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.