Nijushiho 二十四歩
Twenty-four steps
What Nijushiho is.
A form about rhythm rather than about any one technique. It repeatedly gathers slowly and then releases in a burst, so the performance is a sequence of accelerations rather than a steady tempo, and much of its striking is done with the palm heel and the elbow at close range. Its name simply counts its movements, which is unusual honesty in a canon full of poetic titles.
What it develops
- Changes of rhythm, gathering and releasing within a single sequence
- Close-range striking with the palm heel and the elbow
- Flowing, connected movement rather than a series of separate stops
- Breath used to drive the transitions, not just the techniques
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Nijushiho 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 Nijushiho.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| teisho-uchi | 底掌打ち | palm-heel strike | A thrust with the heel of the palm, fingers pulled back out of the way. It delivers most of the force of a punch with none of the risk to the small bones of the hand, and it doubles as a press or a push, which is why kata use it to unbalance as well as to strike. |
| empi-uchi | 肘打ち | elbow strike | A strike with the point of the elbow, forward, upward, sideways or backward. It is the hardest weapon on the body and it only works in close, so a kata that uses one is telling you the distance the sequence is imagining. |
| yoko-geri-kekomi | 横蹴り蹴込み | side thrust kick | The same sideways line as the snap kick, but driven through the target with the hip behind it and the heel leading. Snap and thrust look similar and do completely different jobs, and telling them apart in a kata is one of the first things an examiner watches for. |
| kiba-dachi | 騎馬立ち | horse-riding stance | Feet parallel and roughly twice shoulder width, knees pushed outward, weight even, back vertical. It is punishing to hold and that is the training effect: it builds the hip and thigh strength that everything else borrows from, and it teaches the student to generate power sideways rather than only forward. |
| kokyu | 呼吸 | breathing | The deliberate coordination of breath with movement — out on the technique, in on the withdrawal, and audibly under tension in some kata. It is taught as an explicit subject rather than left to instinct, because breath held under effort is what makes a performer fall apart at the end. |
| kime | 決め | focus | The instantaneous tightening of the whole body at the end of a technique, followed immediately by release. It is what makes a karate technique stop dead rather than push, and a kata performed without it looks like a dance no matter how correct the shapes are. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Nijushiho.
There is no verified video of Nijushiho 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.