Meikyo 明鏡
Bright mirror; polished mirror
What Meikyo is.
A quiet, symmetrical form whose name means a mirror polished clear — the image is of a mind reflecting things exactly as they are. It opens with slow, sweeping two-handed movements that frame the face like a mirror being held up, repeats its sequences to left and right with unusual exactness, and finishes with a jump. The symmetry is the discipline: any difference between the left side and the right is on display.
What it develops
- Exact symmetry, since every sequence is performed to both sides
- Slow, controlled sweeping movement without loss of tension
- A jump used as the resolution of a form rather than as decoration
- Calm, which the form is explicitly named after
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Meikyo 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 Meikyo.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| heisoku-dachi | 閉足立ち | closed-foot stance | Feet together and parallel, legs straight, weight even. It appears at the start and end of several kata and between sequences, and its job is stillness — it gives the performer nowhere to hide a wobble, so it is where composure is visibly either present or not. |
| zenkutsu-dachi | 前屈立ち | front stance | The long forward stance: front knee bent over the toes, back leg straight, roughly seventy per cent of the weight on the front foot. It is the stance that lets a technique carry the whole body behind it, and the reason the first kata a student learns is mostly walking. |
| gedan-barai | 下段払い | downward sweep | The forearm sweeps down and across to clear an attack to the lower body, finishing just above the front thigh. It is the first block most students learn and it is a sweep rather than a stop — the arm brushes the attack off its line instead of meeting it head on. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| neko-ashi-dachi | 猫足立ち | cat-foot stance | Almost all the weight on the rear leg, the front foot resting on the ball with the heel lifted, like a cat about to move. It carries no weight on the front foot at all, which is what makes it the fastest stance to kick or step from and the hardest one to balance in. |
| embusen | 演武線 | performance line | The floor pattern a kata travels — the map of every step, turn and direction change. A performer who finishes away from where they began has lost ground somewhere, and because the pattern is fixed, the kata itself reports the error without anyone having to point it out. |
| 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. |
| bunkai | 分解 | analysis of application | Taking a kata apart to work out what each movement is actually doing against a real opponent, then practising it with a partner. Without it a kata is choreography; with it, a sequence that looked ornamental usually turns out to be a grip break and a throw. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Meikyo.
There is no verified video of Meikyo 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.