When Kanazawa Hirokazu formed his own SKI organisation after being expelled from the JKA, he decided to change the names around as he felt that the smaller, more subtle kata deserved the “sho” designation so that the Gojushiho pair would align better with Bassai and Kanku. However, the truth about the naming disparity between SKI and the other Shotokan organisations is quite easily discovered. The Truth about the Different Naming of Gojushiho Until last year, the Wikipedia article on Gojushiho also presented this story as fact. Is the story about Ueki true? Maybe not.”ĭespite the obvious caveat, this story gained traction, more often than not masquerading as “the truth”, as people copied and pasted bits of this article into their own websites. However, most people in the JKA, and the Best Karate series of books refer to the more difficult kata as Dai and the easier kata as Sho. So, today the karateka who outrank Ueki generally call the more basic kata Dai. Their solution: give Ueki first place, and switch the names of the two kata. “It is rumored that in a JKA tournament some years ago, a now very high-ranking Ueki performed the Dai kata while accidentally calling out the name “Gojushiho-Sho!” in the last round of competition on National Television in Japan.Īccording to this story, the judges were befuddled, since the performance was perfect, about what to do with Ueki and his misnamed kata. Rob Redmond, on his sadly long-gone website “24fightingchickens” wrote: The first time I encountered the legend about Ueki Masaaki mixing up the names of the Gojushiho kata he was performing and the JKA subsequently changing the names to spare his blushes was back at the end of the last century. The Original Gojushiho Names are reverse.Masatoshi Nakayama Introduced Gojushiho Sho to JKA.The Truth about the Different Naming of Gojushiho.

Gojushiho dai