Niels’ Homepage

Once in a while I check the website statistics for this site. They tell all kinds of neat stuff like who visited when and how did they come here. For example it tells that people visited through a link on another webpage or through a search engine. It even tells, in case of the search engines, what the search terms were that lead to here. To my surprise someone found this site searching for ‘ebo no kata meaning’. The only place I ever mentioned the Ebo-no-kata is here.

Being intrigued by this search term I got the feeling that I could tell about my view on the Ebo-no-kata.

Short Introduction
The Ebo-no-kata is a Dutch national kata that is mandatory for every Dan exam. It is performed by two persons where one does all the attacks and the other
does all the counters. There are twenty different attacks divided into four groups:

1. Grabs
2. Holds
3. Punches/Kicks
4. Weapons

It was created by Mario den Edel and Wim BOersma (EBO :) ) to represent their view on contemporary jiu-jitsu. As I understood it it serves not only as a kata (or a teaching tool, which most katas are), but also as a framework to start technique training from. One of its shortcomings is that it has little ground techniques but that is compensated by another Dutch national kata called the Ne-Waza-Jitsu kata which consists purely of defenses on the ground.

The following items are my personal views and motivations on the Ebo-no-kata. To me the kata is:

• A great way to start an exam. Both as an examine and as an examiner. As examine it gives you a nice warming-up and a sort of constant factor that can help to overcome nxiety.
• A good excuse to work on my technical skills. Just take it slow in an constant pace an try to improve my technique. This is how I think all katas should be performed. Fluent, clear and skillful.
• A good excuse to take a slow pace in training. Perfection does not allow rushing.
• A starting point to develop technical skills like the correct distance and moving in the right position and direction. My main problem is that the more I learn about that the more a get the feeling that I have to start all over again with my kata training.
• Discussion material. People often debate the way a technique in the kata should be performed and sometimes go as far as to declare their way the one and only correct way. I think this is a mistake. Their is more than one way to arrive at a technique as long as you can make the technique work for you without using ‘force’.

Like I said I like to discuss stuff like this. So if anyone has more or other viewpoints, or would like more information, I would be glad to hear from you.

Editing entries in NanoBlogger appeared a bit cumbersome to me. But as with any open source solution this is primarily my own fault. Anything can be customized…

I added a ‘modeline’ to my templates/entry.metadata to override my .vimrc settings and also changed the editor setting in my blog.conf.

templates/entry.metadata:

TITLE: $NB_EntryTitle
AUTHOR: $NB_EntryAuthor
DATE: $NB_EntryDate
DESC: $NB_EntryDescription
FORMAT: $NB_EntryFormat
$METADATA_MARKER
BODY:
$NB_EntryBody
$METADATA_CLOSETAG
vim:set sw=4 ts=4 fo=cqt noet:

blog.conf:

EDITOR="gvim -f"

Now editing is a lot more bearable. The only problem now is that :!aspell -c % from gViM is not working properly anymore. Everything stays in in the bottom command line. Ah well, just another item for my TODO list.

Update: Wed Jan 25 21:41:50 CET 2006
Forget about the ‘modeline’. It screws the title of the entries up by adding $NB_EntryDate (literally) to the entry’s timestamp. This will take more time debugging than I have tonight. <schwarzenegger_voice>I’ll be back</schwarzenegger_voice> (on this one).