Seichin
十戦 · Seichin
Literally: „ten battles“
Also known as: Sechin
A Uechi-ryu kata whose name is written with the characters for "ten battles". In it, the practitioner first meets the cat stance, neko ashi dachi.
Quick Facts
About the kata
Seichin is one of the eight Uechi-ryu katas. Per the English Wikipedia, it belongs among the five katas that were added to the style only later – only Sanchin, Seisan and Sanseiryu come from the older Pangai-noon system. Uechi-ryu.com calls it a bridging form whose adoption into the curriculum raised the number of official katas to eight, and Koburyu.org calls it the hardest kata of the kyu student grades. Per Koburyu.org, the practitioner first meets the cat stance, neko ashi dachi, in it. The same source names as typical a low block in which the defender settles into a firmly rooted cat stance, followed by a thrust with an open hand in the thumb-fist boshiken. The English Wikipedia stresses the whipping techniques of the dragon style, Uechi-ryu Karate-Do Oryukai adds crane techniques with the crane stance to them and calls the kata "very Chinese", with many circular techniques. On the 2024 WUKF competition list, Seichin appears in the Uechi-ryu group among the required shitei katas under the spelling Sechin, and among the optional tokui katas under the name Seichin.
Meaning of the name
Both the English Wikipedia and Uechi-ryu Karate-Do Oryukai translate the characters 十戦 as "ten battles" or "ten clashes". Wikipedia offers two further readings: the name may combine the names of two other katas, Seisan and Sanchin, and read phonetically it means "spirit challenge" – referring, it says, to the kata's soft whipping motion.
Creator and history
The sources disagree on who composed the kata. The English Wikipedia writes that Kanei Uechi designed all the katas added to the original trio from Pangai-noon. Koburyu.org, uechi-ryu.com and uechi-insights.com instead attribute Seichin to Saburo Uehara (1890–1965). Per Koburyu.org, he worked from 1925 at the same cotton mill in Wakayama as Kanbun Uechi, became his second student a year later, and opened a dojo in Naha after the Second World War. Per the same source, he created Seichin in 1963; we did not find another date in the sources.