Chinte 珍手
Unusual hand
What Chinte is.
The odd one out, and the name says so. It is full of techniques that appear nowhere else in the canon — circular ridge-hand strikes, two-finger thrusts, strikes with the second knuckle — and it ends with three short hops backwards that no other Shotokan form does anything like. The circular, open-handed character has led to it being described as older and less reworked than its neighbours, and it is the form most often left out of a curriculum for exactly that reason.
Worth knowing. The closing backward hops are among the most debated movements in the canon; explanations for them differ sharply between organisations, and this library does not pick one.
What it develops
- Circular striking, in a style that is otherwise mostly linear
- Open-hand and fingertip technique, and the conditioning it needs
- Familiarity with technique that survives nowhere else in the canon
- Willingness to perform something that does not look like the rest of the style
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Chinte sits in an examination, because the federation has not decided it. There is a named, empty place in the library for that association, and it stays empty until the federation fills it. What the federation has published about belts and progression is on the belt system page.
The belt system & grading →The Japanese in Chinte.
The words a student meets in this form, with the English beside them and an explanation of what each one actually is. These definitions are shared across the whole library, so they mean the same thing on every page.
| Term | Kanji | English | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| zenkutsu-dachi | 前屈立ち | front stance | The long forward stance: front knee bent over the toes, back leg straight, roughly seventy per cent of the weight on the front foot. It is the stance that lets a technique carry the whole body behind it, and the reason the first kata a student learns is mostly walking. |
| haito-uchi | 背刀打ち | ridge-hand strike | An open-hand strike with the inner edge, the thumb tucked underneath, swung in a wide arc from outside to inside. The wide path is the point: it comes around a guard rather than through it, and it needs the whole shoulder to be worth throwing. |
| nihon-nukite | 二本貫手 | two-finger spear hand | A thrust with the index and middle fingers, aimed at the eyes. It is one of the few unmistakably lethal-intent techniques left visible in the canon, and it is the reason the kata carrying it has a reputation for being older and less sanitised than its neighbours. |
| kokutsu-dachi | 後屈立ち | back stance | Weight sits back — around seventy per cent on the rear leg — with the feet at right angles and the hips half-facing. It is a receiving stance: the body is already withdrawn, so a block can meet an attack without the defender having to retreat first, and the front foot is light enough to kick with. |
| teisho-uchi | 底掌打ち | palm-heel strike | A thrust with the heel of the palm, fingers pulled back out of the way. It delivers most of the force of a punch with none of the risk to the small bones of the hand, and it doubles as a press or a push, which is why kata use it to unbalance as well as to strike. |
| kiba-dachi | 騎馬立ち | horse-riding stance | Feet parallel and roughly twice shoulder width, knees pushed outward, weight even, back vertical. It is punishing to hold and that is the training effect: it builds the hip and thigh strength that everything else borrows from, and it teaches the student to generate power sideways rather than only forward. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Chinte.
There is no verified video of Chinte here.
MMAKF has not recorded a performance of each kata, and this library will not present another organisation's video as the federation's. Where the federation's own kata footage exists it is published below, described as what it is: training, not a performance of any single form.
This page would rather carry no recording than a guessed one. A video is published here only with the evidence of its check attached — the id, the channel it actually resolved to, the date and the method — and nothing that has not been loaded and read is linked as though it had been.
The federation’s own kata training footage — general practice, not a performance of this or any other single form — is listed on the library index.