Jitte 十手
Ten hands
What Jitte is.
A short, heavy form whose name is usually read as the claim that a student who masters it can handle ten opponents. It is built on strong horse-stance work and on a closing sequence read almost universally as taking a staff from an attacker and turning it. The techniques are large and slow by comparison with its neighbours, and the form rewards mass and rootedness rather than speed.
What it develops
- Rooted strength, and the ability to receive force without giving ground
- Large-frame technique where the whole body commits to one movement
- Handling a weapon-length attack at close range
- Deliberate pace, holding a technique long enough for it to mean something
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Jitte 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 Jitte.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| bo-dori | 棒取り | staff-taking | A sequence read as disarming an opponent holding a long staff — trapping it, levering it and taking it away. Two kata in the canon carry sequences that are widely interpreted this way, which is a reminder that these forms predate the idea that karate is unarmed by definition. |
| bunkai | 分解 | analysis of application | Taking a kata apart to work out what each movement is actually doing against a real opponent, then practising it with a partner. Without it a kata is choreography; with it, a sequence that looked ornamental usually turns out to be a grip break and a throw. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Jitte.
There is no verified video of Jitte 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.