http://www.fullcontactvictoria.com/
What is the history of this style, and other than kyokushinkai what are names of full contact karate style?
Ashihara
Seido kai kan
Shidokan
any others?
daido juku
enshin
“Broke ten blocks of ice at the “Strongest Karate on the Earth” Demonstration”
So now they want to be the “Strongest Karate.” (Ahem… Kyoku…) Plus, it was founded in 1962 when Sosai Oyama was rapidly expanding his dojos overseas. Of course, the founder of Yoshukai claims he “always strove for something new, something that was never done in traditional Karate. Actual Karate was one of such trials.” Saw the sparring vids… Looks like good old Kyokushin Bareknucle sparring BUT with headgear. So where’s the Chito-Ryu that he apparently studied from the age of 13 and learnt for 12 years before founding his “new” art?
Oh, and he claims that he fought a tiger. Sounds like Bull to me. 
Man, that guys like a total Oyama wannabe. Either that or he’s adept at adapting a good marketing model.
Just my 2 cents FROM LOOKING AT THE TWO WEBSITES.
http://www.yoshukai-karate.com/en/Greeting.html
http://www.fullcontactvictoria.com/
kinda reminded me of Gogen Yamaguchi, he was said to have killed a tiger with one kick.
I studied Yoshukai in Florida. www.wykko.com I have personally met GM Yamamoto and he is a very charismatic individual. He’s also my size so quite large for a Japanese. Yoshukai still does have some very McDojo practices (breaking, lots of kids, katas, etc) But they do fight early and fight often. And they do like to fight bare knuckle Japanese Knockdown style which is a lot of fun. As far as karate styles go, I’d say it’s up there because they are very heavy on conditioning and fighting. There are two groups of Yoshukai though…
the one mentioned above split from GM Yamamoto and do their own thing (I heard they do a lot of XMA kind of stuff) AND the one that I did which was the WYKKO which is still affiliated with GM Yamamoto.
I don’t have any personal experience with Kyokushin but I’d venture to say it’s similar to it and the Oyama splinter groups. They all go to the same tournaments. My dojo was the only one I’ve been to that had a “fight night” where it had an open door policy for anybody to come in and test it out. I have to give Yoshukai props for that. It is a very “functional” style though so it isn’t very flashy.
As far as GM Yamamoto fighting a tiger goes, it can be researched on the net and maybe I’ll tell the story I heard later when I have more time.
as I was told…
The Okinawans had the body of a Japanese general at the end of WWII and weren’t going to give it back. They said a Japanese fighter had to come down and fight a tiger to get it back. GM Yamamoto was sent to Okinawa and locked in a cage with a tiger with only a bo and sai. After several hours, he killed the tiger and brought the dead general’s body back to Japan. I really don’t have much of a way of validating this story but that’s how it goes. Like I said before though, he is a very charismatic individual.
on a side note,
the clips that I saw on the fullcontactvictoria.com website were of youths doing point sparring, NOT Japanese knockdown – there’s a big difference