I need to call out an error. Ura-Gyaku and Hon-Gyaku are not one in the same. In Uragyaku, the wrist is rolled all the way over until the palm is facing up, then pressure is applied to the wrist. Uke hey is compelled to do a forward roll. In Hongyaku Uke’s wrist is held in a vertical position where the pinky of their hand is upward and their thumb downward. Then you try to rotate their fingers over the wrist in the direction of their forehead, or lower the wrist and try to rotate the fingers over as if you were going to press them in to their center or hara. Uke feels a sharp pain compelling them to drop straight down in place to try to alleviate the pressure.
I really like this theoretical stuff. When I trained Bujinkan it was more like "now we do Kihon Happo", now we do "San Shin no Kata" and I had no clue what it is about and how deep it goes and what it means actually. I mean "San" means 3 in japanese, but it does more than 3 movements, right, like 5 or something, was that about the 5 elements? That was so crazy to understand and nobody explained that ever. I also didnt really understand the difference between "water" and "wind", since both was so similar somehow and what exactly is "Ku", the 5th element? ..... That was never really explained. ....... And we just trained all these principles, but I had that feeling it was not suitable for a fight. We had black-belts and I thought, a normal boxer had no problem with them. And since there is no fight-training anyway, I think, the defense of thet most guys was weak anyway. We never really trained punches and kicks, besides 1 or 2 forward and sideward kicks. But I highly recommend to train Karate and boxing parallel. With these arm-grabbing principles you wont come far, if you dont have a punching-bag at home and some boxing-gloves and do some extra punch-training there.
