importance of kata?

[Tez3]

that will be interesting... but then I would bet your Pinan katas are slightly diferent from meany of the Okinawan Karate systems Pinan kata..

Wait, meany of the Okinawan Systems Pinan kata are diferent from each other!! at least I know for a fact that my styles Pinan kata are diferent from Matsumura Seito's Pinans...

We know what you mean! Going to have a kip then get done to typing!

 

[chinto]

We know what you mean! Going to have a kip then get done to typing!

ever wonder if Anku Itosu tought diferent versions of pinan kata to people and laughed at what was going to happen with all the versions that over a centery or two might be tought? an perhaps laughed at the arguments about who was right when all most all of them were or at least might be??

 

[FieldDiscipline]

ever wonder if Anku Itosu tought diferent versions of pinan kata to people and laughed at what was going to happen with all the versions that over a centery or two might be tought? an perhaps laughed at the arguments about who was right when all most all of them were or at least might be??

Heh. I've been known to do that!



Not intentionally though unfortunately :waah:

 

[chinto]

Heh. I've been known to do that!



Not intentionally though unfortunately :waah:

OHH MAN!! now that is mean..and a Dirty Trick .... hmmmm:yoda:"A Jedi desires not these things, NOOO, not these things!

LOL

 

[TheOriginalName]

Just a quick note....

I can understand why some of you have flared up at this question, as it is a commonly asked one to which the "answers" have already been posted.

However, the thing i love when i open a thread like this is the passion.
It is clear that many of you are passionate about your art - it comes through clear as day. And that is to be commended.
This passion i hope extends right through your lives - as such passion can only enhance life.

What also shows is the "control" which our arts teach.
It would be so simple to lash out at such as post with a volly of....well i'm sure we could all imagine.
I also hope this control extends beyond your art.

The final thing - this post i believe highlights the need to be careful with our wording. We need to be upfront in our view and questions, however post them in such a way that we do not cause insult. We must show the "respect" to those around us that we would expect them to show us.

Just a few thought on why this type of post is not always a bad thing....

Enjoy my insanity one and all.....

 

[exile]

OHH MAN!! now that is mean..and a Dirty Trick .... hmmmm:yoda:"A Jedi desires not these things, NOOO, not these things!

LOL

LOL is right! Anko Itosu looks very grandfatherly and kind in various photos of him I've seen reproduced, but don't forget, this was a guy who had dozens of fights in his life and had his reputation made in part by going to Naha and breaking the arm of some guy who was dissing Shuri style karate with a `shock block' that ended the fight in one move... a guy like that could well be someone who'd get a kick out of setting up a bunch of rival disciples and their schools with slight variations that eventually led to doctrinal disagreements on the scale of the religious wars of the 17th century.

But really, I suspect it was more a matter of Itosu's thinking evolving continuously, changing and modifying stuff as he saw fit, and everyone he taught his latest, new-improved method to adhering to it, well, ... religiously. People have, if I recall correctly, suggested that Ed Parker did something like this in Kenpo, constantly updating and refining his method, but different groups of students assumed that they and they alone had been privy to the EP's Final Word on the subject, which led to a lot of rivalry and contention in Kenpo later on. My own picture of guys like Matsumura, Azato, Itosu, Kyan, Miyagi and the rest is that they were experimentalists and innovators, not doctrinaire system-builders trying to get every `i' dotted and `t' crossed. He may well have tinkered with the Pinans on an ongoing basis; after all, he created them (on the basis of older material, of course) and maybe couldn't resist tweaking them and playing with them to get them just right as his thinking evolved... like, we never do that with our pet projects, eh? :lol:

 

[chinto]

LOL is right! Anko Itosu looks very grandfatherly and kind in various photos of him I've seen reproduced, but don't forget, this was a guy who had dozens of fights in his life and had his reputation made in part by going to Naha and breaking the arm of some guy who was dissing Shuri style karate with a `shock block' that ended the fight in one move... a guy like that could well be someone who'd get a kick out of setting up a bunch of rival disciples and their schools with slight variations that eventually led to doctrinal disagreements on the scale of the religious wars of the 17th century.

But really, I suspect it was more a matter of Itosu's thinking evolving continuously, changing and modifying stuff as he saw fit, and everyone he taught his latest, new-improved method to adhering to it, well, ... religiously. People have, if I recall correctly, suggested that Ed Parker did something like this in Kenpo, constantly updating and refining his method, but different groups of students assumed that they and they alone had been privy to the EP's Final Word on the subject, which led to a lot of rivalry and contention in Kenpo later on. My own picture of guys like Matsumura, Azato, Itosu, Kyan, Miyagi and the rest is that they were experimentalists and innovators, not doctrinaire system-builders trying to get every `i' dotted and `t' crossed. He may well have tinkered with the Pinans on an ongoing basis; after all, he created them (on the basis of older material, of course) and maybe couldn't resist tweaking them and playing with them to get them just right as his thinking evolved... like, we never do that with our pet projects, eh? :lol:

yep that could well be, but remember also that the Pinan kata were for the Okinawan School system primarily. ... So gota also when thinking about it seriously wonder if some of the diferences were based on perhaps who and what age groop they thought the student might be teaching in the schools, and or be in thoes schools perhaps?

 

[Danny T]

Could someone explain to this non karataka the differences in Kata, Hyung, and Bunkai? As someone looking in there often appears, at least to me, they are used synonymously and at other times they seem to be different.

Danny T

 

[exile]

Could someone explain to this non karataka the differences in Kata, Hyung, and Bunkai? As someone looking in there often appears, at least to me, they are used synonymously and at other times they seem to be different.

Danny T

Kata on MT are the formal patterns that embody the technical core of karate; kata in general refers in Japanese to any formal pattern or stylized method (floral arrangement, tea ceremony... you name it, there's a kata for it in Japan). Hyung is the Korean term for the same thing. Bunkai is the analysis of kata to reveal the application of the movements the kata consist of so that the combat uses of the kata, the moves, are revealed. From the time of Anko Itosu more than a century ago, the fighting system of karate and its related arts has been deliberately obscured by labelling certain moves by misleading movement: an arm pin followed by a horizontal elbow strike followed by a downward hammerfist to the assailant's neck, face or upper arm might be labelled a `down block' and so on. The Japanese expression kaisai no genri specifically refers to the decoding method that would allow bunkai to be carried out for kata, and was taught only to the most advanced students. Innocent-looking, seemingly choreographed series of kata and hyung moves turn out, when such methods are applied systematically and realistically to these forms, to contain extremely brutal and damaging fighting techs.

 

[Sukerkin]

Excellent and straighforward synopsis of the concepts there, Exile - bravo!

 

[Tez3]

I don't think anyone actually started out to change movements in kata, I think it happens naturally! It's like the game of Chinese whispers, what starts out with the first person is rarely what is recieved by the last.

If I'm doing kata on my own or for a display and there's a side kick I will change it to a front kick because my front kicks are far better than my side ones so it looks better. I of course teach the side kick version but if I was the head of a school and decide to change it who would say anything? I and plenty of others have 'senior moments' in kata comps where you forget a move, IIve done also when teaching, I go off and check in the book but what if I forgot the original move and thought it was something else?and the kata will change. If I have a bad back one day when teaching and don't do a certain movement with so much of a twist, the students will do it the same way and oops, there's another kata changed!

Taken over time instructors quirks will influence kata hugely I think! No one follows another exactly right, there's tiny changes which over time again will change katas.That's without the instructors who think "well I don't think that bits right, I'll just tweak it a bit" there's also the instructors who leave and start their own schools who change parts of a kata to make their own mark on it and I could go on .....lol! ( no don't they shout!)


That's some of the things I think happen,of course that's without the deliberate updating and changing that goes on! To be honest it's a wonder anyone recognises anyone else's kata!!

 

[exile]

yep that could well be, but remember also that the Pinan kata were for the Okinawan School system primarily. ... So gota also when thinking about it seriously wonder if some of the diferences were based on perhaps who and what age groop they thought the student might be teaching in the schools, and or be in thoes schools perhaps?

That comes into it too, I'm very sure. Itosu was an educator, as much as anything else. I suspect he saw the teaching of karate in the schools as a key to its survival; even in Okinawa, the complexity of life was scaling up rapidly from how things were when he worked for Bushi Matsumura and helped, if the stories are true, defend the last King of Okinawa. Mass education was the wave of the future, but Itosu also, I'm convinced, saw the Pinans as the embodiment of the martial content of the karate that he, Matsumura and a few of the other masters of that time had worked out, so there would be an adult constituency as well as a schoolchild constituency for the Pinans, and some of the variations may well have hinged on those circumstances as well.

I strongly suspect that for people of that time, the content of these arts was much more fluid and dynamic than we're used to thinking of them these days. As I say, I don't think the masters of the past regarded what they were doing as fixed doctrine; they themselves were still in the discovery phase of these arts, and experimentation and innovation were the order of the day. They certainly weren't nearly as worried about lineage and doctrinal purity as many contemporary martial artists seem to be; they were eclectic, by necessity, I think, and would change the story they were telling depending on the age and experience of the practitioners they were teaching, and as their own understanding evolved. Fixed codification was something that I just don't see as part of their vision of the arts that they were busy bringing into being.

Excellent and straighforward synopsis of the concepts there, Exile - bravo!

Mark, thanks very much for your kind thoughts—I could probably have put it a bit more clearly, but fortunately, I don't have to, because Iain Abernethy has done that way, way better than I ever could could, here. And he has this incredible treasure-trove of papers and e-books on the subject of kata and bunkai at his site here, absolutely free, no strings or membership or anything attached. There is literally weeks of extremely insightful and informative material there on methods of bunkai analysis, the history and technical content of specific kata and kata sets (such as the Pinan and Naihanchi), strategic issues such as preemptive strikes and the role of kicks vs. hand/arm techs, etc.

I can't figure out how someone can provide all that stuff for free, but if it works for him....

Anyway—the stuff I've mentioned should make it very clear to anyone, even from a non-karate-based MA, just what the role of kata and bunkai are.

 

[chinto]

I don't think anyone actually started out to change movements in kata, I think it happens naturally! It's like the game of Chinese whispers, what starts out with the first person is rarely what is recieved by the last.

If I'm doing kata on my own or for a display and there's a side kick I will change it to a front kick because my front kicks are far better than my side ones so it looks better. I of course teach the side kick version but if I was the head of a school and decide to change it who would say anything? I and plenty of others have 'senior moments' in kata comps where you forget a move, IIve done also when teaching, I go off and check in the book but what if I forgot the original move and thought it was something else?and the kata will change. If I have a bad back one day when teaching and don't do a certain movement with so much of a twist, the students will do it the same way and oops, there's another kata changed!

Taken over time instructors quirks will influence kata hugely I think! No one follows another exactly right, there's tiny changes which over time again will change katas.That's without the instructors who think "well I don't think that bits right, I'll just tweak it a bit" there's also the instructors who leave and start their own schools who change parts of a kata to make their own mark on it and I could go on .....lol! ( no don't they shout!)


That's some of the things I think happen,of course that's without the deliberate updating and changing that goes on! To be honest it's a wonder anyone recognises anyone else's kata!!

I guess that depends on the instructor. my instructor and his instructor say "this no never change!" so if and when I am an instructor of a school I WILL NOT change any thing about how I was tought the kata. the kata was made by men who know more then I or my instructor or his instructor.. besides you change the kata you change the meaning and perhaps what it it trying to teach you on a deeper level. the kata was made by men who were looking to pass on what they had found out the hard way.. Namely to stay alive in a fight for your life.

 

[chinto]

"That comes into it too, I'm very sure. Itosu was an educator, as much as anything else. I suspect he saw the teaching of karate in the schools as a key to its survival; even in Okinawa, the complexity of life was scaling up rapidly from how things were when he worked for Bushi Matsumura and helped, if the stories are true, defend the last King of Okinawa. Mass education was the wave of the future, but Itosu also, I'm convinced, saw the Pinans as the embodiment of the martial content of the karate that he, Matsumura and a few of the other masters of that time had worked out, so there would be an adult constituency as well as a schoolchild constituency for the Pinans, and some of the variations may well have hinged on those circumstances as well.

I strongly suspect that for people of that time, the content of these arts was much more fluid and dynamic than we're used to thinking of them these days. As I say, I don't think the masters of the past regarded what they were doing as fixed doctrine; they themselves were still in the discovery phase of these arts, and experimentation and innovation were the order of the day. They certainly weren't nearly as worried about lineage and doctrinal purity as many contemporary martial artists seem to be; they were eclectic, by necessity, I think, and would change the story they were telling depending on the age and experience of the practitioners they were teaching, and as their own understanding evolved. Fixed codification was something that I just don't see as part of their vision of the arts that they were busy bringing into being. " |Quote|



yes and no, they were not going to change things for the hell of it. or for looks, they were looking for effeciant and effective combat techniques. they were training for survival. so the things that worked were fixed at least to a point. they did not change the kata that was handed down, but perhaps made a new one if they learned something well that really made things easier.. or perhaps to pass on something they found in the older kata and wanted to emphisise ... remember the Pinan kata came from the Kusanku and kusanku dai.

 

[Tez3]

I guess that depends on the instructor. my instructor and his instructor say "this no never change!" so if and when I am an instructor of a school I WILL NOT change any thing about how I was tought the kata. the kata was made by men who know more then I or my instructor or his instructor.. besides you change the kata you change the meaning and perhaps what it it trying to teach you on a deeper level. the kata was made by men who were looking to pass on what they had found out the hard way.. Namely to stay alive in a fight for your life.

I think Exile has demonstrated correctly that kata does change. the founder of Wado Ryu Ohtsuka Sensei trained under Funakoshi Sensei and when he left to start Wado he certainly changed the kata, which again have been changed by Wadokai as documented by Shingo Ohgami (Exile if you don't have his book called "Karate Katas of Wado Ryu" do get it, you will love the very technical explainations he gives !)

The fact that Tang Soo Do's hyungs and the katas from Wado are strikingly similiar (yep still typing lol on that) prove to me without a doubt these came from a common source and have been changed by various people.

I like the argument for fluidity, as I said before my side kicks are rubbish basically i will never use one in a fight street or competition so there's no 'deep' meaning to those movesments of kata that seemingly require a side kick, my front kick is extremely good so I will use that if a kick is needed. There's no stretch of the imagination needed to see others may have had a similiar thought. The katas in Wado require front kicks where in TSD there is a sidekick ie in Pyung Ee Dan in movement 7 you move your left leg half a step then do a mid section side kick with the right along with a hammer fist. In Wado at same point, the kick is a front kick.

I don't believe at the time Funakoshi Sensei and Ohtsuka Sensei were teaching there was a dramatic need for self defence, I think I'm right in thinking that Funakoshi Sensei actually hated fighting. I have seen a great many versions of Kushanku, there is Kushanku Dai (big) Kushanku sho (small) Shiho Kushanku (four directions) Chibana no Kushanku ( Kushanku of Chibana) Kuniyoshi no Kunshanku and Chatanaya no Kushanku are the famous ones.

 

[Danny T]

Thank you Exile.

This helps me greatly. In my training we have forms which are the catalogs of our tools. These catalogs contain the movements of the body, the positions & presentation of the tools, the structure of body when presenting the tools. All available usage is within the movements, positions, and most importantly the transitions from movement to movement. We then have specific drills to unlock some of the “techniques” available within the forms and to make one aware of some of the possibilities. Then there are the applications based upon one’s understanding & ability as well as the spatial & physical relationships between combatants. In other words the Striking, Clinching, Joint-locks, Chokes, Throws, Takedowns, Ground-fighting and Weapons work are all within the forms, the drills & exercises build the attributes needs to be able to function and the application process is where we actually function within the possibilities. (Sparring)

From what I see and what you have explained katas contain a vast amount of martial knowledge; Striking techniques, Attacking vital points, Grappling, joint-Locks, Strangles, Ground fighting techniques, Chokes, Throws, Takedowns etc. The amount of martial knowledge contained within the katas can be overwhelming but only when one understands otherwise it is only movement for the movement sake. From my experience with persons of some or limited Karate training I can see why many don’t like kata as well as those of us looking in. When asking about kata I am usually greeted with very passionate quips such as “Kata is very important;, if you don’t understand what you are doing then do your kata’s; kata is the essence of karate if you are asking these questions then you don’t understand kata; continue to do your kata’s and your weakness’ will be revealed to you.

How is one to understand if one only gets these kinds of answers? As passionate as they are it provides no answers for understanding.

Bunkai then the key one uses to unlock the meanings of the movements and possibilities contained with in kata. This is a great help!!

Now is Bunkai a specific part of training or is it something most express as a part of kata? I ask this because in my very early martial art training I had some “karate” training (quite limited) and most karate BB’s I have spoken with or trained with never talk about or use the term bunkai. I can only assume those I have been associated with don’t understand because they didn’t stay in the system long enough or were never taught bunkai. I presently have 4 BBs from 3 different Shotokan schools and 5 from TKD schools training with me. In conversation with them only one knew the term bunkai and his explanation was he never used it but that it was a part of kata. He is a BB but left before learning bunkai.

Now this isn’t a slant so please don’t take it that way, I am only trying to understand the usage of kata and its importance in training. There seems to be far more importance on kata in the karate systems over the Chinese, Filipino, and Silat systems I am far more familiar with. I believe all the training systems are good just different but in order to be effective the participant must have an understanding of what they are training and why.

Thank you Exile for your explanations

Danny

 

[exile]

yes and no, they were not going to change things for the hell of it./B]or for looks, they were looking for effeciant and effective combat techniques. they were training for survival. so the things that worked were fixed at least to a point. they did not change the kata that was handed down, but perhaps made a new one if they learned something well that really made things easier.. or perhaps to pass on something they found in the older kata and wanted to emphisise ... remember the Pinan kata came from the Kusanku and kusanku dai.

Well, sure, kata weren't fashion items to the karate pioneers, and any changes that were made would have been made for sound practical reasons. But those practical reasons can encompass a variety of factors: changes in the instructor's thinking, different adaptations by senior students based on height, weight or other physical differences, feedback from bunkai into karate form... there are all sorts of reasons. Consider e.g. this, devoted to Shotokai kata. Note in particular their observation that

Some katas are performed under the same name but differently. This is due to the fact that some masters have made some changes in kata on the basis of their own specific philosophy. As said before, in the past, the main axis of karate practice was kata as it was done to use techniques in attack and defense. Beauty in performing kata was not considered. ​

I've seen the same thing over and over in the writings of karateka; some bemoan the fact and some, such as the author(s) of the essay I gave the link to, accept it in a very matter-of-fact way. Like anything else, it's almost certainly a mistake to play around with a kata before you deeply understand it and its bunkai. But it happens, and I suspect it has always happened. As an illustration of the remark I've quoted from the Shotokai source, look at the number of somewhat different versions of Rohai that are out there. And as someone noted, I don't remember where, there are a number of different versions of the Pinans even in Okinawan styles. No one would suggest that these variations were created for frivolous reasons, but the karateka who understood kata most deeply almost certainly regarded them as textbooks, not as sacred texts, and subject to modification in their own teaching to reflect their ideas about the best use of the kata. The process is happening before our eyes, so to speak, in Bill Burgar's terrific book Five Years, One Kata. Burgar, a sixth dan Shotokan practitioner, spent five years training exclusively in bunkai for the Gojushiho kata, and the results of his explorations and analyses are in his book, including certain deviations from standard Shotokan Gojushiho which are systematically motivated as they are introduced. For example, where the kata contains certain `stylized' moves that Burgar believes would have been understood by experienced as `code' for a particular technique sequence, he modifes the kata, usually only slightly, so that the kata movement in his version of Gojushiho is more transparently linked to the oyo he demonstrates for the movement as an effective application.

... the founder of Wado Ryu Ohtsuka Sensei trained under Funakoshi Sensei and when he left to start Wado he certainly changed the kata, which again have been changed by Wadokai as documented by Shingo Ohgami (Exile if you don't have his book called "Karate Katas of Wado Ryu" do get it, you will love the very technical explainations he gives !)

Thanks for the pointer, Tez—I've just ordered it from Amazon!

The fact that Tang Soo Do's hyungs and the katas from Wado are strikingly similiar (yep still typing lol on that) prove to me without a doubt these came from a common source and have been changed by various people.

Lots of changes in the transition from the Japanese to the Korean interpretation of karate. But similar things happen as new styles fragment off established ones even within particular national MA traditions.

I like the argument for fluidity, as I said before my side kicks are rubbish basically i will never use one in a fight street or competition so there's no 'deep' meaning to those movesments of kata that seemingly require a side kick, my front kick is extremely good so I will use that if a kick is needed. There's no stretch of the imagination needed to see others may have had a similiar thought. The katas in Wado require front kicks where in TSD there is a sidekick ie in Pyung Ee Dan in movement 7 you move your left leg half a step then do a mid section side kick with the right along with a hammer fist. In Wado at same point, the kick is a front kick.

Another example of the modification of kata based on `instructor preference', as I've seen it referred to. Look at different versions of Pinan Shodan, where some versions of the kata use a hammerfist on the third move and others use a knifehand strike. In TSD, the hammerfist is used; in most lineages of TKD that I know of, Palgwe Sa Jang, whose first subsequence is lifted whole from Pinan Shodan (or more likely Heian Nidan, since it would have come into the KMAs via Shotokan), is performed with a the knifehand on that move. This difference could possibly have corresponded to different targets: hammerfist for an attack on the jaw, knifehand for a strike to the throat. After a few such changes in detail accumulate, you're looking at distinctly different versions of the form, although both are recognizably the `same' kata.

I have seen a great many versions of Kushanku, there is Kushanku Dai (big) Kushanku sho (small) Shiho Kushanku (four directions) Chibana no Kushanku ( Kushanku of Chibana) Kuniyoshi no Kunshanku and Chatanaya no Kushanku are the famous ones.

Right... it's just so common! No one is saying people make these changes just on a lark; there's usually a good reason for it, but it does happen, and I'd bet high it's always been that way.

 

[Tez3]

That's a thoughtful post Danny T! I think too many karateka follow blindly that kata is just a catalogue of movements that you have to do to pass your gradings and because they've always been done.

I was introduced to Iain Abernethy's teachings early on and am going to one of his seminars hopefully next month. When doing Wado and now doing TSD the Bunkai is tremendously important. I also do MMA and Iain has shown several 'kata moves' that are very useful. In the Wado kata Chinto and the TSD Hyung Jin Do there is a move where you raise your leg to have the foot just behind your other knee and raise your arms. Iain pointed out that if you were doing this move on your back this is a standard move from juijitsu used for arm and leg bars etc. Hard to explain but it's on one of his videos.

I've often had said to me about kata that people can't fight someone doing all the moves in a kata. They mistakenly think that if someone is attacking you, we launch into the entire kata to defend ourselves! I get it a lot from the MMA guys, when I point out that it's more of an aide memoire they tend to undrstand a little better. I tend to use the analogy of when we have new people who come to learn the stand up fighting we teach and drill them with a combination of jab, cross, uppercut and uppercut. Of course in a fight they aren't used in that order but it enables the student to learn them properly, it's a very basic 'kata'. It's very over simplified of course but gets the point across.

Reading a book about Geishas recently and they have dance katas to learn.

 

[exile]

Thank you Exile.

My pleasure, Danny; your questions are exactly the right ones to ask. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner; I kind of cross-posted with you and missed this message.

This helps me greatly. In my training we have forms which are the catalogs of our tools. These catalogs contain the movements of the body, the positions & presentation of the tools, the structure of body when presenting the tools. All available usage is within the movements, positions, and most importantly the transitions from movement to movement. We then have specific drills to unlock some of the “techniques” available within the forms and to make one aware of some of the possibilities. Then there are the applications based upon one’s understanding & ability as well as the spatial & physical relationships between combatants. In other words the Striking, Clinching, Joint-locks, Chokes, Throws, Takedowns, Ground-fighting and Weapons work are all within the forms, the drills & exercises build the attributes needs to be able to function and the application process is where we actually function within the possibilities. (Sparring)

Right, that's the general idea of kata. There's one additional factor, which some people I think minimize (out of a well-motivated desire to minimize the `secret esoteric hidden technique' mystique that tends to pervade a lot of MA self-promotion), but which was probably genuinely important: the need to keep certain tactical skills and specific combat moves secret, especially important in cases where MA knowledge was kept within particular families, as was definitely the case in China and, as I understand it, in Okinawa as well. Something as simple as a strike to the face followed by a potentially lethal neck twist could be concealed as a series of movements plausibly labelled block-retract-punch, where the `block' is in fact a knifehand strike that via muchimi becomes the takeoff point for a hair/ear grab and twist that breaks the assailants neck or at least traumatizes his spine to the point where he can't move, let alone fight; the use of this technique could easily be concealed in the apparently harmless vocabulary of blocking, striking and stance change that Itosu introduced. So when you look at kata, you have to bear in mind that the people who put them together didn't necessary want you to see everything that was in there. That was for the instructor to reveal, in his own good time, to some select group of students who were ready for and worthy of that knowledge.

From what I see and what you have explained katas contain a vast amount of martial knowledge; Striking techniques, Attacking vital points, Grappling, joint-Locks, Strangles, Ground fighting techniques, Chokes, Throws, Takedowns etc. The amount of martial knowledge contained within the katas can be overwhelming but only when one understands otherwise it is only movement for the movement sake. From my experience with persons of some or limited Karate training I can see why many don’t like kata as well as those of us looking in. When asking about kata I am usually greeted with very passionate quips such as “Kata is very important;, if you don’t understand what you are doing then do your kata’s; kata is the essence of karate if you are asking these questions then you don’t understand kata; continue to do your kata’s and your weakness’ will be revealed to you.

How is one to understand if one only gets these kinds of answers? As passionate as they are it provides no answers for understanding.

Yes, absolutely. And often you get that answer, I suspect, from people who themselves are none too sure of just what information kata contain. You should be aware, though, that this is changing very rapidly, as a result of the kind of experimental investigations of kata applications that people like Iain Abernethy, whom Tez mentioned in her reply to you, have been carrying out. The single best source I know of on the realistic combat interpretation of kata is IA's book Bunkai-Jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, but he also has a website where you can download, for free, no strings attached, a huge amount of terrific material on kata history, bunkai, and combat strategies inherent in traditional karate. If you go here and take the link at the top of the window to `Articles', you can access to some terrific stuff; in particular, these will answer pretty much any general question you might have about bunkai methods, the role of kata in realistic combat training, ans the like:

http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/BasicBunkaiPart1.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/BasicBunkaiPart2.asp
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http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/BasicBunkaiPart8.asp

http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_3.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_7.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_14.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_9.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_9.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/article_19.asp
http://www.iainabernethy.com/articles/Kataalockorkey.asp

And the other articles you'll see there, both by IA and his guest writers, are terrific as well. The point is that the claim that kata are the heart of karate isn't a mystification of obscure choreography that people have been mindlessly teaching and mindlessly learning when they should've been focusing on effective combat techniques: the techniques are there in the kata, but you have to learn to read them.

Bunkai then the key one uses to unlock the meanings of the movements and possibilities contained with in kata. This is a great help!!

Now is Bunkai a specific part of training or is it something most express as a part of kata? I ask this because in my very early martial art training I had some “karate” training (quite limited) and most karate BB’s I have spoken with or trained with never talk about or use the term bunkai. I can only assume those I have been associated with don’t understand because they didn’t stay in the system long enough or were never taught bunkai.

The decline in the study of bunkai is probably due to the increase in the scale of participation in karate that really took off when Funakoshi and other Okinawan karateka brought their martial art to Japan and started teaching the techniques to large classes. This is what Burgar in his book has to say about the change:

Originally, the heart of karate was individual kata training with one-on-one instruction being a central feature. However, when karate was introduced into the school system on Okinawa (in the early 1900s) the emphasis started to change. Instruction became one-to-many and classes took the form of performing kata synchronized by count. The use of training kihon (basic techniques) in lines advancing up and down the dojo then became widespread. By the time karate was introduced into Japan from Okinawa this practice was already well established and then built upon. ​

Another important aspect of the bunkai issue, though, is the very interesting suggestion in Gennosuke Higake's book Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi that, as he was told by Shozan Kubota, one of the last of Gichin Funakoshi's senior students (4th Dan from GF, 1944), there was a `secret pact' between GF and the other Okinawan expat instructors, on the one hand, and the senior Karateka then alive in Okinawa, to the effect that the former would not teach the true bunkai for the kata they taught. As he writes (pp.65–66), Sensei Kubota told him that

When Master Gichin Funakoshi introduced Okinawan karate to the mainland, there was a `secret pact' made amongst the practitioners of Okinawan karate. Karate was primarily spread at universities, and the explanation, which Sensei Kubota learned, was about the same as today.

It was, however, completely different than what he was taught at night by Master Funakoshi at his house. When asked, `Why did he teach something different than in the day time?', his answer was that `Master Funakoshi was actually not suppose to teach it.'

In other words... when he taught his ordinary students [`yomatonchu' (the slang for Japanese mainlanders)], he taught them katas, which they would not be able to use.

Sensei Kubota also learned from Master Kenwa Mabuni. Master Mabuni also divided the teaching into `the original form' and `the other form'.... There is a well-known saying in karate that goes, `Even if you teach the kata, don't teach the actual techniques'. I believe this phrase expresses well the contents of the `secret pact'.​

In view of these kinds of factors, it's not surprising that the study of `true bunkai' and the teaching of the general method of kaisai no genri to systematically decode applications, became less and less part of the core karate curriculum, with emphasis shifting to kata performance, rather than analysis and application, mastery of individual techniques, and point-scoring competition.

I presently have 4 BBs from 3 different Shotokan schools and 5 from TKD schools training with me. In conversation with them only one knew the term bunkai and his explanation was he never used it but that it was a part of kata. He is a BB but left before learning bunkai.

What I've said to this point probably goes at least a bit of the way to making it clear why bunkai training has become something of a lost discipline in a lot of karate dojos (and that much more so in the KMAs which the Kwan founders developed on the basis of their karate training in Japan), though this seems to have started being reversed quite rapidly in the past decade, as Abernethy's work and that of his colleagues makes clear.

Now this isn’t a slant so please don’t take it that way, I am only trying to understand the usage of kata and its importance in training. There seems to be far more importance on kata in the karate systems over the Chinese, Filipino, and Silat systems I am far more familiar with. I believe all the training systems are good just different but in order to be effective the participant must have an understanding of what they are training and why.

Well, one thing I was told in a discussion of this point on another thread is that in some of the CMAs, at least, the forms are much more transparently related to their applications than is the case in the Okinawan/Japanese systems. This would be worth exploring as a separate issue, maybe in its own thread...

 

[Tez3]

This is only anecdotal, I was told it years ago but it ties in with the secret pact that Exile was talking about, I have found no basis for it though perhaps other can. I was told that at the end of the last war when Japan was occupied by the Allies many Allied soldiers, Americans in particular became interested in karate. The Japanese instructors made a point of teaching them as little as they could and what they did teach was suitable for, in their eyes, only children. This is why we punch when doing Junzuki with the palm facing down when it should be palm facing to the side, a more lethal punch. It's also why we do kata without knowing why! It seems the Japanese instructors just told the Western students that Japanese students don't question the instructors and all would be revealed at some mysterious future when the student was 'ready' for the magical techniques. Of course with the Western students that time never came but they had gained a fair knowledge and this was what they took back to the States. I'm not so sure about the UK as I believe there were few British troops in Japan at the time.
As I said, I have no basis for proving if this could be true but in light of Exiles post it sounds very feasible.

Exile I think you will enjoy that book, it's by far my favourite martial arts book. I read it regularly as it takes a long while for me to take in what he writes, especially the equations! Imagine them in kata! He can also show you far better than I Wado Ryu.