Current Kata for Saturday Classes: Jion

We are now studying Jion (慈恩) in our Saturday classes.

You can see very good examples of people from the JKA doing the kata here and here. And here is part 1 of 3 of Yahara Sensei teaching Jion details.

This is a relatively “basic” kata for advanced practitioners. It is composed almost entirely of moves contained within the five Heian kata and Tekki Shodan. So it is a great kata for newer brown belts to study. It is also a great kata for experienced black belts to use to review their fundamentals and go deeper into the study of biomechanics and application. As Kawawada Sensei told us during his visit to our dojo in 2018, Nakayama Sensei’s idea was to list this as the “last” kata in the curriculum, to provide a review for those with more experience and act as a reminder that solid basics are an important part of our development.

Even if we’re beyond the kata you’re practicing, it’s great to begin to learn how techniques can be combined, and the practice in applying techniques is indispensable.

See you Saturday!

At SVSK our Saturday morning kata classes focus on one kata at a time. We typically spend four Saturdays on each kata:

Week 1: Overview/review of the kata
Week 2: Fine points of the techniques and the kata
Week 3: Hands-on practice to understand applications (bunkai)
Week 4: Variations in the kata