Kata are (supposed to be) a training tool. What is the point of a training exercise that obscures what it is trying to teach? Mysticism? Convincing people to train and pay for something they don't understand for longer? If that is the purpose of the chamber, then that purpose should be made obvious. After all, chambering your hand as is traditionally practiced in the kata will look and feel different from a twisting/pulling/anchoring grab. Our own kata distinguish the two.
OK, this is where history comes in. The whole modern interpretation of kata—which actually goes back well into the early 20th century so far as Japanese karate and its spinoff arts, such as TKD, are concerned—is based on Itosu's
deliberately misleading packaging of kata for children's use in school. Chambering as we are commonly taught it
never existed in the original applications, any more that the knife-hand 'blocks', which are typically strikes to the throat, or 'down blocks', which are typically parts of takedowns or attacks on the assailant's forcibly lowered head, are actually blocks. There is a 'public', literal version of kata, which follows Itosu's concealment conventions, and a practical, combat-ready reading of the kata, which has a name in Japanese:
kaisai no genri, the 'theory'—the decoding method—for kata. Chambering is just as much a part of the systematic disguise as the blocks which are in fact strikes, the punches which are in fact parts of breaking neck-twists, or the pivots which are parts of throws.
Take kicks, for example. In Taekwondo, you chamber the kick, then strike—but for practical attacks where the actual strategy involves closing, not opening the distance to your attacker, the chamber
is the strike—a knee strike to the ground or abdomen, typically associated with some upper body method of anchoring the attacker so he can't move back. In TKD, these knee strikes were systematically reinterpreted as chambers to middle or higher level kicks—but in many cases, this makes nonsense of the associated moves, which clearly are based on close-in controlling methods.
Or take the retraction chamber. There is a huge amount of work on the kata which involve this kind of move, and the point is, you are always pulling part of your attacker's body toward you
into your strike when you do this—a point that Iain Abernethy, mentioned above, or Lawrence Kane and Kris Wilder, in
The Way of Kata, based on their understanding of Gojo-ryu, develop in detail. The key element which is often ignored in interpretation of kata is
muchimi, the transition in the use of the striking hand into a grabbing hand (and vice versa). In the Taikyoku kata, for example, the initial turn+down block already incorporates a lock on the attacker's gripping hand: you and he are facing each other—he's
not coming in at you from the side—and your 90º turn-plus-'retraction chamber' encodes a reversal of his grip on you with your 'free' hand, pulling his arm toward you, while your 'blocking' arm strikes his upper arm above the elbow, completing the pin, which you use to force his head down, at which point your 'down block' is a spearing elbow strike to his face followed by a hammerfist to the side of his temple or throat. And that striking fist then grips his ear or hair, pulling it back toward you (another instance of muchimi/hikite 'retraction chambering') while you step in with the the other fist to punch him in the side of the jaw or neck, and so on. The point, with respect to the bolded material in EH's post, is that the kata have been stylized so that this is not explicit, but for the pioneer karateka and their students, the anchoring/controlling use of this retraction would have been
understood. And this kind of stylized reference to what would have been commonly understood techniques is probably very common in the kata and hyungs we now learn and practice, but usually without the kind of guidance that gives us instructions on what moves the movement themselves were supposed to correspond to.
There's no point in practicing the kata unless you can read the actual use of the movements involved; but those uses were obscured by deliberate policy when karate started entering 'mainstream' educational facilities, and were subsequently lost as the focus of karate shifted from no-nonsense street defense to group training, morale-building, character-building, you name it, a process which got into high gear when Funakoshi brought karate to Japan, but which Itosu set in motion when he got karate accepted as a physical education requirement in Okinawan schools in the first decade of the 20th century. The whole
bunkai-jutsu movement came into being to try to recover the practical applications encoded in these kata—and in those applications, 'chambering' is always part of the main technique: a striking movement, a deflecting movement (as in the double knifehand 'block'), or an anchoring/trapping movement. One thing it is not, though, is a time-wasting 'coiling up' movement.
