Budapest Seminar Report
Ushiro Sensei conducted his very first seminar in Budapest, Hungary during the weekend of October 19th-20th. While the European seminar has been held annually in Germany, the strong passion of the host made this 2nd European seminar in Budapest possible.
People gathered from various countries from Europe (Hungary, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland) as well as from US and Japan. This reflected the strong passion of the host, Mr. Fris and his desire to learn bujutsu karate from Ushiro Sensei.
Because more than half of the people were new to Ushiro Sensei’s karate, the beginning of the seminar was spent on explaining the difference between bujutsu karate and sports karate with demonstration. Bujutsu karate comes from life and death situation whereas sports are judged on winning and losing. Hence,the starting point and its essence are different. With that, the seminar started with Sanchin kata.
Due to most of the participants coming from full contact karate background, Ushiro Sensei spent time on demonstrating the difference between sports karate and bujutsu karate as well as what a martial arts is within Japanese culture. The participants had a lot of questions and Ushiro Sensei responded to each of them.
The second day started by addressing the question of “What is Ki?” which is the very condition of bujutsu karate. To simply put, Ki is time and energy. There are time of Chronos and Kairos, the universe time and human time. The energy is something that enables the leap from now to the unknown. Ushiro Sensei emphasized its importance and necessity.
Based on the flow of the first day, the attendees were divided in 5 groups (3 Hungarian speaking groups and 2 English speaking groups). Ushiro Sensei walked over each group and taught separately.
“There is a world that cannot be explained by words” (Words can be only comprehended within the limited scope of the receivers). With that, Ushiro Sensei focused on the 1 touch, not only showing the techniques but inviting the participants to touch his body and feel the difference between a sport body and a bujutsu body.
Veterans attendees from Poland, Italy and Germany were starting to get a better sense of the depth of bujutsu karate and were very focused on making sure not to miss any single message and movement of Ushiro Sensei.
Every single moment you spent with Ushiro Sensei is practice. To showcase this, Ushiro Sensei walked around the table at the party on the first night, chatted with the people and demonstrated some techniques.
Ushiro Sensei emphasized that he wanted each participant to bring back something for continuing practice. Hence he focused his teachings on Sanchin kata and breathing. All attendees, from the first timers to veterans, were able to bring home some learnings from these 2 days.
The next Monday after the weekend seminar, Mrs.Aniko Fujita from Osaka dojuku and Mr. Fris arranged a visit to the Hungarian traditional martial artist Mr. Kassai on the countryside of Budapest. Mr. Kassai and Ushiro Sensei had the chance to discuss various subjects during lunch afterwards.
Feedback from the participants