Nihon Tai Jitsu
日本体術A French self-defence system derived from Yoseikan budo. It was formalised by Roland Hernaez after the death of Jim Alcheik.
Quick Facts
FranceCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Nihon Tai Jitsu
Nihon Tai Jitsu is a French self-defence system of Japanese origin. This page gives no single year of foundation, because the sources describe a chain of events rather than one moment. The documented sequence is as follows. In 1951 Minoru Mochizuki, founder of the Yoseikan, came to Europe, and his teaching was brought here by Jim Alcheik. In 1957 Alcheik gave his self-defence method the name tai jitsu, and in 1958 he founded the FFATK federation in France. Alcheik died in 1962, and technical leadership passed to Roland Hernaez, who developed and formalised the method into its present shape. The label Nihon Tai Jitsu appeared later and has a practical reason: it recalls the Japanese origin of the system and at the same time distinguishes it from other schools that use the word tai jitsu. In France that distinction mattered above all in the recognition of the discipline by the delegated federations. Technically the work derives from the Yoseikan, that is from Mochizuki's joining of aikido, judo and karate. The syllabus is built not on one answer to one attack but on a small number of principles carried into different situations; Hernaez summed this up in a motto about a thousand techniques and one principle. Both empty-hand work and defence against weapons are trained. Today Nihon Tai Jitsu is administered in France within the French Federation of Karate and Associated Disciplines (FFKDA) and has held on mainly across the French-speaking world.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.