Sadly Soke Hirokazu Kanazawa passed away on December 8, at 88 years old. The Shotokan Times offers a Condolence Board , a place to mourn, so that we can pay our last respect to Soke Kanazawa, as well as to express sympathies for his family and relatives. We can write our condolences, our prayers, and wishes in the comment section. This page will be left unchanged and a link to the page will be sent to the family of Hirokazu Kanazawa.
Thursday, November 11, Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Who's Who. Pat Burleson: American Karate System. Bobby Taboada: Cuentada Balintawak. Pat Burleson Celebration of Life November 3, As a result, he became an instructor at the JKA Honbu dojo, at several companies, and universities. Therefore, Kanazawa had trained intensively for the championships.
However, five days before the championships were due to start, he broke his wrist in two places. The injury upset Kanazawa and he decided not to compete. But his mother had traveled to Tokyo to watch him compete in the tournament. She asked him whether he had other limbs he could use. Certainly, not wanting to disappoint her he entered the tournament.
He used his good hand for blocking and his kicks for scoring, all the way through the tournament. To the astonishment of the audience and himself he won four fights by ippon.
Moreover, he defeated Katsunori Tsuyama in the kumite final and became the first JKA kumite champion ever. In the following year in , he exceeded his success from the previous year. While his victory was clear in kata, kumite posted a bigger challenge. In a memorable kumite final he faced Takayuki Mikami. Both men fought as if it was a battle about life and death.
In the end, the judges decided on a draw. Therefore, Kanazawa and Mikami shared the kumite title. The year hold many changes for Hirokazu Kanazawa. Firstly, he got promoted to the rank of a 5th dan.
For the next two years, he introduced the new art of Shotokan karate to the island. However, his first deployment was not free of problems. For instance, he had to face challenges from other instructors of other karate styles and martial arts. They wanted to test the authenticity of his karate and his strength. He managed to prevent some escalations through talking many conflicts. However, five challengers post more difficulties. Even after several rounds of talking they still wanted a physical confrontation.
They all lost. Always eager to experience other styles of karate, Kanazawa visited the birthplace of Karate, Okinawa. While on the peninsula he traveled around in order to train in as many dojos as possible. I would not be his last visit to Okinawa. The tour aimed to introduce the JKA and Shotokan karate to the global stage.
The tour succeeded and led to a request for JKA instructors to teach outside of Japan. However, his contract duration was only for one year. When he left the BKF in many of his students felt a huge disappointment, because Hirokazu Kanazawa had gained popularity among British karateka. The reason for him leaving the BKF laid in the split of the organization. Thus, he became the chief instructor of the newly formed KUGB. That same year the JKA promoted him to 6th Dan.
One year later, Hirokazu Kanazawa moved again. During this time in Great Britain he also must had got in contact with somebody from the film industry. In , he played a very tiny role as a karate fighter in the British tv series The Saint with Roger Moore.
As far as we know, this was his only detour to the film industry though. When Kanazawa left the Germany to return to Japan in , he recommended Hideo Ochi to take over from him. Furthermore, he received appointments of Musashikogyo, Kantogakuin, and Kitasato universities to become their chief instructor.
For the next few years, Kanazawa worked tirelessly as a senior member of the JKA. For many years, Kanazawa occurred as one of the main faces of the JKA.
Thus, it came as a huge shock when he left the JKA in What really happened at that time is only in the knowledge of the participants. But two legends exist. The first one says that Hirokazu Kanazawa sent a letter of resignation as a JKA director to the honbu dojo. However, he did not resign as a JKA instructor. The reasons for his resignation was that one of his major tasks was to unify all the different JKA groups around the world.
He felt he had failed to do this. Therefore, he step down as director of the international division. For some people within the JKA this came as treason and a sign of weakness and the wanted to see him expelled. While on a trip to Europe he received a dismissal letter from the JKA. Yet Lee's ultimate powerful pervasive message of Chinese not being sick people is brilliantly depicted when Lee defeats Japanese thugs in front of Shanghai Park by splintering a wooden sign that read, "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" with a flying kick it's a sign that never existed.
Black Tavern is the best whip movie in the history of whip-moviedom. My mouth was so agape watching this film that I swallowed a thousand flies. Whip master Zhang Ku Feng is like a flamethrower full of rocket fuel. It's on the list not for the story, but for the fight scenes that are cooler than liquid nitrogen freezing the Terminator, which includes the whacked out, Viking-helmeted, villain Hu terrorizing the Inn like an enraged bull in a ring filled of blind matadors who forgot their capes and swords.
The story opens when after a drunk monk performs shu xiao ban 11 th century Chinese rap music to an inn full of vagabond, thieves, and a cryptic swordswoman that a treasure chest is heading to Black Tavern, all the rascals leave the inn with brains wrapped in greed. At the tavern, all hell breaks loose as the menagerie of Chekhovian pseudo-heroes, back-stabbing villains, zombie men, ghosts, leopard-skin lackeys, switched women and Hu partake in increasingly lethal and inventive death scenes.
Ku's choreography goes far beyond simple whip twirling circles and figure eight motions that inject a whip crack or two. He's Quisp and Quake, and the continued use of cool sight gags stupefy our brains like how his whip uniquely beheads a woman, and when Hu attacks Ku with a pole, what follows is an outlandish kooky fight sequence featuring a wicked reverse-angle point-of-view shot of Hu holding onto his weapon for dear life while he's being lifted skyward, travels in an overhead semi-circle, lands on his back, while his face grimaces into camera the whole time, then ends up being whipped into a coffin and dragged across the ground toward several swords.
The night fight in a snowstorm between the swords-woman and Zhang is a combo whip-in-a-whip-in-a-whip crescendo with a headless horse and carriage as a wayward rolling wheel tries to crush them. The Japanese dojo challenges the Chinese guan to a competition to draw Liang out of hiding. He complies and the dojo pays a dear price for their misplaced loss of face. Choreographer Lin You-chuan was known for creating relentless, fast-paced fights that didn't rely on perfect technique, posture, or real kung fu fighting.
My hat goes off to Wen. In earlier films, he put his body on maniacal overdrive and just kicked and scrapped his way all over the screen, not caring about what other kung fu stars thought of him.
When he takes on multiple attackers in this film, each shot is pure mayhem. He's as intense as he's fun to watch, regardless of the choreography's haphazard nature and the somewhat sloppy kung fu.
The key to Lin's choreography was having Wen throw his leg in the direction of an attacker and the stuntman would react to his leg placement. As a result, Wen's not kicking at anyone, he's rapidly lifting his leg in many directions. It's flail-on-flail choreography with animalistic luster.
Wen mimicking Lee's nunchaku dojo sequence with a piece of rope is so blatant that you've got to admire his audacity. Wen's rope has the same sound effect, Wen copies Lee's nunchaku movements and the fight is shot using the same camera angles. Wen kicks the karate dojo sign like the Shanghai Park sign and a brief Bruce Li moment is a sign of things to come.
The film follows the path of jujutsu expert Uyeshiba Jiro Chiba losing fights to karate expert Natori Shinbei Sonny Chiba; Jiro's brother and to the bokken -wielding sword master Okita. Uyeshiba thus learns karate from Soubei Honda. Armed with newfound skills, Uyeshiba revenge fight plans go awry causing Shinbei' brother to commit suicide setting up a superbly orchestrated fight between two real brothers, Chiba vs. Chiba, with a hard-style karate vs. Though the fights are intensely riveting, it's the displays of true karate morality that is most memorable.
When Honda presents Uyeshiba with a teacher's certificate and Uyeshiba declines it because he can't afford it, Honda replies, "I don't take money when I give lessons to a man I trust. Though I can sell my skills, I can't sell my marital heart. Jiro Chiba's portrayal of Uyeshiba's martial transformation is transcendently dynamic as to how he adjusts his martial movements from one teacher and fight scene to the next.
His techniques subtly change and improve over the film's duration, which shows how Uyeshiba's aikido evolves from Japanese jujutsu to aikido's basic hand guard, fight-ready position that is modeled after the way a samurai holds his samurai sword during battle.
On the surface, the movie appears to be a run of the mill, topsy turvy, grittily and cheaply made early '70s Taiwanese kung fu flick; yet it balled me over. Imagine Led Zepplin meets Def Leppard ala Deep Purple wrapped into one group and their sole song's music is translated into the sensibility of the final fight scene.
When Zhen Zheng Jiang Bin returns home, he's called a traitor, ostracized by his village and his girlfriend forsook him as his brother, a turncoat that mines red sand from a river for the Japanese, who use it to forge steel to make guns to kill Chinese. Though the early fights resemble out-of-control windmills, they're raw and you watch them to the point of mental fracking. They're filled with unabashed desperation and overblown fantastical facial expressions associated with silent-film stars.
It's like female fans of Rod Stewart saying he's so ugly that he's cute, Jiang's fights are so sloppy that they're great.
Just when you think Jiang can't get any worse the attack ante rises as Yasuaki Kurata skulks onto the screen as the nefarious nemesis from Nippon, who oozes the animalistic intensity that Sonny Chiba brought to his Street Fighter films, yet Kurata's hapkido kicks elevate the film's frays and makes Jiang look like a 20 th degree black belt in everything. Midway through the finale, Zhen taps into his Buddha Prayer Fist, a cheesy and effective turning point in the fight as they begin battling on a fast-moving freight train with the frenzied intensity of Lee Marvin vs.
Ernest Borgnine in Hitchcock's savage barreling train skirmish in Emperor of the North The emotional sacrifice of breathless intent behind the assault asphyxiates every moment of the fight for them and us. This was a rare accomplishment in Chinese kung fu films that also featured the bewitching soundtrack of Black Magic Woman by Santana.
Overall, the fights in The Gallant are intense and well-choreographed, and Wang portrays each character and their fighting skills with dexterous prowess and violent acumen. In The Stranger , a trapped woman flees from an abusive Triad into the arms of a man Wang that's part James Bond and knight in shining armor.
He doesn't use a gun or sword instead he's armed with flaming fists and combustible kicks, and fights with tiger intensity soaked in an avalanche of bowling balls that uses up to 25 technique per shot to destroy the kingpin.
The somber Stranger Attending the Tomb features Wang as a heavy-hearted prodigal son who while guarding his father's grave laments on his own sinful past, while his sister believes her brother is the last bastion of goodness in the world. When she's threatened by a gang of grave-robbing rebels that want to loot the father's grave, with snapping dragon fists, and a pitchfork and shovel, Wang goes more berserk than Billy Jack at an OK Corral spree that is filled with wretched revenge and insane disdain.
In The Avenger , a man Wang returns home from prison after taking the rap for a treasure heist to protect two accomplices, his father-in-law, and the double-crossing Li San. While the man was away, San killed the father-in-law and heinously coveted the man's wife.
With two daggers in hand, it's time to unleash a whirlwind of steel-slashing bewitchment upon San and his clan.
Never say, "Cut it out," to a former inmate with blades. However, when Ben and father use arnis to thrash two cowardly sons of the Philippines' first colonial governor Legazpi, and stop them from raping his mum, Legazpi retaliates by killing Ben's father, raping then killing his mum, and shipping Ben to Los Mananos to be executed.
Desperate to escape the storm-ravaged sinking ship, when forced to kill the captain and conquistadors blocking his way, Ben is mortally wounded.
Washing up on an unchartered island he stumbles upon the old, now blind master who teaches Ben and how to make arnis sticks that can withstand sword strikes, which he needs as he prepares to battle Legazpi, his two sons and Mori, their hired deadly samurai bodyguard.
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