Throwing Arts

In addition to striking arts, grappling arts and throwing arts are covered at length in Kosho Ryu schools. The same laws and principles apply to both. Furthermore, Kosho Ryu sees no difference between striking arts and throwing arts other than intent. Rotation takes place in all motion. By studying natural laws of motion and balance, we can understand kuzushi, imbalance. All movement requires a temporary state of imbalance to regain the next balance point. Without imbalance, movement is impossible. Movement is a falling process. Therefore, when we continue the imbalanced movement of an attacker, we make it impossible for him to regain balance. This is the process used to freeze the motion of an opponent used in Kosho Ryu's Otoko No Atemi. Freezing the opponent disallows him leverage from either side of his body and traps him using his own skeletal structure to do so. We settle our body-weight strategically upon the structure of the opponent so that he becomes our base, and is therefore skeletally frozen beneath us. To do so, we use a heaven-to-earth direction. In the Kumiuchi-type grappling (ancient battlefield wrestling-techniques of the samurai which gave birth to jujutsu), and in judo based systems, the same rotations take place, but are applied in an earth-to-heaven fashion, which requires some power on the part of the thrower. In Kosho Ryu bujutsu, no power is necessary because the law of gravity acting merely on our properly-positioned body-weight accomplishes our goal. To throw an opponent instead of trapping him in a skeletal lock, we simply alter the angle of the settling of our body-weight. It is easy to crush him, breaking his neck, back, and leg, simply by dropping quickly into his locked skeleton with an Otoko attitude, but of course this is largely unnecessary in actuality since the opponent is trapped.

Stephen Bonk - Shihan