Michelle Manumaleuna has done a lot of things – professional hula, professional football, martial arts consultant for Femme D’Action show, you know, the usual. In 2010, she taught at PAWMA camp and the large Seven Star contingent there realized that she was awesome and should come visit us. We were super stoked when she agreed to do a workshop with us in early 2011. Her martial art, lua, is a native Hawaiian martial art, a hard side precursor of hula. In 2011, she explained that lua is the Hawaiian word for pit, and they call it that because that’s where you put the bodies.
In a kajukenbo school, everyone’s eyes light up when you say something like that. Shark bite and stinging squid strikes? “Poi pounding” to tenderize an opponent’s flesh? Choking each other out with our belts? Yes, please! Read More →
So I was out having a drink with my taller half and spotted a brightly colored box on the game shelf.
It was the cards from the Worst Case Scenario Survival Game, and they were hilarious to the point that we both got out our phones to capture images of our favorites forever.
Besides letting you know that birds are the tastiest wildlife (duh! who doesn’t know that one?) I found several that were ostensibly self-defense tips. Since I train at a martial arts school which includes a lot of self defense in the curriculum, I thought I’d comment on these, at least briefly. Read More →
PAWMA board president Rosanne Boudreau greets Shihan Keiko Fukuda at Friday night’s opening class.
Late this spring, I promised my taller half that I would come with him to Pickathon, a music festival in Oregon. When I realized it was the same weekend as the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists camp, I told him I didn’t mind not going to camp this year.
Then I found out that Shihan Keiko Fukuda was going to be there for the opening class.
When we talk living legends of women’s martial arts, Fukuda should be at the top of anyone’s list. At 99 she is the last living student of Jiguro Kano, the founder of Judo. She is the highest ranking woman in Judo: 10th dan according to the US Judo Federation, and 9th dan with the Kodokan in Japan, where the men who run things aren’t quite prepared to give a woman the highest honors, no matter how overwhelmingly she deserves them.
Fortunately my husband is a bit more sensible and modern than what I assume is a panel of old Japanese men, and I was able to convince him that this was a once in a lifetime sort of thing, worth skipping a music festival for.
Shihan Fukuda still teaches three times a week, despite being wheelchair bound, and is assisted by her black belts. The piece she chose to share with us was ju-no-kata, the “gentle form.” She demonstrated this form at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The form does not include actual throws, but rather the lead up to throws – tori takes uke to the point when they are just about to fall, and then sets them down gently again. It was a very slow and deliberate form.
I took a lot of rapid fire sequences of photos during camp and made some into gifs, including this one of Shihan Fukuda’s black belts demonstrating one of the almost-but-not-quite throws of ju-no-kata.
I don’t have any pictures of the camp participants practicing the form, since I was in on the class and there was another photographer taking pictures at that point, but we learned a part that involved joint locks, not throws.
After the class session, we got to watch Mrs. Judo, a brand spanking new documentary on Fukuda and her life. Here’s the trailer.
The rest of camp involved a lot more mat artists than usual, which I really liked. Last year while I was living in Alaska, I trained for several months with the Sitka Judo Club, and got my yellow belt. Here’s another giffed set of pictures from one of the classes taught by Sensei Denise Gonzales.
Stay tuned, because I have several hundred decent photos from camp, and dozens of really great ones, and I’ll share some here in the next week or three. If you were at camp, I will be putting all the good photos up online somewhere else and you will get an email from the organization with a link. If you’re a lapsed member, send in your dues so you can be on the email list to get that link! And if you’re a maybe kinda thinking about it prospective member of the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists, I strongly encourage you to sign up, because camp is wonderful for three days, and it is also a door into a beautiful community of strong, inspiring, women.
It doesn’t matter if you started training last week – do you catch the white belt in the above gif? That woman has been training for about a month. You have no excuse. Join PAWMA and come play with us next year!
I have been training in martial arts – specifically, kajukenbo – for nearly five years now, and for the last several years I’ve been taking photos during belt tests at my school, Seven Star Women’s Kung Fu. It has become a big part of my participation in the school, a reason for me not to skip out on anyone’s test, and a great way to develop my action photography eye. This year I was asked to act as an official photographer during the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists‘ annual training camp. I accepted, of course! I feel it is a huge honor, and I’m very excited.
Camp is this weekend, so today I have been packing, and adding camera gear to the usual pile of athletic gear I take. I’ve also been looking through test photos. We had a black belt test last week, and I still had 2000 unsorted photos from a green belt test which happened just before my husband and I took off for our European bike tour this spring. Since the number of photos I take during camp will probably approach (or exceed!) 10K, it’s time to set aside my novel in progress and get through some of these pictures!
My process for sorting through the hundreds of photos that come out of a test is pretty simple. I take out all the blurry ones, and most photos were you can’t see a face. I also get rid of stupid faces. Occasionally my husband tags along as a second shooter and takes pictures of me, and then I remember exactly why I have this policy. I’m looking at a picture right now wherein my eyes are half closed and my mouth is hanging open. The knot of my belt has worked its way up under my sweatshirt, giving me an unkempt and possibly cancerous look. It’s not a Kodak moment. No one needs to see this photo of me, and no one needs to see the thousands of equally dopey looks I’ve managed to capture. My kwoon-mates have developed a certain trust that my photos will show their best side, and it’s a trust I value. I do occasionally snicker a little to myself, but I mark two thirds of the pictures as “rejected” for fuzziness, facelessness, or dopiness, and then I delete them.
Now I’ve whittled things down to the photos in which everyone looks sharp and badass, or at least competent. Unfortunately, as I’ve become a better photographer, I end up with more and more competent photos, and I’m not going to share 700 photos, so I look through the remainder again. This time I’m looking for the photos that make me go ‘wow!’ The ones where the subject appears to be holding a pose, except they are in the middle of a form. The street fighting shots where you can see that someone is about to lose an eye. The pretty pretty kicks caught in midair, showcasing the flexibility of the hips. The moment after the fist has hit, when the face deforms a little and the pony tail flies up.
This finally brings the number of photos I’m working with under a hundred, and these ones I spend some time developing. I crop out the fluorescent lights, bring the focus of the frame in on the subject, adjust the temperature and colors so they are consistent across the full set of photos. I add tags so that if Jane Smith ever asks me for all the pictures of her doing street fighting, I can find them. I upload a selection to the school’s Facebook page, and a larger set to the photography website my husband maintains.
I started taking photos at the tests nearly three years ago. Now they’re in the school’s brochures, on the website, and even went into another project I did to redesign the logo. The first pictures I took don’t look so great now, considering what I’ve learned since, but it has been a fun journey, and a good counterpart to my training. It gives me an opportunity to look at my kwoon-mates, and our art, from a different angle, through a different lens. I’m looking forward to seeing PAWMA camp through that lens this year.
