In fact, Kanazawa is on record as saying that when he formed SKIF he changed the names of the two kata as he felt that the “sho” designation suited the smaller, more difficult, kata better. The oft-repeated story about the JKA having to rename the Gojushiho kata due to a tournament mix-up and Kanazawa Hirokazu, because of his seniority, keeping the original names in his SKIF organisation is without foundation. Shōrin-ryū combines elements of the traditional Okinawan fighting styles of Shuri-te. The characters 少林, meaning “small” and “forest” respectively and pronounced “shōrin” in Japanese, are also used in the Chinese and Japanese words for Shaolin.

It was named by Choshin Chibana in 1933, but the system itself is much older.

Shōrin-ryū one of the major modern Okinawan martial arts and is one of the oldest styles of karate. Gojūshiho Shō and Gojūshiho Dai are two versions in Shotokan of the Shōrin-ryū kata called Useishi (54) or Gojūshiho. Another “shuto” technique as “shuto-nagashi-uke” or “knife-hand-flowing-block” has become the unique characteristic of Gojushiho because of flowing movement which is not merely interpreted as “block”, but “throw”. Rather it was throwing technique in “aiki-jujutsu”. “Tate-shuto-uke” does not resemble other shuto uke which resemble as “block technique”. Gojushiho movement is quite similar with Aikido grappling technique in terms of flowing knife hand or “tate-shuto-uke” or vertical knife hand block. Gojūshiho Dai consists of many advanced open-handed techniques and attacks to the collar-bone. Gojūshiho Shō begins straight off with a wide variety of advanced techniques and, as such, is highly recommended for study. The embusen of both Gojūshiho Shō and Gojūshiho Dai are nearly identical. An advantage of the two versions of the kata is to better master the difficult techniques presented therein, but not without facing some confusion, for many sequences are the same and others only slightly different. In some styles of karate, there are two versions of this kata – Gojūshiho Shō and Gojūshiho Dai. Gojushiho was developed by one of the Okinawan karate master, “Sokon Matsumura” and named it as “Uesheishi” under the fluency of chinese Kungfu.

Gojushiho dai kata