Katatori – Nothing Up My Sleeve
- Sensei Jay
- Aug 29
- 9 min read
October 29, 2025
What’s Happenin’
Summer is Over It has been a while since I wrote a letter. I would like to say I will write more often but that would either be total denial or a plain old lie, or both. Life is great and just busy. Spending more time in Maine, Zachary, my older son got married to a wonderful woman – Megan. Jacob, my youngest son moved to Manhattan. Work is crazy: We had to move my office twice in the last year and my lovely wife, Rachel, is traveling more and more for work. Yes, life is good, but busy. So please enjoy this letter and if you miss reading these, you can always reread all 120 letters I have written since 2019 on our website.
SEO So, as I stated, life has been busy. I am down to working only 70 hours a week! I have not only been remiss in writing letters, I have also let my dojo work slack. As a result, I have been behind with things like keeping our Search Engine Optimization or SEO active to get more Google presence. As a result, our membership is down. If you know someone in our area who is interested in our classes, please send them our way. After my confession, I got off my butt and spent two Saturdays doing SEO and low and behold, we have had 6 potential students walk through our doors in the last three weeks. It is amazing how hard work gives you a benefit. Is it kind of like practicing Aikido? Huh. We have also started posting regularly in Instagram. Please follow us at https://www.instagram.com/aikidoofnewjersey/ I learned something new, a new AI-frontier. In addition to SEO, I now need to work on our GEO or Generative Engine Optimization. SEO is your ranking on search engines like Google. GEO is your ranking on AI engines such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. We need to improve our ranking there so if some asks Claude, “Where should I practice martial arts?” Claude will answer, “Aikido Schools of NJ.” Running a business, any business, you need to keep up with new technology and how to best advertise. I remember when one of the biggest concerns was about your placement in the Yellowpages. What are the Yellowpages? Ask ChatGPT.
50 Years Aikido Schools of NJ was founded by Rick Stickles Shihan back in 1977. We will be 50 years old next year. To celebrate, I have invited the two people in the Aikido world closest to Sensei Stickles, Hal Lehrman Shihan and Bruce Bookman Shihan. Next October, we will be hosting both these fine gentlemen for a weekend long seminar celebrating ASNJ’s 50th year. So please keep on the lookout for more information and join Bruce, Hal and everyone at ASNJ to mark the half a century of our wonderful dojo and community. Row Row Row Your Boat Gently down the stream. One of the least appreciate car sing along song, right up there with “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. The ASNJ Women’s Committee had their summer event “Rowing on the Rahway River”. It was another great day for the group. They rented canoes from Cranford Canoe Club and spent the morning enjoying the bucolic scenery of the remote Rahway River hidden in NJ near the dojo. They docked a few hours later treating themselves to a picnic lunch in the nearby park.
I want to thank Alice and Thu for putting this event together.
Katatori – Nothing Up My Sleeve When I re-dislocated my shoulder six years ago (I first injured my shoulders at age 14 and, again, at 15 doing gymnastics), I only taught katatori - One hand grab to shoulder. By the way, you can reference a glossary of Aikido terms on our website. This was as an act of necessity, (the katatori, not the website) since I could not raise my arm and, for those of you who know me, I am too stupid to not train and heal (as opposed to heel. I love English.). Now I am doing katatori because of something in my Tai Chi Chuan practice. I will explain more in “Look Mom, No Hands” article below. I like katatori since uke is grabbing your gi, you are limited in the use of your arms and need to focus more on the movement of both bodies. Recently, we started class with a basic opening into kokyoho (see the glossary). Uke’s left hand grabs nage’s right shoulder. Nage should place their right arm on top of uke’s elbow. It is important to be directly on the elbow as this is the pivot point in the arm. It only bends here (hopefully. That was another gymnastic injury). Now turn your waist to your left or toward uke. If you shove with your arm, uke can stop you. Simple turn your waist and uke, from their elbow out, will be drawn in between both of you and off balance. Use your body, it is katatori! The way I experience it, katatetori (see the glossary), or grabbing the wrist, is more about speed and extension while katatori, or grabbing of the gi usually at the shoulder/chest, is about torque. For those of you NON-gear heads, torque is the rotational twisting force that gets a machine moving, while speed is how fast that something rotates. Let me Aiki-splain, since uke’s hand is tight to your body, and you are moving your entire body, this generates a lot of force (torque). You need to be careful not to hurt uke by moving quickly. Uke should be stuck to you, either with your hand holding them or your gi “tying” them up. An example I used in class, and engine is moving with a lot of force, it is hard to stop it. The wheels, after the gears of the transmission are moving much quicker, the torque is converted into speed. Your body is the engine, moving with torque and your arms, like the wheels are moving faster, less power and more speed. I told the class to think of katatori as using force or torque and katatetori using speed. If you studied physics, you love me right now. If you hate science and were a liturature major, I hope you are enjoying my prose. I started the idea of this class at this year’s USAF Summer Camp. Peter Bernath Sensei did kokyudosa while grabbing uke’s arms when pointing up, thumb on the hand side of uke, not the traditional thumb on the elbow side. I saw this before at Joe Birdsong’s dojo in Texas. I loved the idea of changing it up. I thought of kokyudosa while grabbing the gi, like katatori. Thus, I had to do a class of katatori to lead up to katatori kokyudosa at the end, you know, to keep a theme. Try it. Just another way to do classic exercises differently. Or read the “Look Mom, No Hands” part of this letter. Or ask Gemini.
Confessions of an AikiChuan Addict I have been practicing Tai Chi Chuan maybe a year longer than I have been studying Aikido. I started both in the early ‘80s. I am from Lou Kleinsmith’s (who founded the Woodstock dojo) lineage. He used each martial art as an aspect of the other and found a more complete outlet for the core concepts. As Hal points out (more like criticizes but who am I to complain), I place my heel (not heal) down first as opposed to a classically trained Aikidoka, who places their toe down first. Aikido is about extension so you place the toe down while Tai Chi Chuan is more focused on rooting, you place your heel (I think I over played the joke already… ok….heal) down first (Hal, who edits this next, will have a problem with the rooting vs. extension comment. I am curious to see if Rachel, who edits this first, leaves it in. I miss writing these letters, I have so much fun with my editors!). Since I started with Tai Chi Chuan and have done it for a little longer than Aikido, I naturally go heel to toe. Since both are based on the same principles, they are parts of the whole of my practice. A couple of months ago in Tai Chi Chuan class, a student asked me what “press” is for. (If you want to know what press is, you can check out the Tai Chi Chuan section of our website). Without a thought, I sent him flying across the mat. I had not done that in years. To be honest, I have not been able to do that for years. It happened since, at that moment, I was not thinking, it was a natural thing to do. You see, I have been repressing my Tai Chi Chuan to become ‘more’ Aikido-ish. It did not help my Aikido either. That one movement re-awakened my Tai Chi Chuan. I actually remembered the moment 10 years ago I began repressing this part of myself. Now, I can again use the explosive power in Tai Chi Chuan, and my Aikido is more natural. Funny how this works. It is almost like O’Sensei or Chen Man-Ching figured out a practice to make you more natural and that would make you powerful. Crazy. Now, the interesting part (you thought the first two paragraphs were the interesting part? Have you never read one of my letters?). In my Tai Chi Chuan class, I was explaining how, in Tai Chi Chuan, you do not shift forward, you shift diagonally as the stance is one foot shoulder width wide and forward about the same. – See example image: Your feet are diagonal, unlike the Hamni (you can see the definition in the Glossary); in Aikido the stance it is linear. (The explanation of that I did in an old letter. I would link it but I did not have the time to see which one, just read all of them). So, your shifting, from foot to foot, is diagonal. You do not move into your partner, that would be conflict, you move diagonally, off the line (sound familiar?). I wanted to do this movement with the idea of moving to create an emptiness, as in many Aikido techniques. We shifted from our back foot to our front, diagonally and did not move our hands, just left them on our partner. The result: our partner fell off balance into the area we were in, like a vacuum drawing them into the emptiness. Instead of force, we used the vacuum. Just like Aikido. This is the first time I took an Aikido idea into a Tai Chi Chuan class. That one moment opened a new world. Our limitations are usually created by our thoughts and our ideas and not our environment. Now if only I can figure out GEO. Maybe I will ask AI.
Look Mom, No Hands Much of what is going on in this newsletter, especially the Katatori part, came from my reading an old newsletter from the Northeastern Tai Chi Chuan Association, my old Tai Chi Chuan school run by Eric Schneider on West 18th Street, a block from the NY Aikikai. There was a story told by Chen Man-Ching how he had a dream he had no arms and that’s how he learned to do Push Hands. The Tai Chi Chuan Classics state that movement comes from the foot, springs up through the legs, is directed by the waist and is expressed by the hands. No mention of your arms. I recently heard Harvey Konigsberg speaking in a trailer for a new documentary (you can watch the trailer on that link). He talked about how uke’s attack transfers to your center and then to the ground. Not with your arms. Koichi Tohei also talked about this in his books, he explains in your stance, you need to relax completely and have “one point under.” What is the best way not to use your arms? Don’t use them. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “Doh” (I have never actually seen the show. That is a clue in The New York Times crossword puzzles often. See? I know pop culture). The newsletter is dedicated to Chen Man-Ching’s dream of not having arms, which hit home for me when I reinjured my shoulders and could not use my arms (see everything tying together. Your reward for reading the whole newsletter). Whether you are in a sling for 6 months or have a breakthrough while taking a dream filled nap or practice, the lesson is the same, we move our entire body, starting from the ground - One body, One mind. No one can plan where inspiration will come from. In my case here, the moment came from my rereading about a dream from a great teacher, seeing a class at summer camp, watching a YouTube trailer and teaching a class, which each helped to reworked a basic principle in a way that, at the moment and to this day, makes sense to me. Find your inspiration in any way you can. Just keep your eyes open, practice, dream. Or ask ChatGPT. --Jay Tall Chief Instructor Aikido Schools of NJ
"We always root for uke". -- Hal Lehrman, 7th dan, Shihan
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