Contact Play For Sabaki / Discussion

Dieter: Now we have technical examples on the discussion page and signed contributions on the parent page, itself a spin-off of a WME. THis illustrates the confusion/disagreement among even experienced deshis on what kind of discussion should be where.

Bill: How about an /Examples subpage for Minue's examples? I would be happy to create the page and move the material, if that's OK. :-)

Minue: I thought that above diagrams might not meet the purpose(intention) of the parent page after i had posted them on parent page at first. ..., i mean..., I thought that posting above diagrams might be redundant and superflous, and hurt simplicity of original parent page. So i removed them from parent page to this discussion page. Anyway,...If you think that adding these diagrams(examples) with some detailed comments can be suited to the orginal purpose of the parent page, i can do it. if not? No problem even if you(or someone else) delete those diagrams...

Or..., as Bill suggested, creating subpage is better, still ok to me.

Bill: I agree with you Minue, about keeping the simplicity of the parent page. Also, I love your examples. And I agree with Dieter about keeping them off the Discussion page. So, I'll move them to their own subpage. :-)

About contact play or attachment

• Bill: Attachment is the standard English term. Contact play is Bruce Wilcox's term for his theory of contact fights.
• (Saturday): I have emailed Bruce asking for his definition. Please put my request on hold until I have a chance to hear back from him. Thanks.
• In my mind these are not the same. - DrStraw
• To me, attachment suggests a single stone, whereas contact suggests the possibility of nobi, etc. - Bildstein
• I think "contact" includes moves like a shoulder hit or an angle play, not just attachments, and these other moves are often useful for making sabaki. -Bob McGuigan
• Bill: True, Bob. But the proverb is explicit about attachment.

(We can delete this conversation, too.)

unkx80: So what is the better term, "contact play" or "attachment"?

Bill: When I said that attachment is the standard English term, I was unaware that there seems to be a dialectical difference between British and American English. Attachment is American English, contact play is British English. (Tsuke is Japanese. ;)) Wilcox's contact fights include diagonal plays, and many people, like Bob McGuigan, think of contact as including such plays. In American English, contact play is ambiguous. I do not think that attachment is ambiguous in British English, however. The lack of ambiguity argues for attachment, but, whichever term we use, we should acknowledge the other term.

P. S. I did hear back from Wilcox, who does not use the term, contact play, even when writing about contact fights. ;)

unkx80: I asked because of an outstanding page rename request. In this case, there seems to be no strong argument for page renaming then.

Page rename request

DrStraw: Someone asked for this page to be renamed "attachment for sabaki". I disagree. They way I use these terms is that a contact play is used in isolation in an attempt to create sabaki whereas an attachment is used in the middle of a sequence. I know that tecnically these are the same, and I would not be surprised if the same word is used in Japanese (anyone know?), but as we have two perfectly good English words I prefer to made the distinction. I believe this leads to a clearer understanding of the underlying concepts.

Bill: Actually, I made the request because contact play is ambiguous. It has a more general sense than attachment. In particular, Bruce Wilcox uses the term for a shoulder blow or a hane in his writings on contact fights. The Japanese proverb that this page title is a rendering of says Sabaki wa tsuke. Which has the more specific meaning of attachment.

I think your comment underlines the problem with contact play in the title. Wilcox uses contact play in a more general sense than attachment, you use it in a more specific sense. Attachment is unambiguous and carries the meaning of the original proverb.

Bill: (Much, much later.) I misremembered Wilcox's writings. He does not use the term, contact play, at all, I understand.