You don't necessarily need to get drunk to train or fight using a drunken style. The idea of the drunken style is to emulate the unpredictability of someone who's been soaked in the piss, to do things in such a way that your opponent will have absolutely no idea of what you might do next. Which leads us to...
jlambvo: Sorry for the delay in replying to you, Jon - I must have clean forgotten about this thread until people started posting on it again. Anyway, the above pretty much sums up the one common characteristic of all the known drunken styles. Other than that characteristic, they often share little else in common, though it influences everything they do heavily. That said, by the very nature of the style, just about al the drunken styles known are highly acrobatic and physically-demanding, since practitioners need to have strong, agile bodies able to bend into all sorts of odd positions and be able to generate effective power from those positions while maintaining full control their movement at all times. While being actually drunk is certainly not a prerequisite for training or fighting with the style, my teacher did tell me that the full potential of a drunken style is best expressed when one is just slightly tipsy, as it makes one that much more relaxed, uninhibited and creatively vicious. As for the techniques themselves, they are usually alcohol-soaked variations of their mother styles, for drunken subsets, or dedicated alcoholic fighting for the pure drunken styles
On that note, I just remembered that there ARE dedicated drunken styles out there, only very rare. The southern trademark drunken style is Eight Drunken Immortals, while the nothern one is the Drunken Arhat style.
I thought Gyokushin was a heiho specialist ryuha? Or was that Kumogakure?
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