Heian Godan 平安五段
Peaceful mind, fifth level
What Heian Godan is.
The last of the series and the one that introduces leaving the ground. A cross block catches a kick, the hands close on it, and a few movements later the form jumps, lands with the legs crossed and finishes in a wide two-level posture held long enough to be looked at. It also contains a crescent kick into the opposite palm, so the performer hears whether the kick arrived where it was aimed. It is a compact form that behaves like a much longer one.
What it develops
- Jumping and landing under control, without a heavy or noisy landing
- Catching and holding rather than only deflecting
- Defending two levels at once and holding the finished posture with presence
- Accuracy made audible, through a kick that must strike the waiting palm
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Heian Godan 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 Heian Godan.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 It is a receiving stance: the body is already withdrawn, so a block can meet an attack without the defender having to retreat first, and the front foot is light enough to kick with. |
| uchi-uke | 内受け | inside block | The mirror of the outside block: the forearm sweeps from inside the body outward, taking the attack on the inner side and opening the opponent up. Beginners regularly swap the two names, and the way to keep them straight is to name the direction the arm travels, not where it ends. |
| gyaku-zuki | 逆突き | reverse punch | Punching with the hand opposite the forward leg, driven by rotating the hips. It is the most-used scoring technique in karate because the hips can turn faster than the feet can step, and the power comes from that rotation rather than from the arm. |
| juji-uke | 十字受け | cross block | Both arms crossed at the wrists in the shape of the character for ten, catching a kick or a strike in the X they make. Because both hands finish in one place, the technique that usually follows is a grab, and several kata make that continuation explicit. |
| kosa-dachi | 交差立ち | crossed-feet stance | One leg crossed behind or in front of the other, feet close, knees bent and the body compressed. It is a transitional shape rather than a place to live: kata use it to land a jump, to cover ground quickly, or to wind the hips up for the technique that follows. |
| manji-uke | 卍受け | double block, one arm high and one low | One arm blocks upward behind the head while the other sweeps low in front, the body turned side-on between them. It covers two levels at once and, held at the end of a sequence, it is as much a statement of readiness as a defence. |
| mikazuki-geri | 三日月蹴り | crescent kick | The foot travels in an arc across the body, striking with the sole. In kata it usually lands in the opposite palm, which is not decoration: the palm is the target being represented, and the sound it makes is the audible proof the kick arrived where it was aimed. |
| zanshin | 残心 | remaining mind | The alertness that continues after a technique finishes and after the kata ends — the attention that has not yet been put away. It is the difference between finishing a kata and stopping one, and it is the quality most visible from the back of a hall. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Heian Godan.
There is no verified video of Heian Godan 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.