One of the most important techniques in Taijiquan, as well as in almost all martial arts, is the need to rotate your waist while you are executing various forms. This is true whether you are doing warm up exercises, doing the forms in one of the Taijiquan form sets (e.g., the Simplified Yang Style 24 Form), or executing sophisticated Qin Na1/Self Defense techniques. From both the health perspective and the martial arts perspective, it is important to rotate the waist.
From the health perspective, you are exercising more parts of your body when you rotate your waist. For example, in a simple warm up exercise of “wave hands like clouds” when the hands are moving 180 degrees out of phase, if you are just moving your arms and hands, then you are exercising only your arms and hands. However, if you also rotate your waist, together with rotating your knees and your shoulders, then you are adding the exercising of your knees, waist, and shoulders in addition to exercising your arms and hands. Furthermore, when your eyes also follow the direction of your rotation, then you are also exercising your eyes. Once you have gone beyond natural breathing and start using your lower abdomen to help breathe during the breathing cycle, then you are massaging, or exercising, the internal organs in your lower abdomen.
Sex Slaves of World War II
One of the most horrific crimes of the World War II period[1] has remained relatively unknown to most Americans, as well as to most people in many other parts of the world, even though more than 63 years have elapsed since the end of World War II. This is the crime of sex slaves, or euphemistically called “comfort women” by the Japanese government. During the WWII period, approximately 400,000 women and young girls (most between the ages of 14 and 18) from China, Korea, Philippines, Netherlands, and other countries (with about 50% being Chinese) were forced to become sex slaves to the Japanese soldiers occupying Korea, China, Burma, Philippines, and other parts of Asia.[2]
Most of these women and girls were kidnapped from their families and shipped to all over the Japanese empire to become sex slaves, and many died or were never united with their families again. Sometimes, these women and girls were tricked to become sex slaves when they thought they were being recruited for other jobs. As sex slaves, they were raped on a daily basis by as many as a dozen or more Japanese soldiers, while being poorly fed and living in extremely harsh conditions. In addition, sometimes they also had to perform other menial tasks during other parts of the day, all without compensation.
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