Continuing Steps in Karate

  This way of looking at karate is influenced heavily by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and Lynne Kelly’s Power and Knowledge in Prehistoric Societies (2015) and The Memory Code (2016).  What follows is where my thoughts on kata's purpose and structure have gone, based on the issues and concepts these texts cover.  Kata were created within the context of oral knowledge traditions as a means to retain, recall and transmit knowledge. They are a tool, a vehicle through which knowledge is conveyed, rather than being the knowledge itself.   Having said that, in order to use them effectively, we also need to have knowledge of the kata itself and the ability to recall and demonstrate it/run through it automatically and faithfully. In this regard, kata are a mnemonic device, with particular structure and knowledge features.  They: Are memory prompts - they do not demonstrate/shadow-box complete sequences of movement, just those bits that need recall or are t...

This is a follow-up to my earlier post: What was the original kata? We know that kata have changed - even a cursory glance at youtube will show you the huge variety of ways that any given kata can be performed.  This appears to not be just a modern development, as even by looking at books from the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s etc... we can see that there have been changes to kata since then, and even at the time (compare, for instance, the earlier publications of Funkoshi such as Tote-Jitsu (1922) with his later publication, the Karate-do Kyohan (1931) and then with its re-working in the 1950s; or compare the two earlier works and their rendition of naihanchi kata with Motobu's Karate - My Art (1932)).  Even within the students of the same teacher, we can see variance that cannot all have been contained within what was originally taught (see the different schools of the students of Choshin Chibana, for instance - the differences in kata between Kyudokan and Matsubayashi-ryu are a good ...

This post is related to, but is not a direct follow-on from the previous post on the original kata. In my school, and within its parent tradition, many of the kata have different variations.  For instance, in the kata Saifa, there are two different starts, two different ways to do the first section and two variants on the turn/sweep/hammerfist that are not only different from each other, but from other traditions as well.  Similar (accepted and taught) alternate variations exist in sanseru, shisochin, suparinpei, kururunfa, sepai, and seienchin.  Some of these kata have only one or two minor alternatives, others have more, with varying degrees of difference. Why? And what does it mean for understanding the origins and purpose of kata? There are obvious advantages pedagogically for teaching only one version of a kata, particularly to large groups of individuals.  Having a standard approach for everyone and every time makes it easier for the instructor to not onl...

How can we know that the kata we are learning is the original form? One of the things that we are told - often unsolicited - is that we should do kata exactly as we have been taught, because 'the old masters knew what they were doing' or 'we will lose the meaning of the kata if we do'. Leaving those two very leading assumptions aside (for now), implied in that is that the kata have been unchanged as they have been taught and handed down from generation to generation. But is that actually true? There is no denying that each kata had, at some stage, a starting point where someone (or someones) created it. At that point in time, there was indeed, only one version of the kata and it was undoubtedly the correct one. But who created it, when and for what purpose, is often difficult to determine. For some kata such as tensho, the gekisai and pinan kata, we do know who created them, when and have at least some recorded information about their intended purpose. So surely, th...

Every so often I tape myself doing kata so I can review if what I think I'm doing is what I'm actually doing. Here's one I did a couple of weeks ag, and as usual, there were a few things I thought I was doing and wasn't, as well as a couple of things I didn't think I was doing, but was. But, since that was the point of the video, that's ok. One interesting point about this run-through was the difference in being able to freely move between stances on the soft, springy grass compared to the dojo floor - an excellent reminder to me to keep practising on different surfaces and with different footwear, as aspects of my normal footwork needed to be adapted for the grass. It is well worth making semi-regular videos to review progress and form; not to mention it makes for interesting and educational viewing when there are multiple years of videos to look back over. I have, for instance, videos of myself doing sanseru kata from 2010, 2015 and 2020, and whi...

I have spent entirely too much time on the internet over the last 20-odd years, and entirely too much of that time on martial arts discussion boards.  Starting with e-budo.com back in the late 90s, I must have been either a member or regular lurker of all of the major forums and some of the not-so-major ones too.  Now, I still check out a couple of forums regularly (mostly Martialartsplanet.com), but most of my online martial arts fix comes from facebook where I'm a member of 8 different, active groups.  Funnily enough, some topics just keep coming up again and again and again and again.  Probably because one of the not-so-great things about the internet is that many people like to talk and don't actually listen to the other side; spouting off is more important (my view on that is that if you want to pontificate, don't do it in a forum, create your own blog to do it in! Forums should  be for exchanging ideas and holding conversations - not that they ever have be...

Following on from the previous post regarding the dual nature of uke-waza, most beginning and intermediate students find it possible to stop or at least weaken the strength of an attack, although this may not always be consistently possible.  What they do find very difficult to do with any reasonable probability of success is also weaken or off-balance the opponent at the same time. From trying to teach students how to effectively perform and use uke-waza over the last few years I feel two of the major reasons are the shape  of the arm and the direction  of movement. Shape Most beginners and intermediate students, in my experience, hold their arms too compactly.  Their elbow is too close to the body, and the forearm is held at about 90 degrees to the upper arm.  This shape is easy to collapse when force is applied to it, and the lats and shoulder girdle are not activated, meaning that it is only the strength of the arm muscles that can be applied....

Or, why it's not a bad thing if you don't get it right all at once. Two years ago, I learned my first bo kata, shuji-no-kon.   I learned it in a weekend and took notes and videos and have practised it regularly ever since.   These last couple of weeks, we have revisited this kata and in just two run-throughs with my sensei, I picked up two major, fundamental flaws in how I was moving and half a dozen smaller things to work on as well.   My initial thoughts were along the lines of - "I wish I had known/realised this ages ago", but my second (and subsequent) thoughts were - "I probably wouldn't have understood beforehand anyway". I'm seeing this in my empty-hand work too.   Improvement seems to happen piecemeal or in sudden jumps, when something that I have seen many times before just suddenly stands up, slaps me on the face and shouts "THIS is how you should be doing it!"   And the reason why, I think, is that the brain and body can only...

As part of my ongoing efforts to fix my body structure (which can be pretty poor), I have been trying to get my posture correct for sanchin - head being pulled up from the top, no swayback, not hunching.  My problem is, while I have changed my posture in the last little while (and for the better too), my sensei still keeps telling me that I have some of these issues!  And no matter how I try and fix it according to his instructions, I haven't had much success. What I needed was a different perspective.  What I was feeling in my body felt 'right', so I couldn't make sense of what he was seeing.  So, I videotaped myself.  Well, that was a different perspective alright.  It turns out, what I was doing, was very different to what I thought I was doing.  It took me about 5 minutes after viewing my video and doing another couple of takes until I had what now looked like a posture my sensei had described. It felt very strange, but somehow'right'. The upshot...

Doing is easy, learning is hard.  In the martial arts, the teaching structure can too easily convince the student that how they are taught is how they should learn.  The act of participating can be confused with the act of learning. The Shorin-ryu practitioner, Pat Nakata highlights this issue in a recent post on Charles Goodin's blog, where he talks of the difference between training, and training to "get it right".  How we are taught or shown something is not necessarily the best way for us to learn it, or to learn from it.  Learning is ultimately intrinsic to the individual, and not something that can be delivered by anyone else.  I see this in my own profession of secondary education; in a classroom, students can all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that if they copy something down, they are learning.  It comes as a rude shock to their system when they find in an exam or applied situation that all they learned to do by copying, was how to co...