What is Kumite?

Kumite, or “meeting of hands,” is a commonly used term for sparring in karate. Today, people often equate kumite with sparring in dojo or what we see in tournaments.

However, kumite would have had a far different meaning for Chitose-Sensei, who fought but never in tournaments.

I did a lot of sparring in the dojo and tournaments when I was younger. The contests are useful. They can teach you lessons about timing, distance, strategy, and fighting spirit. But these matches have rules that shape the fighting they exhibit. WKF tournaments are long-distance tag games because of their rules. Kyoshinkai tournaments feature contestants fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, pounding away on bodies with their hands but never punching to the head because of their rules.

You have fighters from different lineages who practice different kata, yet their kumite all looks the same on the tournament floor.

We must examine our kata to understand the fighting skills masters such as Tsuyoshi Chitose would have used. What shapes, moves, and principles do they embody?

An examination of forms reveals many powerful techniques not used in rule-bound tournaments. There are fingertip attacks, one-knuckle strikes, throws, joint breaks, chokes, flesh-ripping attacks, and more. Many techniques are brutally effective.

But just practicing these kata repeatedly won’t give you access to the traditional kumite techniques. A karateka might do the kata Ryushan thousands of times, but could they apply the fingertip techniques to an actual attacker? Have they trained their fingertips to destroy vulnerable parts of a body? Have they done a study of human anatomy? Do they know which ki meridians to target? Are they aware of the other uses of hands in the kata that don’t relate to direct fingertip attacks?

I recall training at O-Sensei’s hombu dojo in 1979 and seeing Sakamoto-Sensei doing full-power kicks into the makiwara with his toe tips. He revealed that the toe-tip kick was the preferred way to kick by many traditional Okinawan fighters, because it is much more penetrating and dangerous than a front kick done with the ball of the foot.

Knowing that a toe-tip kick is a traditional karate technique is not enough. Mastering it requires a lot of grueling practice. The same goes for nukite, ippon-ken zuki, haito-uchi, and other techniques that are usually practiced a few times in class and then forgotten.

I was told once that Okinawan karateka liked joint-breaking techniques. When fighting, you would keep your elbows tucked in so they couldn’t be grabbed and broken. Or a stance like neko-dachi would be used for close-in fighting doing damaging kicks to the knee, hip, or groin.

In class, some people are good at resisting joint locks. But if your focus in training changes from applying locks to finding ways to break the joints, then it no longer matters how flexible your opponent’s joints are or how deep their nerves are buried.

We have a lot of tantalizing clues in our Ryusei Chito-ryu kata and kaisetsu that indicate what O-Sensei’s approach to kumite involved. And we have a few practitioners, such as Terry Valentino of Koshin-ha Chito-ryu, who use the kata as guide maps for their approaches to fighting.

Many of us take karate for its fighting skills, but what does it take to access them?