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As you know, Dave Meltzer covers the business of mixed martial arts better than anyone. But, as you might also know, his technical knowledge of the sport is very much a work in progress. This is true of all of us, of course, whether we’re casual fans, devotees, or martial artists who train in grappling or striking arts ourselves. Mixed martial arts is a sport marked by such rapid technical innovation and evolution that we’ve all found ourselves behind the curve at one time or another. We’ve all had our, “wait, what on earth was that?” moments as we’ve been exposed to techniques for the first time. But unlike most of us, Dave Meltzer unfortunately has his “wait, what?” moments recorded for posterity. And the June 23rd edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter has a real doozy.

Recapping the June 15th Dream 4 event, Meltzer offers this somewhat baffling analysis of the finish to the Shinya Aoki / Katsuhiko Nagata Lightweight Grand Prix match: “[Aoki] remained on top, doing very little until using what was called a gogoplata from the mount, but really wasn’t, as it was more of a forearm choke except using the shinbone instead of the forearm.”

Wait, what?

Before going any further, I want to to clear that the point here is not to belittle Dave Meltzer, or to slight him as an MMA journalist. But I want to use his confusing and confused comment as a way into talking about this technique, a technique that left more than a few people scratching their heads. Here is the match in its entirety with English commentary (a higher quality Korean language version is available here), and here is an animated image of the technique itself. As you can see, it is, as Meltzer describes, not unlike a forearm choke that uses the shinbone instead of the forearm — which, by definition, makes it a gogoplata.

Bas Rutten starts the confusion when, at the six minute mark of the linked video, just before the finish, he calls the technique an “omoplata from the top,” and he says it’s the first time he’s seen it. He then says that it’s much like what Nick Diaz caught Takanori Gomi with in Diaz’s win (er . . . no contest) over the Pride lightweight champ. At this point Bas catches himself, and says he meant to call it a gogoplata from the top, not an omoplata. Although this is the first time Bas has seen this particular variation of the gogoplata, immediately it seems to him to be “even better, because the face cannot go backwards.” Face, head, whatever. Bas stumbled, momentarily, but he got it right, which is what we have come to expect from arguably the greatest man to ever live.

But still, confusion. Michael David Smith — who endorsed, but who did not author, the dumbest thing you will ever read about mixed martial arts — called Aoki’s move “so unique that no one is quite sure what to call it.” He pointed us to Jim Murphy, who apparently wrote at the Savage Science blog that the move was an omoplata from the top mount (Murphy’s post has since been edited to read “gogoplata”). MMA Core described the move as a “locoplata” (a related technique in the Eddie Bravo arsenal), before joining the gogoplata consensus. Sherdog, to their credit, had the move correctly described as a gogoplata from the get go (not that they’re batting 1.000 lately: they have Hidehiko Yoshida’s listless kesa gatame win over Maurice Smith tagged as a neck crank submission, despite Smith himself saying in a press conference posted on Sherdog itslef that he wasn’t tapping to a neck crank, but to a suffocation). Bloody Elbow poster TannerMatthews gets the gold star for not only correctly identifying the technique right away, but actually finding a video clip of Eddie Bravo demonstrating the move on Aoki himself — skip ahead to the 3:30 mark of this clip. Extra gold stars, actually, for knowing the appropriate Eddie Bravo lingo: this is a technique applied from “Gangsta Lean/Monkey Mount.” Why wouldn’t it be?

It’s understandable, though, that some non-TannerMatthews observers wouldn’t immediately know exactly what to make of Aoki’s move, even if it’s not the first time Aoki has used it to end a contest. But that was Shooto, and a grappling-only match in Shooto at that. The gogoplata has really only come to the attention of the mixed martial arts mainstream since Aoki’s dissection of Joachim Hansen at Pride’s Otaku Matsuri 2006. Since then, Nick Diaz and, of all people, Brad Imes, who won two matches in six weeks by gogoplata, have increased the popularity of this technique, showing that it is applicable not only to grappling competition but to mixed martial arts as well.

Aoki is often credited with the first successful application of the gogoplata in MMA, but that doesn’t seem to hold up. The earliest I’m aware of is this Ryusuke “Jack” Uemura bout, posted to Youtube in March 2006, which puts it at least nine months ahead of Aoki/Hansen, but I’ve been unable to find the actual date of the match, the name of the opponent, or even the name of the event (anyone who has any information about that match, I’m all ears).

But this is all pretty recent. Where does the technique itself come from? The gogoplata is perhaps most closely associated right now with Eddie Bravo and his rubber guard system — and it is an impressively thorough and complete system, which you don’t really get a feel for in the five second bursts in which you’ll see UFC fighter X “play rubber guard” by grabbing his own ankle, eating an elbow to the face, and then switching up the plan. It’s become a kind of running joke in the online MMA world to suggest that Eddie Bravo invented or claims to have invented every conceivable grappling position and maneuver, from the halfguard to the gogoplata. But Bravo makes no claim to having invented the gogoplata, only to having developed a guard system that facilitates techniques like it. In Jiu-jitsu Unleashed, Bravo writes, “The Go-Go Plata: I stole this move from jiu-jitsu phenom Nino Schembri because it wasn’t hard for me to see just how often it presented itself during the transition to the Omoplata.”

OK, so where did Schembri pick it up? At least once, Schembri — whose omoplata instuctional is absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in that technique — has claimed to have “invented” the gogoplata. He later conceded that surely someone, somewhere, at sometime must have done it before him, at least some version of the move. Which, as it turns out, is true.

Let me be clear that I’m not doubting that Schembri developed this technique and position independently; I’m not claiming that he “stole” anything from anyone. Far from it. My interest here is only in tracing this technique back as far as we can, which means looking back further than Nino Schembri, further back, even, then Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It means looking to judo. Were it feasible, it would mean looking even further back to the traditional jujitsu koryu from which judo derives, but that’s a somewhat less feasible exercise.

Syd Hoare’s The A-Z of Judo, which sets out to provide a “comprehensive survey of traditional judo techniques,” presents a choke in which “the attacker swings his left leg over the opponent’s right arm to bring his front ankle and lower part of the shin under the chin and also trap the arm.” This technique is presented under the name kakato jime or kagato jime, literally “heel strangle.” Hoare credits the technique to Mikonosuke Kawaishi’s My Method of Judo (”Exclusive! Masterful!), published in 1955. Kawaishi’s book is out of print and quite rare — and I seem to have somehow deleted my electronic copy of the French edition, which is pretty much a full-on tragedy. Kagato jime is also present in E. J. Harrison’s Judo on the Ground: The Oda Method, published in 1954 (though based on an earlier Japanese volume).

Here are a couple of relevant images from that text (hosted at a Dutch sight — did you know that the Dutch have the highest per capita rate of judo participation of any country? Even higher than Japan? Shocking but true):

Not only is the first image, a kagato jime, a gogoplata in all but name, but doesn’t the second image bear a striking resemblance to Eddie Bravo’s basic (well, basic if you’re Eddie Bravo) “mission control” position, as one poster on Sherdog pointed out when these pictures first started making the rounds? And wait, while we’re at it, what exactly is it that Kyuzo Mifune is up to when he sets up the ude gatame at the 45:35 mark of The Essence of Judo?

I am certainly not trying to start yet another utterly pointless judo vs. BJJ debate — I’m not claiming that these techniques have been a key part of judo newaza all along, and that the modern exponents of the BJJ have added nothing to them. Far from it. Go to a judo club, ask the sensei to show you kagato jime, and there is a very good chance he won’t know what you’re talking about. Try the same thing with sankaku garami, which is the Japanese term for the omoplata, and you’ll probably have better luck, but it’s by no means a sure thing. My own sensei, an accomplished, respected, and extremely knowledgeable 4th dan, knew of kagato jime but wasn’t completely clear on its application until recently; that he had even heard of the technique by that name puts him well ahead of most. It’s a technique that had a past in judo, but which has disappeared almost completely.

When Schembri says that, as far as he knows, he invented the gogoplata, but that someone had probably performed the move before, that’s an entirely creditable position, in my view. While there is perhaps nothing completely new under the sun, I suspect everyone who grapples has stumbled upon a technique they haven’t been shown, only later to find out that it is an actual existing technique — the “is this even a thing? Ok, it is a thing” experience. Training just last night, I thought I came up with something both clever and novel during ne waza randori, only to find myself scooped by Kyuzo Mifune when I came home and watched some videos. I watched a technique that I stumbled upon myself demonstrated by a sixty five year-old in 1948 (10th dans: they’ve got it all pretty much figured out). That kind of thing happens. And it probably happens an awful lot more to someone with the creativity of a Nino Schembri than it would to, say, me.

Let me again state as clearly as I can that I’m not suggesting that Bravo or Schembri or Aoki or Diaz or Imes (one of these things: not quite like the others) have “ripped off” anything or anyone. That is absolutely not what I’m suggesting here, implicitly or explicitly. Given the nature of grappling, and the seemingly limitless but actually finite ways of forcing an opponent to submit to a choke or joint lock, it’s inevitable that there will be independent discoveries of techniques. There is no question that the modern rubber guard adaptations of the gogoplata or kagato jime have expanded the possibilities of this technique immensely, effectively bringing the technique back from the dead.

And that’s what interests me here. When we see the gogoplata — this technique that is clearly the new hotness in mixed martial arts thanks to flashy finishes like Aoki’s mounted attack against Nagata that had many observers unable to find the words to describe it — we’re not seeing a new technique, but an old technique made startlingly new through innovative modern applications. The kagato-jime, a technique that was once present in — but clearly never particularly central to — the traditional judo ne waza syllabus has reentered the mainstream of grappling in a fascinatingly roundabout way: a Brazilian rediscovery of the technique, further developed by an American, whose system finds perhaps its fullest realization in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu stylings of a Japanese judoka.

“There is fashion in judo,” ne waza specialist and 1981 World Champion Katsuhiko Kashiwazaki once wrote, “and sometimes I wonder if there is anything that is truly new!” Well, sort of, there is. But it’s complicated.