http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63xMDIy3Xic
Most judoka have heard of Kyuzo Mifune, one of Judo’s venerated 10th dans. He was small in stature but is famous for evasive judo, i.e. it was difficult to throw him. Some of the video of his evasions are found on youtube but there is not much commentary I have found on how he performs his evasions and defense. I see some comments that he does not get thrown due to tradition that the Japanese do not throw a higher ranked teacher out of respect. There may be some of that in the videos but if that is all of the explanation I would expect similar videos to be available of any of the venerated masters with great evasive judo but Mifune seems to the standard that everyone brings up when discussing evasion. Some of these evasions especially the spinning out which I take to include somersaults are still seen today at high levels of judo competition.
We have been practicing some of the tactics that he uses to evade over the last few months. We have come across five flavors of evasion that he tends to use – floating, over rotating, pushing into tori, releasing tori and spinning out.
- The floating is demonstrated many times including the first evasion on the above video when he floats out of the hane goshi attempt. He also seems to use the same tactic when he evades ashi waza. At about 2:25 he floats out of okuri ashi harai.
- The over rotation occurs at 0:38 when seoi nage is attempted. He demonstrates another version at about 1:04 when he over rotates out of a seoi nage and then hooks his leg around tori.
- He releases his own grip on tori a few times. At about 2:09 he releases both hands grip on tori evading some type of koshi waza. He the releases only one side at about 4:20 when he evades an ashi guruma.
- At about 2:50 he can be seen pushing his center into tori to disrupt the throw.
- There are also a few tomoe nage attempts that he evades by spinning out. The last one is about 3:39
We have found over rotating, pushing into tori and releasing grip on tori to be the most reproducible evasions so far. The floating he does to avoid the ashi waza is a work in progress.
Here is another video that dwelves into this topic which is a good demonstration of the over rotation evasion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxsHUVe-ao