Of the three videos I offered in my previous post, it appears that all three originate from the teaching of Gokenki. The Shito-ryu version is how it was taught by Kenwa Mabuni. Marko from traditionalfighthingorum.com offered this on the matter:

Shito-ryu version is performed only with steps forward. There are many versions of the Hakucho kata in Shito-ryu, each of them has three steps forward, then side to side, and a final three steps forward to conclude the kata. Tomiyama Sensei said that’s because cranes only walk forward.

Another big question that arose from my previous article revolves around the fact that I was always told that Matayoshi never taught his Kingai-ryu to anyone but family. Again, Marko was able to offer me some interesting insight base on his experiences:

Kingai-ryu has many katas. Yamashita, Chinen ..etc..were taught and kept only one kata. At that time and later, Matayoshi didnt teach his Kingai-ryu openly. I have met, through another kobudo practitioner, his student who does Kingai-ryu, and apparently only people who were devoted to his dojo for [many]  years were taught the style.

This explains how I came to learn the kata. It was taught to Shinko Matayoshi by Gokenki, then to Shinpo Matayoshi, who taught it to Tadashi Yamashita. Yamashita taught it to my instructor who passed it on to me. I believe that the kata is called Hakkucho and that Hakkuku is a Japanese dialect of that. I call it Hakutsuru, but because that means “White Crane(s)”, it was probably used in reference to the type of moves, rather than the actual name of the kata. I am going to make the transition into referring to it as Hakkucho like Matayoshi did.

Noah Legel was helping me gather info from other karateka who practice their own version of Hakkucho. His instructor, Richard Poage, also practiced the kata under the name Hakutsuru. This was what Noah found out about the origins:

Sensei Poage learned Hakutsuru kata from Hanshi Doug Perry, 9th-dan and head of the Shorinkan in the United States. From what Sensei Poage knows, Hanshi Perry learned it while on duty in Okinawa when he was in charge of the base there. The story goes that Hanshi Perry was asked for a favor by a friend of his (someone in Isshin-Ryu I believe), and that favor was to get his one-armed uncle a landscaping job at the base. Hanshi Perry invited the man in for an interview, had him demonstrate his work and hired him after determining he was qualified to do that job. Apparently this got him a lot of flak from the military, but word spread around the island and he began being invited to a lot of dojo. Sensei Poage isn’t sure what lineage the Hakutsuru kata that Hanshi Perry learned comes from, but he knows it isn’t Matsumura.

After some more hunting on the internet, I cam across a post by John Oberle of Bujutsu Blogger involving a similar story. John says that:

Kyoshi Perry learned his from old man Takemyoshi (who had a family style which included variations of some “common” kata and other kata), having trained with him after he helped his nephew get a job on a work crew in Okinawa.

I think that the two stories correspond very nicely. Additionally, Hanshi Perry has posted on his own website that he had the honor of training with a “Sensei Takemyoshi” who was part of an old Okinawan Karate-Do family. I would like to do additional research on this “Takemyoshi” later, but for now, there is multiple references to him and one that stood out was about people teaching “Takemyoshi No Tekko”. The fact that people have learned techniques of the Okinawan Knuckle Busters that are attributed to someone of the same name, makes me a little more convinced that he could have belonged to a family of Okinawans who had their own lineage of Karate-Do and Kobudo. Should be interesting to learn more about it.

In summation, we have a collection of White Crane katas spread around throughout the Shorin-ryu schools and others (like Shito-ryu). The kata Hakkucho that I know comes from Gokenki. It was taught by Shinpo Matayoshi to Tadashi Yamashita and others. Shito-ryu teaches a version of it that also comes from Gokenki. The one known by many in Shorinkan that learned it from Doug Perry was taught by a Sensei Takemyoshi. Whether this is also of Gokenki origin is up for debate. Hopefully I can find a video of this version and it may give us more insight on the matter.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing information to this. I think it helps a lot of us better understand where the katas we practice came from and it explains the differences in how we perform them.