Gensei-ryu
玄制流Seiken Shukumine's karate from 1950. It grew from the objection that karate moves only in a plane, and so adds turns, drops and jumps.
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About Gensei-ryu
Gensei-ryu is a karate style founded around 1950 by Seiken Shukumine, who lived from 1925 to 2001. Shukumine came from Okinawa and studied under Kishimoto Soko, a holder of Tomari-te. His own contribution grows from the single objection he raised against karate again and again: in his view karate moves only in a plane. Attacker and defender stand facing one another on a line, evasion goes to the side, and the whole encounter proceeds as if the space above the head and below the waist did not count. Gensei-ryu therefore introduces movement in every direction — turns about the long and the transverse axis, dropping beneath an attack, jumping above it and evading along circular paths. From this comes the acrobatic cast of the style, recognisable at first glance. The curriculum keeps the classical Okinawan kata of Tomari-te and alongside them Shukumine's own forms, of which the best known is Sansai. The teaching includes a distinction between three levels of initiative, that is whether the student acts before the attack, with it, or after it. Gensei-ryu is Shukumine's first school; in 1965 he followed it with the still more radical Taido, in which he carried his idea of movement in space to its conclusion. Today the style exists in several organisations and outside Japan is strongest in the Netherlands and in eastern Europe.
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Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.