My home dojo, Grand River Karate in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, is a non-profit co-op run by dan-ranked members. It has a mixed heritage of Chito Ryu and Shotokan styles. While we are "officially" a Shotokan club, our lineage goes mainly through Masami Tsuruoka, originally a Chito Ryu stylist who studied in Japan under Chitose and generally known as "The Father of Canadian Karate", and his student Sensei Monty Guest. Grand River Karate itself is a member of the Kai Shin Association and was formed by a nucleus of dan-ranked and 1st kyu belts from K-W Karate when Sensei Jake Klaus (a student of Sensei Guest) took an extended sabbatical from active teaching.
Our club is somewhat eclectic. Like Tsuruoka Sensei, we look for the unity underlying different martial arts styles, and many of our instructors cross-train in other fighting arts or sports. There is no "my style is better than your style" at Grand River!
Kobudo (weapons training) at Grand River is restricted to upper kyu and dan ranks, with several instructors having bo, sai and tonfa experience. Bo is the only one of the three actually taught in regular classes at this time.
We typically learn one Shotokan and one Chito Ryu kata at each of our six kyu-belt levels, in addition to basic blocks, strikes, kicks, terminology and ippon kumite techniques. Here's a few brief descriptions of how we perform the following (mainly) Chito Ryu kata:
Courtesy of the CyberDojo, here are descriptions of the Shotokan kata we perform:
And a few other useful things:
Try my Simple Karate Terminology Generator
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