A reasonable mistake but still wrong. The characters are Japanese, not Chinese and even in Mandarin they do not say “Tai Chi Chuan” or “Tai Ji Quan”. I don’t know about Wade Giles but the mandarin for those characters is “Tai Qi Quan” which is, as was pointed out before, Japanese for Yi Quan aka Da Cheng Quan.
The middle character “qi” is not the same character or the same pronounciation as the middle character in “taijiquan”. Furthermore, even if it was, although Japanese uses many of the same characters as Chinese, you can’t just read the Japanese and ASSume it means the same thing.
There were some famous guys in that clip. The Yi Quan master was there as was some pretty famous Karate guys. It’s not my area of expertese though (yi quan or karate lineage) but the names of the faces that were recognized are all here on this short thread:
There are three CHINESE characters in that clip that say Tai Chi Chuan or whatever Romanization you chose to use. I use the Yale University Romanization I learned in college. Sometimes Japanese mix Chinese “Kanji” in with their own characters. That middle character is Chi in Mandarin or Ki in Japanese.
Phil
So if you were reading the Japanese characters, it may be pronounced in Mandarin a bit like Taijiquan but I don’t think it’s referring to the same art.
the characters write ultimate energy fist and not ultimate fist (tai chi chuen). I guess the ultimate internal energy fist is what they are trying to get to.
whatever, they were well out fight by the K guys! probably due to lack training. it was easy to tell the T guys were going to get creamed as they just stood there I guess to summon up their qi/chi
anyway, nobody seams to able to block a punh or a kick nor moved side ways
I had two points. One has already been repeated. “Taijiquan” is not written that way even in Chinese.
Second point, Japanese uses many of the same characters. Don’t assume that because you recognize the characters the phrase or sentence is actually in Chinese or even means the same in Chinese. There are many Japanese phrases you or I can read just based on our Chinese language skills, however, there are also many others that simpy do not mean what you would think they should mean based on the Kanji.
Tai Qi Quan is one of those cases.
And just for the record, look again at the character “qi” or “ki” as you put it. It is in fact, NOT the Chinese character. It’s very similar but there is no rice radical. The rice radical has been abreviated to a small “x” because it’s Japanese and that’s how the Japanese write the character “ki”.
I see what you mean. The second character for Chi/Ji is not the same as the one for TCC. If it were then Tai Gik Kune in Cantonese would be Tai Hei Kuen.
Thanks, I stand corrected.
Phil
Well…yeah…it means the same thing in that case. What I meant was that that little detail tips you off that it’s Japanese and not Chinese because there ARE a lot of same characters.
There’s a joke among Chinese, maybe you’ve heard it, that Japanese Kanji came about because many moons ago when they ran off with Chinese writing back in whatever dynasty they were being chased by the locals and in their haste they dropped some of the strokes.
So you get stuff like “qi” written with a “X” instead of a “”.
But “taiji” is with neither anyways. It’s with a rather than a (simplified. I have not complex fonts on my computer)
Just got this from someone who I guess is better acquainted with the background on the clip than I:
Taikiken is NOT Yiquan.
Sawai did study with Wang Xiang Zhai or Yao Zong Xun but crafted his own system out of it when he went back to Japan and handed all of his challengers their asses.
Mas Oyama, Kyokushinkai’s founder studied taikiken with Sawai.
When the Japanese team met with Yao Cheng Rong’s yiquan fighters they got their asses kicked as well.
So it’s not exactly Yiquan either but something close. This guy Sawai AFAIK trained with Wang Xiangzai or some other Yiquan big shot but this is his own art derivative of yi quan that he taught in Japan.
I believe Sawai is the guy instroduced in the beggining of the clip as the founder of “Taikiken”.
