Realistic Poomsae, Kata's

[terryl965]

What is everybody take on Poomsae or Kata's being realistic for real self defense. How can we really process the true meaning of such great techniques when the majority of school and instructor teach it as a after thought. I mean I see so many people come from other schools and they have no earthly ideal what the movements are, let alone the actual techniques. Are we doomed twenty years from now, with people making certain things up do to the facts of mis information, is there a way to preserve what the true meaning are?

 

[Makalakumu]

I am a little confused as there are multiple questions presented in the above post. Each of them could use a reframe...how about...how do we use kata effectively in our arts? Does that seem close to what you are driving at?

 

[terryl965]

I am a little confused as there are multiple questions presented in the above post. Each of them could use a reframe...how about...how do we use kata effectively in our arts? Does that seem close to what you are driving at?

OPJ that is pretty much it lets go with that OK

 

[newGuy12]

is there a way to preserve what the true meaning are?

Who knows what the true meaning is? If the ones WHO DO KNOW open this knowledge and publish it (and some of them are, are they not?), then NO, the knowledge will survive.

Also, there are some, I believe, who can interpret the motions.

Also, in freefighting, the mood is one of friendly competition, or not-as-friendly in the case of a tournament. But, in the hyung, the intention can be, "I am going to kill this opponent."

 

[exile]

What is everybody take on Poomsae or Kata's being realistic for real self defense.

My take: implicit in the poomsae that TKD inherited from its origins in Japanese karate are extremely effective instructions for practical combat in a civilian self-defense context. We have enormous evidence, in the form of bodies of analysis by some outstanding, clear-thinking karateka, that these applications are encoded in kata; we also know, from the evidence of his own pen, that Anko Itosu substituted children's-level intepretations for these applications in order to get karate into the Okinawan school system. And we have the living evidence of an ongoing bunkai tradition in Okinawa, the 'root source' of the karate-based MAs, for these multiple bunkai, as Kwan Jang and cstanley have pointed out on other threads. I think, at this point, that anyone who maintains that hyungs/kata are nothing but a kind of martial folkdance unrelated to realistic combat is facing a burden of proof that they are never going to be able to meet.

965;952948How can we really process the true meaning of such great techniques when the majority of school and instructor teach it as a after thought.

Two separate questions here:

• As to how to recover the effective combat techniques: we need to do our homework, as ever. There is a body of really authoritative work in this realm. The leading names are Iain Abernethy, Bill Burgar, Rick Clark, Patrick McCarthy, Javier Martinez, Simon O'Neil, and Stuart Anslow—all of whom have extensive publications, including full-scale monographs in most cases, on the 'decoding keys' for kata and hyungs, with 'worked examples' to show how the general methods play out in individual cases—and I should point out that our own Upnorthykyosa[/I] has provided some excellent guides to form application right here on MT. And there is some great material on the internet as well; check out this site for karate kata—Empi being the example in question. I've looked at Paul Jame's interpretations and I gotta say, this guy is sharp. For my money, these apps are realistic and robust. It's just a question of learning how to 'read' the kata subsequences, just as learning to read French requires acquisition of a specific body of knowledge.
  [*] As to the problem that majority of school and instructor teach it as a after thought, that's a different kettle of fish, and much harder to answer, because it's not just a matter of learning something, but of changing attitude, curriculum policy, and all sorts of other stuff. Practical bunkai means accepting the reality of karate (in the most general sense) as a combat system. For a lot of people, that's something they don't want to think about—actually using this stuff in a life-and-death confrontation where they have to apply extreme violence, lest it be applied to them. The problem in shifting dojo/dojang curricula towards practical applications is a matter, I've come to think, of convincing people that they may really need to defend themselves physically, and convincing them of that to enough of an extent that they start demanding that their MA instruction teach them how to do that. I'm not convinced that most people are ready to face that reality, even people who are studying MAs.
  

The majority of school and instructor teach it as a after thought.I mean I see so many people come from other schools and they have no earthly ideal what the movements are, let alone the actual techniques. Are we doomed twenty years from now, with people making certain things up do to the facts of mis information, is there a way to preserve what the true meaning are?

No, I don't think we are so doomed; and I think that developments in karate bunkai analysis, and more recently, in TKD curricula, are very hopeful signs that the true, underlying combat interpretations of the karate-based arts are going to be preserved. But it will not happen overnight, Terry. It took us many decades to get to this disconnection between kata form and fighting application; we might have to spend the same amount of time getting that connection reestablished.

So far as TKD is concerned, a combat-oriented TKD organization committed to that kind of reconnection, an American analogue of the British Combat Association, would be a big step in the right direction (nudge, nudge, wink, wink )...