The Specialist: the Seio Nage of Toshihiko Koga
Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
This article is part of our “long article” requests through Patreon! A huge thank you to Alteroc (@crwate01) for this excellent topic suggestion.
In an effort to learn more about combat sports, Alteroc laid out an article format that covers three athletes from a specific sport:
An all-time great
A specialist
Someone “weird”
This article covers #2 for the martial art and Olympic sport of Judo
To call the great champion Toshihiko Koga a ‘specialist’ seems absurd. The man is one of the great Judoka of all time, Olympic gold and silver medalist and 3 time world champion (one time bronze medalist). Also the possessor of one of the biggest hearts (if we’re being polite) in the sport’s history as shown by his entry at around 65 kg into the open weight All-Japan tournament in 1990. But never the less, we can’t ignore that the majority of Koga’s great moments came from one specific technique: his ippon seio nage, arguably the finest in the annals of competitive Judo.
Judo is a sport that lends itself to specialization. The range of techniques that consistently score in competition is fairly limited, and most players have a handful of go-to moves (called tokui waza, or favorite techniques, in Japanese) with the variety coming in the setups and follow up attacks. Some players however shrink that world of technical possibility to a singularity, focusing on one move almost to the exclusion of all else. When this fails you can end up a limited athlete who is easy to stymie; when it succeeds, you have a competitor whose opposition knows they have to stop a single move and still can’t do a damn thing about it. Koga most certainly falls into the latter category. There was absolutely no question what he was going to do in 99% of his matches: secure his left hand lapel grip, break your posture, and launch you skyward with a standing seio nage. And yet, for the better part of 7 years no one could find an answer.
But that leads to the question of why his seio nage was so hard to stop. The answer is perhaps surprisingly direct: he perfected a variation of seio nage that required little in the way of gripping, got him consistently under his opponent’s hips, and his entry was so fast and powerful that even if he didn’t hit it cleanly he could often get the score anyway.
Koga’s seio nage wasn’t traditional. Two things he did make it different than the kata variation, but also made it more effective. Those were his split stance entry, and his use of the lapel rather than the sleeve grip.
The prototypical Koga seio nage. Having secured a grip on his opponent’s left lapel, Koga turns in dropping his right leg deep between his opponent’s legs. The split stance entry gets Koga’s hips under his opponent’s and make it easy to load him up. Note how high Koga’s left elbow comes on the pull: that creates just enough space for him to fit in tightly. Once his opponent is loaded up there’s little he can do to avoid landing flat on his back.
Koga didn’t need a lot of tricks to finish his seio nage. The upside of remaining standing on your entry (vs the more popular version of seio nage in which the player drops to his knees) is that once your opponent is loaded on your hips their feet are off the ground and you don’t have to take extraordinary measures to complete the throw. A slight change of direction is all that’s usually necessary.
Here Koga hits a fairly clean entry but over rotates his hips a bit. No problem, just finish to the side in koshi guruma style rather than straight over the top like a standard seio nage.
In addition to slight angle changes, Koga was very good about rolling through when necessary to ensure ippon.
Another clean entry, but uke slightly slides off Koga’s hips to the right. To ensure the ippon Koga rolls through as otherwise his opponent might have been able to limit the score to wazari.
A big reason Koga was able to score so consistently with his seio nage is that there weren’t any situations in which he didn’t feel he could use it. His matches frequently saw seio nage as a counter, a relatively rare application of the technique.
Koga’s opponent tries a leg grab. The Olympic gold medalist rotates out of the way and, as his opponent returns to his feet, uses the upward momentum to enter directly into his seio nage. The pull and follow through was such that the attempted cartwheel out went nowhere but the tatami.
Though a seio nage specialist through and through, Koga did have a few other attacks that complemented his core throw. His main secondary option was kouchi makikomi, a wrapping technique that worked well when his opponents shifted all their weight backwards to avoid the shoulder throw.
Entering for a shoulder throw on the counter Koga feels his opponent throw his hips back to avoid the seio nage. That backwards momentum makes the kouchi makikomi easy to hit.
A similar situation. On the edge of the mat Koga knows his opponent has to come forward or lose points for the pushout. As he enters for the throw he feels uke sit down, making him ripe for the makikomi.
And while less common in his praxis than the kouchi makikomi, when opponents would hide their left lapels by standing in strong left side forward stances Koga would take advantage with the spectacular one handed sode tsuri komi goshi.
A lapel grip not being easily available, Koga grips the cuff of the right sleeve. From this point the entry is much the same as for his seio nage: pull and turn. The left arm swims up during the completion of the throw to help turn uke to his back.
While Koga scored with many throws during his career, it was undoubtedly the seio nage which inspired fear and respect on the part of his opponents. While specialization may pay in Judo, few have ever covered themselves in glory with a single technique like Koga and his seio nage.