Jiin 慈陰
Temple ground; compassionate shade
What Jiin is.
The least performed member of the temple family, and unfairly so. It shares the opening salutation and the direct, powerful character of its relatives, but its floor pattern is more angular and its sequences change direction more sharply. It is the form in which a student most often discovers that they have been turning with the shoulders instead of the hips, because the angles do not forgive it.
What it develops
- Sharp changes of angle without losing the line of the form
- Turning from the hips, which the pattern exposes immediately
- Strong basic blocking sustained across a long sequence
- Symmetry, since much of the form repeats to left and right
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Jiin 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 Jiin.
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. |
| 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 It is a receiving stance: the body is already withdrawn, so a block can meet an attack without the defender having to retreat first, and the front foot is light enough to kick with. |
| gedan-barai | 下段払い | downward sweep | The forearm sweeps down and across to clear an attack to the lower body, finishing just above the front thigh. It is the first block most students learn and it is a sweep rather than a stop — the arm brushes the attack off its line instead of meeting it head on. |
| shuto-uke | 手刀受け | knife-hand block | An open hand, fingers together and thumb folded in, striking or receiving with the muscled edge below the little finger. Almost always performed in the back stance, it is a block that is already a strike, which is why so many kata use it to turn a corner. |
| juji-uke | 十字受け | cross block | Both arms crossed at the wrists in the shape of the character for ten, catching a kick or a strike in the X they make. Because both hands finish in one place, the technique that usually follows is a grab, and several kata make that continuation explicit. |
| 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. |
| kime | 決め | focus | The instantaneous tightening of the whole body at the end of a technique, followed immediately by release. It is what makes a karate technique stop dead rather than push, and a kata performed without it looks like a dance no matter how correct the shapes are. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Jiin.
There is no verified video of Jiin 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.