 Wax on wax off. Everyone knows this quote from the Karate Kid it's perhaps one of the most repeated lines in martial arts motion picture history but did you know that Mr. Miyagi's muscle memory building chores were also based on a real life Okinawan kata? Well today we're gonna look at that and other katas that are embedded within the Karate Kid and Cobra Kai series. Now you never have to give me a reason to watch the Karate Kid again it's one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the reasons I took up an interest in the martial arts. Now we've covered the movies and this Cobra Kai TV series a couple of times in the past as we've analyzed the styles of martial arts that Miyagi Do and Cobra Kai are based on but before we go forward I do want to emphasize the words based on. While the movies and shows have some roots in real life martial arts history in the end they are still in attainment and a lot of these roots have been modified and bellished and taken out of context for the sake of telling the story but I personally find it fun to see what kind of hidden nuggets we can pull out. Now as a disclaimer there will be a few minor spoilers for Cobra Kai so if we have not seen that show yet I'm giving you heads up and if you haven't seen the Karate Kid yet then we are not friends anymore until you do. In our what kind of Karate and Cobra Kai episodes we determined that we believe that Miyagi Do Karate is based on Gojiru a traditional Okinawan style and that Cobra Kai is based on Tonksudo or at least some version or partial version of them again as they fit the need to tell the story. Now if you'd like to see the breakdown of how we determined that then please go check out those episodes I've put those links in the description. So today's episode actually comes from a question from one of our viewers. Ritam Roy asked me what Kata Mr. Miyagi was performing in Karate Kid Part 2 which we only get the tiniest glimpse of and to be honest I had never given it that much thought so I liked the challenge and I wanted to see what other Kata's might be present in the series. Now the first one that I would like to discuss is the obvious one and it's the only one in the series ever referred to as Kata. First appearing in the Karate Kid Part 3 Mr. Miyagi decides to begin Daniel's training with his family's Kata. The only ever referred to it as Kata probably to keep things simple because for the audience and the casual American without martial arts experience at the time likely didn't even know what a Kata was. I mean it was the 80s but they also embellished it for the sake of the story with Miyagi saying that he was ready and that all karate is found in this Kata. It's also later repeated in Cobra Kai when Daniel offers to teach the Kata to Robbie and says that Kata is the foundation of his karate. However I do like the way that he says it though his perspective. Robbie sees him performing it and goes well it doesn't look like karate to which Daniel responds well a blueprint doesn't look like a card does it. I really really like this perspective because Kata is often the point of contention and debate in martial arts circles. A lot of modern martial artists don't like it and say it would never work in a fight but traditionalists understand that it does have its purpose so I really like this analogy. You can't drive or live in a blueprint can you? No it's just for the foundation instructions of how to build the car or house. Same thing with Kata it's the skeleton of a fighting system it just lays out the rules of the framework but it's up to you to actually build it into something functional. Now again to be fair it is a bit dramatized when Miyagi says that all karate is found in this Kata. The truth is the Kata is only one of about 12 to 13 core traditional Kata traditionally found in Gojiru. Each one is part of the blueprint and together they lay out the framework. So what Kata is it? Well the Miyagi-do Kata is actually based on the Gojiru Kata of Sayunchin which means control and pull. It is designed to strengthen the hips and legs and also use hand work in combination the control and pull and opponent off balance. Sayunchin is found in several styles of martial arts and it is very clear that this is the Kata used in the film. Only it is performed very poorly in the film. Pat Morita and Rafmacho did not have any martial arts experience prior to making the movies and the Kata is only used for dramatic purposes. So the first real issue with it is that the timing has changed. No doubt the speed sped up to make it look swift and graceful on screen. It is also heavily abbreviated for the film. I mean after all Mike Barnes wasn't going to just give him all day to perform the whole thing. And that's the second issue. As much as I love the film, yes I even love the third one, I don't really like how Kata was used as one of those magical techniques that was going to win the tournament. It's clear that Mike Barnes is confused when Daniel starts to perform it, but he's an experienced martial artist. Even if he doesn't practice himself he must surely know what Kata is and I don't believe he would have hesitated more than just a couple of seconds before jumping in and pummeling Daniel before he could finish. But you know, we needed the build up for Daniel to gain his focus and let out his best karate. But I guess Sayunchin lives up to his name here because Daniel uses it to control and pull Mike Barnes off balance. Now just as a side note, the All Valley tournament really seems to be a very unorthodox tournament system. It's a light contact competition that seems to tolerate full contact and let it slide. They allow headshots in one movie but then ban them in the next and they don't require any protective equipment at all. For minors. But hey, at least they're efficient and they allow forms of sparring division to be performed at the same time. Now even with all that said, as much as they altered it for the film, you can clearly see side by side that the Miyagi family Kata is indeed based on Sayunchin. Now the next Kata we actually covered in full previously and that was regarding the character of Terry Silver, also from Karate Kid Part Three. In the film, when Daniel takes up Silver's offer to train at the Cobra Kai Dojo, Daniel shows up while he's performing some sort of Akata. Now actor Thomas Ian Griffith had martial arts experience prior to filming, which you can clearly see in his faster and sharper technique. This one threw me for a little bit of a loop because I had a really hard time identifying it. It seemed familiar and I did some research but not having a background in the Korean martial arts, my knowledge of it was limited. I kept my searching in the Tonsudo and the Taekwondo realm as they are kind of related to each other and that's what we assume the basis of Cobra Kai is. The closest I could find is the Kata Koryo, which was very similar yet seemed to have several differences. Many viewers suggested that perhaps he was just performing freestyle, which is what I was beginning to settle on too, but what bothered me was that it felt like a routine. It felt like motions he had done very specifically before, like a Kata. But then again, when you choreograph a film, everything is rehearsed and done as routine anyway. So, just as I was about to give up on it, one of our awesome viewers sent me a message with a link to a Kata demo at a tournament and it was the same Kata. So, I would once again like to thank Adonis Ruiz for bringing this to my attention. What he found was a performance of Koryo as performed by Jun Chung's Taekwondo school. Jun Chung teaches a very different version of Koryo, which some of our viewers have suggested is actually older and more traditional version and if that's the case, I would love to hear more about that if anyone has any more knowledge on that. And if you watch the clips together, you can see that this is in fact the very same Kata that Terry Silver is performing in the film. Even more fitting is that the location for the Cobra Kai Dojo was Jun Chung's Taekwondo school in the 80s. They used it for the film, which also explains all of the Taekwondo photos by the door. And even more fitting still, Thomas Ian Griffith was training in Taekwondo under Jun Chung himself. I also find it kind of funny that Terry Silver was doing a Kata when later in the film, he dumps on Kata saying that they are only good for working up a sweat. I don't know, maybe he knew that Kata was kryptonite to Mike Barnes and he was just trying to keep Daniel off track. Who knows. Now, we're going to peel back a little bit deeper and go through the famous chore sequence. I remember being a little kid watching Daniel do all the chores around Miyagi's house and I just assumed that that was, you know, repayment for teaching him karate until the moment Daniel confronts him about it and Miyagi shows him that he was teaching muscle memory all along. I know the scene and the whole scenario was super cheesy but it's still a guilty pleasure. But I also always assumed that it was just made up for the movie. I mean, our school never made us wash the windows or wax their cars or paint. Granted, Daniel had to learn these moves in a really short amount of time. I mean, he had less than two months to prepare for the tournament. But as it turns out, it was actually drawn from another gojiro kata, although very loosely. The four different chores Miyagi had Daniel do was wax on, wax off, sand the floor, paint the house and paint the fence. And these were the basis of the blocks that Daniel learns. But in real life they are inspired by some of the hand motions in the kata tencho. Tencho translates to turning palms and if I understand it correctly it was developed by gojiro founder Chojin Miyagi to compliment another Okinawan kata, Sanchin. Now clearly the motions are exaggerated and used in an entirely different context in the film but the hand motions are inspired by tencho kata. The screenwriter of the karate kid Robert Mark Kamen based a lot of the film on his own life. He was bullied as a kid and he joined the martial arts school but he found the instructor to be too brutal. In fact he has said in interviews that he based the character of Sensei John Crease on two martial arts instructors he had met that were militant and overly aggressive. He then found the wise karate instructor that taught him the Okinawan art of gojiro. Mr. Miyagi is even named after the system founder Chojin Miyagi. So honestly it's really not a surprise that he would pull some references and inspiration from his own art and put them into a storytelling. I mean, if we were to ever do a film one day I'd sure second bed some obscure temple references as well you know it's kind of it's something that you do it's part of you. So if you take a look at the hand motions in tencho and you might have to squint a little bit to see it but you can kind of see the motions taught to Daniel in the chore sequence. So okay technically it's not really in the film as a kata but I still find that to be a really interesting fun fact. So speaking of Miyagi and getting back to the question that inspired his episode to begin with what kata is Miyagi performing in the karate kid part two. In the second movie when Daniel and Miyagi arrive in Okinawa and settle in Daniel wakes up the next morning and he's finally able to take in the setting in fresh daylight. Upon exploring he comes across the Miyagi family dojo where Mr. Miyagi himself is inside training. So our viewer Ritam Roy asked me what kata Mr. Miyagi was doing. I did not have to meet an answer. My two main obstacles were one I don't have any first-hand experience with Gojiru so my knowledge is surface level at best. Second we're only given but a mere glimpse of the kata a few mere seconds and which mostly are blocked by Daniel crossing in front of the camera and reverse camera angles. But I wanted to take a shot at this challenge and see if I could figure out what the kata was and then present it to you guys and see if all you Gojiru kata take it out there agreed with me. So I watched these few seconds over and over and over until I can get a good feel of the few moves that we see Miyagi do. Then I started to watch a whole list of kata performed by highly respected Gojiru master Morio Higagona and tried to narrow down the kata that ended in similar movement. Then I had to take into account that if the movie altered Seyunchin and Tencho to the point that they did that perhaps this kata was exaggerated or abbreviated as well. So my best guess as to what kata Mr. Miyagi is performing here is Shishochin or at least the 80s Hollywood version of it. Shishochin roughly means four gates or four directions of conflict. As it is performed the practitioner faces all four directions. I believe that Mr. Miyagi was finishing up the last phase of it as the angle approached. Now it's missing some of the highlighted hit rotation and movement as shown by Sensei Higagona but if you look extremely close you can see that Mr. Miyagi is facing the same direction and doing extremely similar elbow strikes before rotating counter clockwise to face the camera and execute the closing. Now it does take a few views to start to see it and if this is Shishochin then some of the finer details are abbreviated and the hand motions are greatly exaggerated for cinematic effect. But after watching it for a while I submit this as my best guess for which kata Mr. Miyagi is performing in the family dojo. So I asked all of you gojiro family out there did I pass or fail? So those are the four main instances of kata that exist in the film at least as far as I'm aware of. The main kata of focus though is clearly Shishochin and as I mentioned before it's the only one actually referred to as kata. It is the centerpiece of Karate Kid Part 3 and it's also fairly prominent in Cobra Kai. We see Daniel perform it a few times and I believe we also catch glimpses of it in other montagens of the show such as when Daniel is training Robbie by the lake, when he's teaching all the new students at Miyagi do Karate and even the balancing drill between Robbie and Samantha. Now if you want to stretch things a little bit further and I fully admit this is probably a major stretch there might even be a few subtle references to it in some other hand motions such as the focus breathing technique in part two and perhaps even the self-defense drill that Daniel teaches Jessica in part three but honestly those are probably just a coincidence. So this was some really fun research and it was really cool to see real life martial arts examples implemented into my favorite movies even if they had a lot of creative liberty taken with them. So I want to hear from all of you do you agree with this analysis or are there references to other moves or katas that I missed? 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