Happy New Year! Sorry for the scarcity in posts. Between natural disasters and personal upheavals there was no time to ponder the deep meaning of Karate. With a little time to breathe and since I am out of practice, allow me to rant about the shallow stuff. In a chat with fellow karate geeks, one of the pillars of a system I am fond of was quoted (I'll paraphrase for you), "kata is not only a fight with multiple opponents but it teaches you the main technique of karate." I would like to take this moment to argue that no kata ever demonstrated how to effectively deal with a group of attackers. If fighting multiple attackers is the premise of all kata, karate ought to be dismissed as outright foolishness.
Think about the Heian/Pinan series of kata for example. If you were surrounded on four sides, you are seconds from getting pounded into a grease stain, so forget about turning to the left. It is hard enough fighting one attacker, if you want to take on four you had better have a firearm and standoff distance, so let just deal with one attacker m'kay. Let's place that attacker squarely in front of you, what would you do? I would step off line, maybe to the left, maybe to the right, to get a better angle on my opponent. Maybe I would stay in place, occupy his center. It would depend on what attack I am countering, but it would always be against the person directly in front of me.
"But, but, but," you start to object, "what about all those turns?" Oh, you mean the embusen, the pattern of lines your feet trace on the floor as you purportedly meet attackers who ambush you in the capital letter "I" formation, or something similar to the Nazca drawings. Recognize that patterns exist in kata, just as they exist in poetry and song. They exist to make the message memorable, but they are not the message. I don't know how many times I read, ". . .his armor clanged upon him, as darkness clouded his eyes," every time a soldier died in one of Homer's epic poems. Mnemonics.
The embusen, helps you remember a theme, elbow joint destruction at the bottom of the "I" and punches in the vertical part. Also, kata have complicated embusen so as to accomodate turns, not for the purpose of meeting multiple opponents. The turns are the most important part of the kata as they contain the most destructive technique. Grab hold of the guy you are tussling with, turn suddenly and drop your center of gravity. Depending on what part of your opponent you grabbed, you either snapped a limb or threw him to the floor. Kata is that simple and that complex. But fighting multiple opponents? That's crazy. It is not that fighting a gang of toughs is impossible, it is simply not the primary, not even the tertiary lesson.
On kata teaching the main karate technique, yeah, sorry, not really. Teachers teach karate. If you are ever told to repeat kata many times until you understand, then your teacher, and his teacher before him failed. This kind of karate frustrates me to no end. It is the same as expecting the illiterate to learn to read by tracing words from a book. I know of one illiterate autodidact who taught himself to read. His name is Tarzan, a fictional character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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