Kata Heritage – Reprise

12-1-2001



Bruce,



You continue to ask very interesting questions about kata.  An entire book of them in reality. I can’t say I’ll be brief, but let me attempt to flow over the various issues in my own way.

Beginning with Judo’s Kata, I first must preface my remarks that I only know what I’ve read.


With the advent of Olympic Judo competition, kata practice fell into disuse. [Which of course doesn’t answer how many if any judo schools still retain the practice.]



From the days kata was practiced, the later kata were only practiced by the most senior judoka. This may be because without advanced movement skills it was worthless to spend time on these kata, or it may be that only the most senior needed the challenge to keep their minds and bodies fresh. Pick any answer, but in the past kata was a more accepted practice.



Why was it discontinued? Some of the high level skills are bitches to teach and most will never spend the time to gain those skills. Those who do follow high level skill training eventually end up more advanced, but if the goal is to train your students to survive and win matches at their levels, it is easy to say, the more difficult techniques aren’t worth the effort.  



Perhaps there are 5,000 techniques and combinations (just an arbitrary number which logical cases can be made in either direction for different answers).  No sane instructor would teach them (assuming they knew them all). Instead a method for training and developing skill in a few to succeed in contest and martial focus would be chosen.  The longer the student went, more skills would be taught and eventually the student would hit on a mixture of what they actually will use for self defense of contest.  That eventual number, likely small compared to the whole, doesn’t negate the 5,000 possibilities, but points out how effectiveness can be derived with a piece of the whole pie.



The Judo kata (many of them) evolved over a very long time, some far older than Kano Sensei’s instructions.  For many reasons they were felt worth incorporating and were kept for the most senior. Such was based on an unlimited value of training, not stopping when one ages, but continuing to grow in skill throughout long life.



Let us leave the Judo arena for the time and consider advanced skill. I believe I can make the point with a common, most uncommon, example. I choose to use Bill “Superfoot” Wallace and his kicking skills.

Where most in the karate arts kick, very, very few do so with the skilled kicks Bill Wallace mastered.  In 76 I attended a clinic with him and he demonstrated throwing literally hundreds of kicks without putting his foot on the ground, with a level of skill and focus that is simply astounding.  He would take very good local karateka, tell them exactly which kicks he was throwing and in what sequence and they would try to block them with no success. And these were people who were skilled in competition.

 


That didn’t mean Bill Wallace couldn’t be beaten, but those that did so didn’t do it by playing Bill’s game and in his range. They did so by moving outside of the Wallace dimension, and were high skill players in their own rights.  A number of years later Bill became a PKA champion and his KO’s weren’t the result of his kicks, it was his hands at that time. But Bill knew winning was more important than just using one technique and he adapted very well.



Undoubtedly genetic factors influence high technique skills, whether in Wallace’s kicking or another’s grappling, etc.  But it also takes great training and practice.



Bill used to say he just threw three kicks (all with his left leg) his side kick, his hook kick and his roundhouse kick. But the reality was he threw literally dozens and dozens of kick  variations off of those three kicking themes. And his lengthy kicking drills were kata, as in essence kata is form, and all drills take form in one shape or another. Bill just used the fluidity of Bill Wallace Kata.

 

Now that was sufficient for Bill, but I spent years trying to incorporate Bill’s drills into my own training and eventually realized that was wrong for me, as I’m not, nor will I ever be Bill Wallace. My form in kicking had to become a shape that worked for me, a difference in kata, though underlying his kicks and mine there is a definite ‘shape’ that they flow from.



Now we go backwards from Bill Wallace into the developing karate.




There are vast differences between Karate’s origins in Okinawa and what developed as Karate in Japan, regardless of the link being the Okinawan instructors.



On their own efforts, Okinawan instructors (until perhaps the modern age 1950 forward) didn’t attempt to document their systems.  If you look at the systems which arose from root instructors, such as the students of Kyan Chotoku, the shape of their kata and systems look very different in fine detail.



If we don’t conclude they were poorly taught, then other factors seem to be implied. Among those being:

Noise in the transmission (the student didn’t listen correctly)

The instructor taught them differently according to their individual needs, and as there was no ‘correct’ template it became established fact student by student.

As the instructor aged and learnt more about his art, he chose to focus on different details which changed the shape of his art by those training with him in those times.

The instructor consciously taught them differently, holding back information until they spent a lifetime proving themselves worthy.



I’m sure there are more factors than I’m citing, but I believe they help establish that there could be many different cases, and all may have been a factor in the resulting fluid developing karate.



When were the older kata created?  There are literally no records. Some point to China, others cite historical evidence those ‘Chinese’ forms were performed in Okinawa long before the China import dates.



What did the originators mean a move or a kata to mean?



Nobody can answer that. We are several generations away from those who trained under those ‘original’ instructors. WWII had a lot to do with eliminating historical evidence as well as resulting in the deaths of many who may have been able to answer those questions. Yet at the same time WWII made it possible for the rest of the world to know of Karate’s existence. A real quandary and parable at the same time.




But you know it isn’t just the Older Okinawan’s can’t prove what happened. Can we do better. My  original instructor trained in Okinawa in 1959, and there was no ‘record’ of what was taught in those days as a template exact.  No did he leave any record that I can use to prove what I teach was or wasn’t what he passed to me. There are tertiary records, a handful of movies made by my systems founder, mostly against his desires, but this doesn’t really prove a template against the reality of those who changed with him.



On the whole the real Okinawan experience was only personal, not to be documented, and it remains mostly so to this day.



Yet, we are not without glimpses as to what the Origins of Okinawan Karate looked like. Funakoshi in 1922 and 1925 published the first works. Shortly there after Mabuni Kenwa, and a number of significant others did the same, not to share it with us, but to provide a template for their new Japanese students as well as to try and impress the world of Japanese MA’s that their Okinawan art was worthy too.

 

Works such as 1933’s ‘Toudi Kenpo’ by Mutsu Mizuho went into great detail on the kata, and the application of karate, far deeper than a punch/kick art. Those varied texts and many other important writings, alas, are not currently available in English, but they provide a wealth of material for those willing to pay the price (literally and figuratively) and obtain them. Several of the more important works are already under translation efforts and before too many years pass, the rest of us will be able to glimpse back 70 and 80 years to see what some of the origins resembled.



But observing Karate’s development in Okinawa we can make several safe observations. For most of the past 100 years, the open art taught was a striking art.  Other obvious grappling techniques were often not mentioned, unless to very senior students (observations made by various others). That didn’t mean they didn’t exist, but rather that a choice of percussive technique was made first. Then, perhaps if the student really got good, would the others be mentioned.  Likewise it may have been that the students skills weren’t sufficiently advanced (by several decades of work) to be able to learn how to sell more complex techniques.



Now before flame wars start, there is obviously other antidotial evidence that more than one method of instruction existed.  Yet I find that this is probably an accurate model of most karate instruction.



Yet hard work shows us literally a multitude of technique exists within every kata. Again, going back, nobody would teach all of the possibilities, and that isn’t important, either, one simply has to develop enough to actually make them work.



I think the answer JA gave on the fluid nature of kata likely sums it up best.  But you don’t learn to hold water permanently, just to maneuver it so you can drink it.  And learning the vast depths of kata doesn’t drive one to becoming incapable of picking a response, but rather helps one accept everything is changing all of the time.



Masters don’t change kata, people change kata.  People and different changing circumstances.  I was originally taught no applications for kata. Then for years I sweated and as I worked up new paradigms on occasion I would find the new answer would change my kata’s performance. So I understand why one may change anything. As I grew in deeper appreciation of kata’s depths, I found I had less and less reason to allow any changes, for kata’s fluidity gave me more than enough to do, and why put the energy into changing something I was learning more and more about.



I had gone through stages considering if a better choice could be made, teaching techniques in logical series than rhapsodically but then I came to understand kata still differently as exercises in energy development, and not just hooks to hang applications.


 
And it matters not if one strains against a partner trying to break their lock, or standing on one leg throwing hundreds of kicks, or running Chinto Kata uncountable times. They are all versions of the same quest.  An attempt to wrap a line around an unlimited area of study.



This is a personal vision. All will accept it or not but I honestly believe the goals are the same, kata or no kata, kata eternal or kata changing. They all represent human awareness trying to grasp the ungraspable and taking the formless and finding form and meaning in it.



What is also obvious is we are all different, our physical, mental and spiritual needs are different. Our instructors are not all created equal, nor are the experiences we face equal. All of these things shape our view of the world and our art.



Victor Smith
Bushi No Te Isshinryu