More Judo
This past Saturday was my fifth or sixth judo class at Oishi’s, but I got to play with a yellow belt on the ground (instead of the usual situation of having a black belt sit on my chest and give helpful hints on how to get out of the hold that work if he’s not paying attention). Interestingly, we were fairly evenly matched. In the first round, I got a nice choke in (a jigoku jime variation, I think) after a few minutes of working against his turtle. In some subsequent round, I almost got a hammer lock on him when he tapped. In another one, from our suwari-waza starting positions, he reached for my lapel, and I did a variation of the “bring the elbow out of his center and cut down his forearm like a bokken” technique (I’m sure there’s a nice name for it in aikido land. Update: it’s one of the kokyunages; the closest on the referenced site is katatetori kokyunage, but directly with the irimi and without the tenkan), which brought him down to the ground quickly and let me open that phase by being on top. I think I had a holy-crap-that-worked look for a while.
I’m, of course, leaving out the various times he got me. He was also nice enough to show me another way to attack the turtle position, and we went over the kataha jime choke. I still don’t know how to work from or against side control.
I also got one of the brown belts in a variation of yoko otoshi on the first round of randori, when he was apparently thinking, oh, a white belt. After that, I didn’t get close (except when he told me to do yoko otoshi again): he kept on foot sweeping me and threw me a few times in tani otoshi (I don’t think we’ve done tani otoshi in Eizan Ryu, mainly because tori and uke are fairly entangled on the ground, and we prefer not to get into that position). In an earlier class, I worked with a yellow belt in randori with similar results but more parity. He did fewer sweeps (possibly because his legs were relatively short) but instead did full powered sacrifice-y body throws to get me down. I did get him when he lowered his head, and I put a headlock on him and more or less sat down and scooted in at his feet, forcing a fall from him.
These past two classes were fairly neat: I feel I’m improving, and I’ve used some of our floaty techniques on people who don’t know what we do and who aren’t cooperating by providing momentum or what-not. One thing I’ve realized with the ne-waza, at least against imperfect yellow belts, is that I can try forcing his arms to cross, i.e., bring his elbow across his center to the other side, to get out of attempts to pin me. This worked fairly well. One of the black belts also showed me how to hold down one forearm if uke is on top, and then bridge on the other side to roll and get on top.
I definitely have to find a judo place in Cleveland.