Osoto gari

A recent discussion about shodan needing to know a number of forms of each throw - osotogari was given as an example - prompted me to post.

I have always struggled to understand the naming of osotogari. I see the similarities between the reaping of ouchi gari, kouchigari, and kosotogari but osotogari seems out of place. The others all use horizontal clips while osotogari has a vertical sweep. In fact, the leg movement seems to have more in common with harai goshi than kouchi gari.

The other thing is that I was always taught was to put uke's weight on one leg (though off to a corner) and reap that leg to effect osotogari. However, in re-reading Kawaishi (for the 1000th time?) I discovered a clarifying point in the osoto otoshi section, where uke's weight should be on his left leg and the right should be clipped before the weight is transferred onto it. Now this starts to ring true with what I have always thought should be the similarity between osotogari and the other karu techniques: the karu action should be short and close to the ground and the effect on uke should be like that of stepping on a banana skin (of the old cinematic gags). This becomes much more of a timing thing regarding weight transference with an outwards twist used to complete the throw. It is a very different action to simply loading the right leg, moving uke's weight outside his base and reaping with a big vertical sweeping action.

I have pulled off this short, clipping osotogari in studied attempts and also - almost by accident - in randori. In randori, it has been one of the fastest throws I have achieved with uke looking up at me from the ground with his eyes on stalks and me looking down at him with my jaw dropped! Like many karu techniques, it seems to be more about body position and timing, and less about strength.

What can anyone offer about this clipping osotogari and the nature of karu? How did the sweeping osotogari come about and why is it not named osoto harai? Kawaishi's osoto otoshi looks more like the 'common' osotogari with weight put onto the heel of the right leg, which is swept/hooked upwards whilst tori drives the upper body over and down; is this a misunderstanding on his part or have the modern osotogari and osoto otoshi diverged from the older versions?

As an end note, I find the short, clipping osotogari challenging but extremely satisfying to get. It fits with my understanding and ideas of 'ju' nicely! It also means that an advancing foot can be clipped from the outside with the o or ko foot or from the inside with the o or ko foot. The basic osotogari I was taught reduced those four options by one.

DougNZ wrote:A recent discussion about shodan needing to know a number of forms of each throw - osotogari was given as an example - prompted me to post.

I have always struggled to understand the naming of osotogari.  I see the similarities between the reaping of ouchi gari, kouchigari, and kosotogari but osotogari seems out of place.  The others all use horizontal clips while osotogari has a vertical sweep.  In fact, the leg movement seems to have more in common with harai goshi than kouchi gari.

The other thing is that I was always taught was to put uke's weight on one leg (though off to a corner) and reap that leg to effect osotogari.  However, in re-reading Kawaishi (for the 1000th time?) I discovered a clarifying point in the osoto otoshi section, where uke's weight should be on his left leg and the right should be clipped before the weight is transferred onto it.  Now this starts to ring true with what I have always thought should be the similarity between osotogari and the other karu techniques: the karu action should be short and close to the ground and the effect on uke should be like that of stepping on a banana skin (of the old cinematic gags).  This becomes much more of a timing thing regarding weight transference with an outwards twist used to complete the throw.  It is a very different action to simply loading the right leg, moving uke's weight outside his base and reaping with a big vertical sweeping action.

I have pulled off this short, clipping osotogari in studied attempts and also - almost by accident - in randori.  In randori, it has been one of the fastest throws I have achieved with uke looking up at me from the ground with his eyes on stalks and me looking down at him with my jaw dropped!  Like many karu techniques, it seems to be more about body position and timing, and less about strength.

What can anyone offer about this clipping osotogari and the nature of karu?  How did the sweeping osotogari come about and why is it not named osoto harai?  Kawaishi's osoto otoshi looks more like the 'common' osotogari with weight put onto the heel of the right leg, which is swept/hooked upwards whilst tori drives the upper body over and down; is this a misunderstanding on his part or have the modern osotogari and osoto otoshi diverged from the older versions?

As an end note, I find the short, clipping osotogari challenging but extremely satisfying to get.  It fits with my understanding and ideas of 'ju' nicely!  It also means that an advancing foot can be clipped from the outside with the o or ko foot or from the inside with the o or ko foot.  The basic osotogari I was taught reduced those four options by one.

Your approach is simply too rigid. You need to reflect on all the aspects of the knowledge you have acquired. You seem to assume that the naming of all jûdô throws is the result of a careful scientific process. This is not true. In fact not all names of throws were arrived at in the same way. Some carried over a name from another school for the same or a different technique, some names were chosen by Kanô, some by others; some names are metaphoric, other descriptive, etc. So it is a mix of inconsistencies. Ultimately what Kanô intended was a pedagogical model. Hence it is hardly surprising that there is quite often a conflict between pedagogy and hard science.

Ô-soto-gari, in terms of the physics is uchi-mata performed in a 180° different direction. Pedagogically as organized in the Kôdôkan system, however, the two throws have nothing to do with each other. Science and pedagogy can be used in harmony though to teach students.

Besides those two consideration, the question arises whether it would be wise to rearrange names more systematically and logically. Past experiences have shown this is not a good option. Anton Geesink has tried, believing his pedagogical approach was much better and the skill transfer thus improved. That was his personal view though and there is no evidence whatsoever that changing such terminology would facilitate skills transfer. Changing names is often flawed in itself, because the foreigners who propose the alternatives generally fail to question their own knowledge, which usually is deficient. When they conclude that something isn't good, often what is the case is that they fail to understand why the way something is the way it is. We saw this frequently with criticisms on the gokyô and Westerners would insist it needed to be changed because they found that some throws in the 1st group were more difficult to carry out than some in later throws. This was a typical Western reasoning rather than accepting their severely limited knowledge, otherwise they would have known that the gokyô is constructed based on the progression of difficulty in making ukemi for uke ..

If one would change the names of jûdô throws dramatically one would create a gap with many of the historic sources that establish the tradition of Kôdôkan. Altready today there is a disjoint if you have to discuss jûdô competition with people who started jûdô the last three years as they are clueless about what keikoku and kôka are ... Jûdô is a traditional activity, and in order to maintain that tradition, eventual changes should be considered with considerable trepidation and only be allowed if there are urgent safety or health matters, and other significant criteria. The IJF has shown over and over the effect of replacing supposedly bad things by their "improvements" and how they result in something that still has little to do with jûdô. Remember how jûdô used to have newaza a long time ago ?

With regard to the activity of reaping (kake), it is you who infuses direction of the reaping limb in there as a factor of importance. Nowhere in the tradition does it say that reaping needs to be subdivided in the direction in which the acting limb is moving. If that were true you could apply the same reasoning to every throw. The throwing circle of kuruma action in kata-guruma, hiza-guruma, ô-guruma, te-guruma, koshi-guruma, ashi-guruma is each time different in terms of degree in which it is oriented in the plane, and sometimes the planes are different too, so ?

Should uki-goshi not be a koshi-waza because the throwing circle is different than in ô-goshi ? Where does it say that koshi-waza can only carry that name if the throwing circle is oriented within a certain window of degrees ?

Why would you employ a rigid study of Kawaishi as fuel for reinventing the hot water ? Firstly, Kawaishi never even wrote what you say he did. You see to be assuming that the text in Kawaishi' books are literally from his mouth. The books of Kawaishi were written by other people. They took notes of what they understood with their limited understanding of a person who did not even properly speak French. As to Kawaishi's own knowledge, that existed only because that of everyone else in Europe in those days was so limited. Clearly when one reads reports from other Japanese sensei from those days or watches what has survived of Kawaishi footage no one would use that as the gold standard. Kawaishi's book are OK in a historic perspective and deserve to be mentioned in an anecdotal survey, but that is how far it should get. Same for Koizumi, who wasn't even a jûdôka when he gained fame. If you look at some of the things they do, it is hardly that impressive now; but it was at the time because the Westerners knew even a lot less; it was a matter of the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind, nothing more, nothing less.

Jûdô is not as rigid as you describe it with "the weight has to be on this" of that foot or leg. In reality, weight continuously modulates through body movements, and through air displacement in the body to change the center of mass. What happens in ô-soto-gari is scientifically very simple: a mechanical couple of opposing forces with one of the forces at each side of the center of mass is applies; at some point the it will make the center of mass fall outside of the base of support and uke falls. The push-pull actions that tori administers serve to break the symmetry of uke's body, and all reactions uke does or can do are intended to restore that symmetry.

The only thing that the technical descriptions further add, is to make the throw as efficient or as jû as possible, and this can be many different ways. Weight transfer is different depending on how the two athletes move, in what direction (straight, circular, sideways, forward, backward, and the kind of debana that one makes use of. In some cases there will be considerably more weight on one leg than on the other.

In reality, the situation is even more complicated, because although there is in theory a careful distinction between harai, kari and kake in terms of uke's weight distribution, this is only strictly applied with regard to naming throws in certain cases. For example, the distinction is rigorously applied in the following three de-ashi-barai / ko-soto-gari / ko-soto-gake. It is, however, not at all applied in ô-soto-gari. That means that ANY projecting throw performed with the right leg outside of uke's right leg IS ô-soto-gari, irrespective of whether it is sweeping, reaping or hooking. In other words "ô-soto-barai", ô-soto-gari, and "ô-soto-gake" are ALL ô-soto-gari. This was, in fact, an official decision of the Kôdôkan many years ago. For that reason the breadth of what is possible under the name ô-soto-gari obviously is wider than that what is possible under, let's say, ko-soto-gari. On the other hand, and anachronistic as that may sound, it does not mean that you have an absolute freedom in determining in what you can be reasonably expected to show when teaching basic ô-soto-gar to basic jûdô students. Ultimately, ô-soto-gari is not a throw, but a principle, but that principle should be taught with respect to the principles that guide jûdô (jû, efficiency) and in adhering proper hontai.

DougNZ wrote: I see the similarities between the reaping of ouchi gari, kouchigari, and kosotogari but osotogari seems out of place. The others all use horizontal clips while osotogari has a vertical sweep. In fact, the leg movement seems to have more in common with harai goshi than kouchi gari.

@DougNZ: Maybe then you would like this version of O-Soto-Gari:

Fritz wrote:

DougNZ wrote: I see the similarities between the reaping of ouchi gari, kouchigari, and kosotogari but osotogari seems out of place. The others all use horizontal clips while osotogari has a vertical sweep. In fact, the leg movement seems to have more in common with harai goshi than kouchi gari.

@DougNZ: Maybe then you would like this version of O-Soto-Gari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yvqpFC8_WXM#t=15
  

That is a good clip, Fritz. There are some others besides Hirano-sensei. Okano-sensei who tends to enter ô-soto-gari using an unusual tsuri-komi entry initially provokes surprise in those who take a class or clinic from him, as it puts tori in a different angle.

Cichorei Kano wrote:....
Changing names is often flawed in itself, because the foreigners who propose the alternatives generally fail to question their own knowledge, which usually is deficient. When they conclude that something isn't good, often what is the case is that they fail to understand why the way something is the way it is. We saw this frequently with criticisms on the gokyô and Westerners would insist it needed to be changed because they found that some throws in the 1st group were more difficult to carry out than some in later throws. This was a typical Western reasoning rather than accepting their severely limited knowledge, otherwise they would have known that the gokyô is constructed based on the progression of difficulty in making ukemi for uke ..
......

This fact alone, that the gokyô was actually intended primarily to train uke's ukemi, not tori's nage waza, turns so much judo training on its head.

In another post I wrote of Kano's instructor training course that introduced the gokyô over a series of lecture / practices.  

Maybe I scan sometime but I can't recall ever seeing the gokyô in a prewar judo instruction book in Japan aimed at beginner students; IIRC it only shows up in books intended for instructors.

Hi CK

Weight transfer is different depending on how the two athletes move, in what direction (straight, circular, sideways, forward, backward, and the kind of debana that one makes use of..

Didn't you forget up- and downwards?


.

Anatol wrote:Hi CK

Weight transfer is different depending on how the two athletes move, in what direction (straight, circular, sideways, forward, backward, and the kind of debana that one makes use of..

Didn't you forget up- and downwards?


.

No. The up-/downward push-/pull-forces in general serve to break the symmetry (around the center of mass) of uke following aite-no-tsukuri (that is the preparation of the position that uke is intended to end up in to execute the throw). Getting uke in that position does not necessary require up-/downward forces or any force since uke is always in SOME position and as tori you do not necessarily need to manipulate uke into a certain position. You can just follow him or use his spontaneous. These movements are in general eithr straight backwards or forwards or sideways or circular. In fact, this is even so when tori does not grip uke at all yet allows uke to grip him. In this case the movements still occur despite the absence of any push-/pull-actions of tori and the movement that occurs still represents aite-no-tsukuri. If debana is perfect it is not even necessary to use or have contact with the hands at all (I am not saying that this is realistic during a final of a world championship when facing an extremely trained out of common strong opponent) to effect the throw; this is even more so since ô-soto-gari is a mechanical couple throw (in terms of physics) and mechanical couple throws do not require kuzushi or even aite-no-tsukuri to be carried out; I did not say that they do not require this when maximal efficiency and jû are the purpose, but when one ignores jû and maximal efficiency every mechanical couple throw can be carried out without any kuzsushi and aite-no-tsukuri whatsoever. When two opposing forces are applied around the center of mass, the center of mass will eventually fall outside of its basis of support and the object will fall. This is basic Newtonian physics, and is a main difference with lever-based throws which cannot be performed without kuzushi.

When displacement of uke occurs, even without gripping of tori, uke's center of mass obviously fluctuates in position when tori's center of mass is taken as point of reference. That fluctuation occurs in three dimensions, not two, and is thus automatically implied in straight, circular, sideways backward/foreward displacements but with the vertical component simply being zero if uke's center of mass would remain perfectly level with that of tori during displacement.

Cichorei Kano wrote:

DougNZ wrote:A recent discussion about shodan needing to know a number of forms of each throw - osotogari was given as an example - prompted me to post.

I have always struggled to understand the naming of osotogari.  I see the similarities between the reaping of ouchi gari, kouchigari, and kosotogari but osotogari seems out of place.  The others all use horizontal clips while osotogari has a vertical sweep.  In fact, the leg movement seems to have more in common with harai goshi than kouchi gari.

The other thing is that I was always taught was to put uke's weight on one leg (though off to a corner) and reap that leg to effect osotogari.  However, in re-reading Kawaishi (for the 1000th time?) I discovered a clarifying point in the osoto otoshi section, where uke's weight should be on his left leg and the right should be clipped before the weight is transferred onto it.  Now this starts to ring true with what I have always thought should be the similarity between osotogari and the other karu techniques: the karu action should be short and close to the ground and the effect on uke should be like that of stepping on a banana skin (of the old cinematic gags).  This becomes much more of a timing thing regarding weight transference with an outwards twist used to complete the throw.  It is a very different action to simply loading the right leg, moving uke's weight outside his base and reaping with a big vertical sweeping action.

I have pulled off this short, clipping osotogari in studied attempts and also - almost by accident - in randori.  In randori, it has been one of the fastest throws I have achieved with uke looking up at me from the ground with his eyes on stalks and me looking down at him with my jaw dropped!  Like many karu techniques, it seems to be more about body position and timing, and less about strength.

What can anyone offer about this clipping osotogari and the nature of karu?  How did the sweeping osotogari come about and why is it not named osoto harai?  Kawaishi's osoto otoshi looks more like the 'common' osotogari with weight put onto the heel of the right leg, which is swept/hooked upwards whilst tori drives the upper body over and down; is this a misunderstanding on his part or have the modern osotogari and osoto otoshi diverged from the older versions?

As an end note, I find the short, clipping osotogari challenging but extremely satisfying to get.  It fits with my understanding and ideas of 'ju' nicely!  It also means that an advancing foot can be clipped from the outside with the o or ko foot or from the inside with the o or ko foot.  The basic osotogari I was taught reduced those four options by one.

Your approach is simply too rigid. You need to reflect on all the aspects of the knowledge you have acquired. You seem to assume that the naming of all jûdô throws is the result of a careful scientific process. This is not true. In fact not all names of throws were arrived at in the same way. Some carried over a name from another school for the same or a different technique, some names were chosen by Kanô, some by others; some names are metaphoric, other descriptive, etc. So it is a mix of inconsistencies. Ultimately what Kanô intended was a pedagogical model. Hence it is hardly surprising that there is quite often a conflict between pedagogy and hard science.

Ô-soto-gari, in terms of the physics is uchi-mata performed in a 180° different direction. Pedagogically as organized in the Kôdôkan system, however, the two throws have nothing to do with each other. Science and pedagogy can be used in harmony though to teach students.

Besides those two consideration, the question arises whether it would be wise to rearrange names more systematically and logically. Past experiences have shown this is not a good option. Anton Geesink has tried, believing his pedagogical approach was much better and the skill transfer thus improved. That was his personal view though and there is no evidence whatsoever that changing such terminology would facilitate skills transfer. Changing names is often flawed in itself, because the foreigners who propose the alternatives generally fail to question their own knowledge, which usually is deficient. When they conclude that something isn't good, often what is the case is that they fail to understand why the way something is the way it is. We saw this frequently with criticisms on the gokyô and Westerners would insist it needed to be changed because they found that some throws in the 1st group were more difficult to carry out than some in later throws. This was a typical Western reasoning rather than accepting their severely limited knowledge, otherwise they would have known that the gokyô is constructed based on the progression of difficulty in making ukemi for uke ..

If one would change the names of jûdô throws dramatically one would create a gap with many of the historic sources that establish the tradition of Kôdôkan. Altready today there is a disjoint if you have to discuss jûdô competition with people who started jûdô the last three years as they are clueless about what keikoku and kôka are ...  Jûdô is a traditional activity, and in order to maintain that tradition, eventual changes should be considered with considerable trepidation and only be allowed if there are urgent safety or health matters, and other significant criteria. The IJF has shown over and over the effect of replacing supposedly bad things by their "improvements" and how they result in something that still has little to do with jûdô. Remember how jûdô used to have newaza a long time ago ?

With regard to the activity of reaping (kake), it is you who infuses direction of the reaping limb in there as a factor of importance. Nowhere in the tradition does it say that reaping needs to be subdivided in the direction in which the acting limb is moving. If that were true you could apply the same reasoning to every throw. The throwing circle of kuruma action in kata-guruma, hiza-guruma, ô-guruma, te-guruma, koshi-guruma, ashi-guruma is each time different in terms of degree in which it is oriented in the plane, and sometimes the planes are different too, so ?

Should uki-goshi not be a koshi-waza because the throwing circle is different than in ô-goshi ?  Where does it say that koshi-waza can only carry that name if the throwing circle is oriented within a certain window of degrees ?  

Why would you employ a rigid study of Kawaishi as fuel for reinventing the hot water ?  Firstly, Kawaishi never even wrote what you say he did. You see to be assuming that the text in Kawaishi' books are literally from his mouth. The books of Kawaishi were written by other people. They took notes of what they understood with their limited understanding of a person who did not even properly speak French. As to Kawaishi's own knowledge, that existed only because that of everyone else in Europe in those days was so limited. Clearly when one reads reports from other Japanese sensei from those days or watches what has survived of Kawaishi footage no one would use that as the gold standard. Kawaishi's book are OK in a historic perspective and deserve to be mentioned in an anecdotal survey, but that is how far it should get. Same for Koizumi, who wasn't even a jûdôka when he gained fame. If you look at some of the things they do, it is hardly that impressive now; but it was at the time because the Westerners knew even a lot less; it was a matter of the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind, nothing more, nothing less.

Jûdô is not as rigid as you describe it with "the weight has to be on this" of that foot or leg. In reality, weight continuously modulates through body movements, and through air displacement in the body to change the center of mass. What happens in ô-soto-gari is scientifically very simple: a mechanical couple of opposing forces with one of the forces at each side of the center of mass is applies; at some point the it will make the center of mass fall outside of the base of support and uke falls. The push-pull actions that tori administers serve to break the symmetry of uke's body, and all reactions uke does or can do are intended to restore that symmetry.

The only thing that the technical descriptions further add, is to make the throw as efficient or as jû as possible, and this can be many different ways. Weight transfer is different depending on how the two athletes move, in what direction (straight, circular, sideways, forward, backward, and the kind of debana that one makes use of. In some cases there will be considerably more weight on one leg than on the other.

In reality, the situation is even more complicated, because although there is in theory a careful distinction between harai, kari and kake in terms of uke's weight distribution, this is only strictly applied with regard to naming throws in certain cases. For example, the distinction is rigorously applied in the following three de-ashi-barai / ko-soto-gari / ko-soto-gake. It is, however, not at all applied in ô-soto-gari. That means that ANY projecting throw performed with the right leg outside of uke's right leg IS ô-soto-gari, irrespective of whether it is sweeping, reaping or hooking. In other words "ô-soto-barai", ô-soto-gari, and "ô-soto-gake" are ALL ô-soto-gari. This was, in fact, an official decision of the Kôdôkan many years ago. For that reason the breadth of what is possible under the name ô-soto-gari obviously is wider than that what is possible under, let's say, ko-soto-gari. On the other hand, and anachronistic as that may sound, it does not mean that you have an absolute freedom in determining in what you can be reasonably expected to show when teaching basic ô-soto-gar to basic jûdô students. Ultimately, ô-soto-gari is not a throw, but a principle, but that principle should be taught with respect to the principles that guide jûdô (jû, efficiency) and in adhering proper hontai.

Thank you for all that...judoka seem to tend to want to find a lot of meaning in names and have the perfect name for every action possible.

Cichorei Kano wrote:

Anatol wrote:Hi CK

Weight transfer is different depending on how the two athletes move, in what direction (straight, circular, sideways, forward, backward, and the kind of debana that one makes use of..

Didn't you forget up- and downwards?


.

No. The up-/downward push-/pull-forces in general serve to break the symmetry (around the center of mass) of uke following aite-no-tsukuri (that is the preparation of the position that uke is intended to end up in to execute the throw). Getting uke in that position does not necessary require up-/downward forces or any force since uke is always in SOME position and as tori you do not necessarily need to manipulate uke into a certain position. You can just follow him or use his spontaneous. These movements are in general eithr straight backwards or forwards or sideways or circular. In fact, this is even so when tori does not grip uke at all yet allows uke to grip him. In this case the movements still occur despite the absence of any push-/pull-actions of tori and the movement that occurs still represents aite-no-tsukuri. If debana is perfect it is not even necessary to use or have contact with the hands at all (I am not saying that this is realistic during a final of a world championship when facing an extremely trained out of common strong opponent) to effect the throw; this is even more so since ô-soto-gari is a mechanical couple throw (in terms of physics) and mechanical couple throws do not require kuzushi or even aite-no-tsukuri to be carried out; I did not say that they do not require this when maximal efficiency and jû are the purpose, but when one ignores jû and maximal efficiency every mechanical couple throw can be carried out without any kuzsushi and aite-no-tsukuri whatsoever. When two opposing forces are applied around the center of mass, the center of mass will eventually fall outside of its basis of support and the object will fall. This is basic Newtonian physics, and is a main difference with lever-based throws which cannot be performed without kuzushi.

When displacement of uke occurs, even without gripping of tori, uke's center of mass obviously fluctuates in position when tori's center of mass is taken as point of reference. That fluctuation occurs in three dimensions, not two, and is thus automatically implied in straight, circular, sideways backward/foreward displacements but with the vertical component simply being zero if uke's center of mass would remain perfectly level with that of tori during displacement.

I had to chuckle. Once during a rather..intoxicated conversation with a former sensei regarding if kuzushi was really necessary to throw an uke I got the reply (imagine broken English from a Japanese after several martinis) "Kuzushi not needed sometimes, tsukuri either..sometimes only kake" at which point he apparently though that was very funny, as he started laughing uproariously.

It helps being 6'1" tall and weighing in at 260 pounds, no doubt...