition to one’s personal library, a work to be deeply studied by both teacher and student alike.”

This was written by Shoshin Nagamine. But he was far from alone in his assessment of the value of the Bubishi. The book is known to have been cherished by many of our legendary forefathers, including Ankoh Itosu, Kenri Nakaima, Kanryo Higaonna, Chojun Miyagi, and Kenwa Mabuni. Gichin Funakoshi mentions it. So, even if I didn’t have any additional information than that, who am I to question these great men? I must at least keep my mind open.

But I do have additional information, things based on something more concrete for me.

While a graduate student in Motor Learning at Stanford, I was required to take several classes in anatomy and physiology. Of all the classes I took during my many years as an undergraduate and then graduate student at Stanford, probably the toughest was Gross Anatomy. It was taught at the Stanford Medical School and was the first half of what was required of the school’s first year medical students.

Only twelve students were allowed in the class. Four were assigned to each of the three dissection tables, where we dissected fresh cadavers (ones never dissected before). The class was taught by two surgeons and a PhD in Anatomy. So we had one of these very knowledgeable men assigned to our table the entire time.

We were required to memorize pretty much every muscle, bone, bit of soft tissue, internal organ, and other structure within the human body. Every bone had a bunch of holes and bumps and notches and we had to know the name and purpose of each – muscles attached and their points of origin and insertion, neural innervations, arteries and veins, etc.

We also studied in depth the various pain sensors (Golgi Receptors, etc.), the nervous system and how it functions, and the rest. From it, I gained a great deal of knowledge about the human body and learned much about our many points of vulnerability. But I also acquired a huge appreciation for our engineering and the wonderful biological machine that we are.

I’ll cut this off for now so it doesn’t become so long that only the most hardy will read it. As always, I greatly appreciate your reading my humble ramblings. Feel free to repost this and share it with anyone who might be interested. It would be nice to expand our readership and increase input from more people. (I'm posting this in a larger type. Is this better or worse?)

Bunkai, Kyusho, and the Death Touch – Part V

In the late 60s, a guy came into my dojo and announced that he knew how to do the death touch. In fact, according to him, there were 54 deadly points (or some such number) in some book he had read but he knew 72! He volunteered to demonstrate his skill on one of my students. So I paired him off with Mike Moti, who had recently been promoted to shodan, as he was my only experienced fighter there at the time. The rest were low ranking people.

Old student Mike Moti at Ralph Castro's California Karate Championships in San Francisco.

Mike played with him for a while and it quickly became clear to everyone, except for the death touch guy, that he knew nothing about fighting. In fact, because Mike was going easy, he somehow got the impression that he was winning and started acting very cocky. Soon, he got cockier… and mouthier. Half way through some insulting comment, Mike footswept him, slammed him into the wooden floor, then followed up with a controlled punch to the head – coming just close enough to make sure the guy got a clear message that he had lost. The guy laid there for a couple of seconds, trying to regain his bearings, then started poking Mike in the ankle with his index finger. Mike laughed and asked him what he was doing. The guy said “The death touch”. Mike laughed harder. I told Mike, “You’re going to die in about 50 years.” The guy got up, stomped out, and never returned. And Mike was still fine last time I heard.

We had, of course, long heard stories about the death touch. (It was usually referred to as the Delayed Death Touch.) Such stories had been around since well before my time, along with stories about people developing their spear hands to a point where they could penetrate the chest and rip out people’s hearts.

It was relatively common at the time to be asked questions by the press and potential students about it, some prompted by what they saw in Kung Fu movies but most by ads run in the back of pulp magazines by “Count Dante”, offering to teach the deadly touch to anyone who bought his book. (Count Dante was actually John Keenan, who was actually a skilled karateka.)

Proper kihon evolved over the centuries to enable martial artists to generate as much force (via high speed and maximum body mass involvement) as our bodies were designed to apply, or close to it. But force is force. When sufficient force is applied, whether by a trained or untrained person, to a body target of sufficient vulnerability, we can cause organ or structural failure. This is what the Soledad Prisoner did.

If you are large enough, like the guy at Soledad was, it’s not hard to generate sufficient force. But if you’re not that large or anticipate having to fight someone significantly bigger than yourself, you have to make your body extremely efficient, trained to tap every potential source of power available to you, physically (such as muscle development and sequencing, gravity, breath control, etc.), mentally (focus, pain control, etc.), and spiritually (intensity, indomitability, etc.).

Everyone is pretty much in agreement with all this. Where they differ, often radically, is when the subject turns to those types of pressure point attacks that claim simple touches or light strikes to points often far from the effected internal organ can produce serious, even lethal consequences.

Are such things scientifically possible? Yes. They are potentially possible. But there are other equally important questions that need to be asked. I’ll discuss my thoughts on all this in my next post. Thanks again for reading my humble opinions.

Bunkai, Kyusho, and the Death Touch – Part IV

In the early 90s, I was appointed head coach for the USA Karate Team’s participation in the Olympic Sports Festival in San Jose, Costa Rica. As the team was composed of athletes from all over the country, everyone was to meet up with Hanshi Anderson at the Miami airport for the flight to Costa Rica. After a layover in Dallas, me and Ron Vick, one of my students on the team, boarded a 747 for our connecting flight to Miami. The huge plane was almost empty. Only a handful of other people were scattered around the aircraft, one of them a guy in the row just ahead of ours.

Turned out he was former World Boxing Champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. He was a nice guy and we spoke all the way to Miami. Like the guy I met at Soledad Prison, Mancini was involved in a fight that resulted in the death of his opponent, South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim. But unlike the Soledad man, who stopped his opponent’s heart with a punch to the chest, Mancini’s opponent died five days after the match from brain damage resulting from punches to the head.

Deaths from punches certainly aren’t restricted to massive guys or professional fighters. We’ve had two local deaths that I know of, where untrained people got into arguments on the street and killed their opponents with a single punch to the head.

Martial artists have known all of this for centuries and why it was included among the kyusho (vital points) attacks that are incorporated within our kata. These also include vital points that require far less power – like the eyes, ears, throat, groin, etc. – where little force is necessary to do serious damage. One such technique, for example, is included in Heian Nidan (Pinan Shodan) kata, where an opponent’s punch (by one definition) is pressed down and the eyes or throat attacked with a spearhand. (An earlier version attacked with the tips of two fingers rather than all of them.)

The rub, of course, is that a result can hinge on individual variables – differences in how each of us is constructed. A punch that would kill one person may do little to another. Professional boxers hammer each other without doing the kind of damage such punches would surely do to most people. An old friend, Ralph Castellanos, who trained with me for a while in the 70s, was once attacked by a guy in San Francisco. Ralph kicked him so hard it lifted the guy off the ground. (And Ralph weighed over 200 lbs. and defeated Joe Lewis twice – no mean feat.) The guy he kicked didn’t react to the kick or even appear to notice it. He kept on fighting with equal strength. Fortunately, his jaw was far less steel-like than his lower anatomy. One punch from Ralph knocked him out.

Kyusho (vital points of the body) includes a wide variety of targets and attack methods. The ones discussed above are direct attacks to internal and external organs. And they are generally accepted with little argument. However, there are some targets and attack methodologies that are highly controversial. I’ll share my thoughts on these in a coming post.

Thanks again for bearing with me and your continued support.