Sensei Kimura Shigera [茂木村] (1941-1995)

Despite my best efforts, and after hours of research on the Japanese-language internet, I have not been able to locate a single article about Sensei Kimura – although I have managed to reconstruct his name using the Chinese ideograms still used in Japan – placing his family name ‘Kimura’ (denoting a ‘tree village’) first, and his first name (‘Shigera’ meaning ‘talented’) second. This is the normal traditional placing in China, Japan and Korea, which is the exact opposite of the convention that has developed in the West. When coming to the West, for instance, many Asians rearrange the placement of their names in accordance with the Western custom. The lack of any written evidence for Kimura Shigera in Japanese language sources probably reflects the fact that he became famous outside of Japan. He is mentioned a number of times within Western (English) sources, and was considered an expert in ‘power hitting’. Not only this, but his understanding of body-mechanics was so profound and exact that his teaching of Shukokai technique eventually became considered a separate and unique branch of the style. Once, when attending a seminar in Poole, Dorset in the mid-1980s – I witnessed Sensei Kimura execute a perfectly timed mid-level front kick into a foot-thick striking pad held by a large Western man. The recipient flew upwards a couple of feet and then fell backward about 6 feet and came crashing to the ground. The next day, this large and stout practitioner of Shukokai (from Hereford) had a large ‘blackened’ bruise across the entirety of his abdomen area – despite 12 inches of foam rubber having absorbed the shock of the power! I find it interesting that Sensei Kimura managed to separate the ‘power’ producing aspect of karate from the religious and/or spiritual elements of traditional karate, and express that process in sound scientific concepts. For a standard biography of Sensei Kimura Shigeru – please reference the link below: 

https://www.shuriway.co.uk/kimura.html 
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As I cannot access any reliable Japanese language texts regarding Sensei Kimura’s biography at this time, I cannot confirm any of these facts that appear in English. Certainly, when I trained with him in the 1980s, I had no idea of his past and assumed he had travelled to the UK from Japan. He appears to have left Japan for the White Minority ruled Southern African countries of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa in the early 1960s, although he eventually left and migrated further to the US. I have written elsewhere (although not on this blog) how US Cold War policy called for the spread of the same Japanese martial culture used in WWII (against the West) throughout the West to negate what was viewed as a possible diasporic Chinese culture sympathetic to ‘New China’ established in 1949. This false economy, if you like (which saw Western governments use domestic taxpayer's money to employ supposed ‘Karate Ambassadors’ from Japan), came crashing down when the US established full diplomatic links with Mainland China in 1979. By 1989 the traditional karate scene in the UK had completely disintegrated. Before 1979, karate classes in the UK would be held using Japanese terms and instructions, but by say 1989, this was already becoming a thing of the past which is non-existent today. One thing I can say is that as far as my experience of Shukokai was concerned, the classes in the UK were always multicultural.  

PS: As far as I am aware, the ‘double hip twist’ which Shukokai is famous far was modified by Sensei Kimura. This technique (in its original form) used to involve one side of the hip being pulled back and then forcibly pushed forward to execute a technique (left-hip for left reverse punch for example) - but by the time I was training in Shukokai a basic time-saving guard position had been developed - whereby the hip was already held in the ‘pulled back’ position. Therefore, with the left leg forward, the right hip was already pulled back and ready to go.