Left and Right of Center

Tonight Charlie emphasized unbalancing the attacker's center and basically letting uke throw himself. I think we started with yokomenuchi for each attack and in one instance we entered early to catch uke well before the strike gets any momentum and then bring the other arm up like iriminage and then step through in the most unbalanced direction.

Charlie kept pointing out he was trying to have us realize that we were addressing uke's area of power and neutralizing it by either catching the attack before it got going or flowing with it and simply directing it. Often it was by simply stepping slightly aside and lightly guiding uke through the direction were you (nage) are not.

A good class.

Then video shows the founder in 1935 and aroun the 30 to 40 second area he does some of the stuff we did tonight, although we were much slower.

As an aside I read in more than one place the ukes for the founder were shocked because they would attack as usual but "suddenly" find them self on the floor and not really know what happened. One guy deliberately tried to be more aggressive because he thought everybody was just playing nice with O Sensei, be he too was shocked to discover himself tossed like all the rest. So if it looks a little to staged in the video at least consider there may be more going on than mets the eye.