It’s a strange situation we are in now with regards to sharing the martial arts. On the one hand I’m all for exchanging ideas and believe that by keeping things ’secret’ or more likely being too careful about what they taught their students, a lot of valuable information has been lost. I suspect that Miyagi Chojun Sensei was not too big on teaching bunkai to his students, neither was Miyazato Eiichi Sensei, possibly as a result of his style of training under Miyagi. We can only guess at Miyagi Sensei’s level of understanding of karatedo from the kata which he passed on, and the often grossly exaggeretted stories promoted by well meaning aquatences of his. Had the war not happened I think we would have seen an even greater shift toward standardization and an even more japanese budo oriented Goju Ryu with a few more gekisai’s. The shift away from martial art was definately well under way.
Only my opinion by the way…..
On the other hand, with the free exchange of information avalible these days through seminars and the media, there are few ’secrets’ left. By the way, secret is probably not an appropriate word. Anyway, the problem we get is students taking on more information than they are capable of dealing with at their level of experience. The natural progression through the stages of Shu, Ha, Ri are broken and everyone chooses to place themselves in the Ha category without an understanding of what this represents, taking on techniques from here and there with no understanding of the principles that make up such techniques, and as a result, no real hope of ever being able to apply them.
This then reflects poorly on the teacher or seminar instructor because they get the blame for their technique being inadequate, rather than simply the student being poorly prepared.
I hope that somewhere there is a balance between the two?
Teaching bunkai
Published October 28, 2008 Uncategorized 1 CommentTags: bunkai, goju ryu, karate, Okinawa, shinsokai
I have seen, at minimum, four different ways of analyzing kata to produce applications. The first is the very basic punch-block-kick stuff; then there is the approach that Seikichi Toguchi talked about in his last book; then there is the approach that Javier Martinez talks about, that parts of the kata are “modular,” each movement or group of movements representing a variation on a basic idea; then there is Seiyu Oyata’s approach, basically to take the individual movements and treat them like letters of the alphabet that you can then string together to make words. I have seen applications that insist that the line of travel indicates the line of attack, applications that say that the line of travel relative to your body mass indicates the way you should step into or away from the attacker, and applications that say that the footwork in the kata often has little to do with the technique itself.
The weird thing is, it seems to me that each approach generates at least some usable techniques!