| My professional interests |
|
Computing Law Education Science and research |
| My leisure interests |
|
Martial arts Heritage railways Garden railways Motorcycles DIY |
| Downloads |
|
Linux downloads Windows downloads Java downloads Perl downloads Home automation downloads |
| About me |
|
Home & family My CV |
| Site info |
|
Contact the author Download policy Keyword index |
If you're new to karate, and perhaps even if you're not, you may be wondering what kata are, and where they come from. In brief, kata are prearranged sequences of moves, each designed to practice some important feature, or features, of the martial art. Kata (or `patterns', or `forms') are not unique to karate -- most martial arts have some. However, it's probably fair to say that kata are revered more highly, and taken more seriously, in karate than in nearly any other martial art. This is in spite of the fact that, to be honest, many of them don't have all that much to recommend them over other possible combinations of moves, at least when seen through modern eyes. Part of the respect that karate people have for the traditional kata stems from fact that they are `old' (or are at least believed to be old) and therefore associated with ancestors. Partly, however, the view that kata are historical and unchanging -- an incorrect view -- is drummed into karate students from their first week of training. The reality is quite different; and, while I wouldn't for a moment want to disparage the practice of kata training, I think that we should know what we are about, and why we are about it.
How were the Shotokan kata selected?
In most Shotokan schools, 26 kata are accepted as canonical, that is, included in the standard catalogue. Of these 26, you'll probably need to demonstrate seven for your first degree black belt grading, but you'll probably be reasonably familiar with about twelve by that time. Of the remainder, most will never been seen, let alone practised, by karate enthusiasts in all the time they spend doing karate. You'd need to be very enthusiastic about kata to learn all 26. And there are many, many others that are documented. So what is it about the canonical 26 kata that make them so important? The answer, essentially, is that these are the ones that Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of the Shotokan style, and his immediate successors, singled out as important. Their reasons for doing so are not well documented; perhaps they picked the 26 that they themselves knew well enough to describe. In any case, other karate styles singled out other kata, some overlapping with the Shotokan canon, some not. There is some logic to the selection of the most basic Shotokan kata, but there are some inexplicable features as well. None of the basic kata require the use of the roundhouse kick (mawashigeri). The standard `outside block' that students learn from day one, and have to demonstrate for their first grading, does not appear in a kata less advanced than bassai dai, which is required for black belt gradings. Although students practice a thrusting side kick from their earliest training, this move does not appear in any of the standard kata. And so on.We know that kata have changed over time, and that a particular school's claim that its variation is definitive is unlikely to be supportable. Consider the first kata traditionally learned by Shotokan students -- heian shodan. This kata is undoubtedly derived from the same source as the Wado school's pinan nidan. The performance line (the invisible line traced out by the movement of the practitioner) is almost identical, as are most of the moves: there are the same downward blocks at the start and in the middle, the same three-quarter turns, the same marching ahead with three rising blocks, and the same marching back with three stepping punches. In both cases the last four moves are the only ones not done in front stance, and in both cases these four moves make a pattern of lines 45 degrees to each other. However, the correspondence is not perfect. The Wado version has two hammer fist strikes, not one; and the second hammer-fist strike is done before a downward block, not after. The last four moves are treated as spear-hand strikes, not knife-hand blocks. Given that other martial arts derived from Okinawan sources still have kata that resemble the pinan, it is likely that the Wado version is more ancient than the Shotokan version. When Shotokan karate instructors get shirty with each other about the exact position of the little toe in a particular stepping movement, it's worth bearing in mind that at some point in the past, one of Shotokan's most fundamental kata changed from finishing with four strikes to finishing with four blocks, and lost a hammer-fist strike. Is the Shotokan variation `better' than the Wado version? Or, more controversially, is Master So-and-so's Shotokan version better than Master Whatnot's?
Even now, some of karate's most senior exponents are tinkering with the kata, with a professed goal of making them more `authentic'. But when there is as much difference between the way the Shotokan kata are performed now, and the forms they took a hundred years ago, it isn't entirely clear what `authentic' means. We don't know how the basic kata were done 200 years ago. We do know how some of the them were done 50 years ago, by various different practitioners. We know that even then they weren't the same. Ultimately a particular school, or organization, singles out one particular respected exponent's view of how a kata should be done, and holds that to be definitive. For many Shotokan practitioners, the descriptions of the kata by Masatoshi Nakayama in his Best Karate books are taken to be authoritative. However, there are other interpretations, and some of Mr Nakayama's interpretations are quirky, to say the least. Consider, for example, the breakdown of kata into individual moves. For better or worse, if Mr N says that a particular move is, say, move 21, then a student who wants to be thought to be doing kata properly had better make very sure that his performance puts a definite pause -- however short -- between whatever constitutes move 21, and whatever constitutes move 22. Now, consider that move 10 of tekki shodan conists only of a turn of the head, while move 21 of heian godan consists of a leg movement, a turn, a strike, another leg movement, and two blocks. Surely it can never have been intended that move 10 of tekki take the same length of time as move 21 of godan; yet in competitions and gradings up and down the land, students are making a simple turn of the head take as long as, and have the same significance as, a complex combined attacking and defensive manoeuvre. Clearly Mr N did regard move 21 of godan as a single move; because it was too complex to describe in one go, in his book he breaks it up into 21a and 21b, rather than 21 and 22. However, to other authorities this is two distinct moves, not a single move. As a result, when someone says that a particular kata has, say, 42 moves, this figure can only be compared with the figures for different kata given by the same reference source.
In short, when a particular karate school says that a particular rendition of a kata is correct, or accurate, or definitive, they probably mean that it accords well with whatever textbook they take as a reference. Very often karate instructors don't know this -- they learned the kata from their own instructors, who learned them from someone else, and never really thought all that much about whether there would be other ways of doing the same moves.
The heian kata
Most karate students begin their study of kata with the heian (or `pinan'). Shotokan recognizes five of these kata: shodan, nidan, sandan, yondan, and godan. These labels mean nothing more than the order in which they are taught: first, second, third, etc. There is no mystic significance. The word `heian' itself appears to be an invention of Gichin Funakoshi, who also attempted with varying degrees of success to rename the more advanced kata. `Heian' is usually translated as `peaceful mind', or just `peaceful'.All the heian have certain features in common. First, all start and finish in `attention' stance, with the hands held in fists. All start and finish at the same point (or, at least, can be adapted to do so -- this matter is not without controversy itself). All follow approximately the same performance line, which is shaped like the capital letter `I' (with, it must be admitted, some sticky-out bits). All require very definite, fomulaic blocks and punches (downward block, for example, is always double-handed -- in all cases the blocking arm is assisted by a pulling action with the opposite fist).
All the heian have places where the same basic move is repeated a number of times. For example, in shodan downward block followed by stepping punch is done four times in total. These repetitions probably signify that the move is though to be particularly noteworthy, and that students should give it full attention.
The tekki kata
The work tekki comes from a Japanese character that can be interepreted to mean `iron' or `steel', and one that means `a knight', or perhaps `riding a horse'. The usual english translation is `iron knight', although `riding a metal horse' would fit the characters equally well. There are three of these kata, and all make extensive use of horse stance. Most karate schools consider tekki nidan and tekki sandan to be outside the standard curriculum, and I don't think there is any that require these for a grading examination, even at black-belt level. Tekki shodan, however, is required for brown-belt gradings in many schools.The `black belt grading' kata
Most black-belt and some brown-belt gradings, particularly in the Shotokan style, will expect you to perform one or more of the following: bassai dai, enpi, hangetsu, or kanku dai. Under JKA rules, the examinee is allowed to choose for the first-degree black belt exam; after that, the examiners choose, so you have to know them all. Opinions differ, of course, but probably the most accessible of these kata is bassai dai. It is a long kata to be sure (twice as long as most of the heian), but nowhere near as long as kanku dai. It doesn't make the same athletic demands as enpi, and isn't as, well, weird, as hangetsu. Consequently, most British Shotokan clubs start students learning bassai fairly early on, so that they are very familiar with it at black-belt time.Pre-heian kata
Even the first heian is relatively difficult for a complete beginner. It requires, for example, stepping and blocking in back stance -- something that isn't normally practiced extensively until six months or more after starting training. Children, in particular, have difficulty -- not with performing the moves, but with remembering the order in which to do them. Gichin Funakosi devised a series of `simplified' kata, particular for use in children's classes. He called these kata, which were derived from the heian, `taikyoku', which translates as `first step' or `first cause'. In practice, even children are usually ready for something more challenging by the time they have mastered taikyoku shodan, and I don't think that the others in the series are now practised much, if at all.Bunkai
The word bunkai is increasingly used in the context of kata training. It is usually taken to mean `applications', although `dismantling' might be a better translation. Bunkai is about finding ways in which the various moves of the kata may be employed in a self-defence situation. We don't actually have any `authentic' bunkai (even bearing in mind the loose meaning of the word `authentic' in karate); all are relatively modern creations. In most clubs it is common to practice certain sections of kata with an opponent, and a decent instructor will be able to come up with ways to do this for most parts of most kata. It isn't hard to see ways in which the downward block/stepping punch combinations of heian shodan could be used, nor the back-fist/snap kick/knife-hand block combinations of, for example, nidan. It is less easy to see, how the three simultaneous rising blocks of shodan would ever be employed in that form in practice. It's unlikely that your oponent would be retreating if you were so thoroughly on the defensive. And that, I think, illustrates the central problem of bunkai -- kata were probably never intended to represent choreographed combat situations. We don't really know what they were originally intended for, but it isn't that. Of course, there are those that argue that, say, heian shodan is a sequence of moves that might be used to repell eight different attackers from different directions. The problem with this view is that there are too many moves that just make no sense in this interpretation. At the very least one would have to interpolate a number of extra moves into the kata -- strikes to follow up the knife-hand blocks, for example.It's much more likely that the kata were orginally created to allow students to practice and demonstrate key moves and combinations of moves; although those moves and combinations are important in a self-defence context, there's no evidence that the overall structure of any kata was intended to represent a self-contained combat exercise. There are even those that go so far as to say that kata are only a form of performance art -- ballet with menaces, if you like.
Why do kata?
Performing the kata, even the elementary ones, is extremely good exercise, for the whole body. It forces the practioner to repeat, sometimes very frequently, key movements that are important in karate. In addition, the adoption of a standard canon of kata by various schools does provide a sort of `national curriculum' of karate. In fact, it's an international curriculum -- in Shotokan the same kata are performed, in strikingly similar ways, throughout the world. This makes it easy for practitioners to communicate ideas and concepts when discussing their training. Despite the criticism that can be levelled at the way kata training is employed, nobody's suggesting that you shouldn't do it.About these pages
These pages contain fairly detailed descriptions of the basic Shotokan kata. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm more-or-less on top of these basic kata now. In addition, I've seen them done many, many times by people who I do consider to be experts, from a number of different schools. I've written this stuff for people who want to know more about them than is usually available on Web sites. I hope you find these pages useful, but please bear in mind that your own club or instructor may have very different views on how the kata should be done.
| Search |
| Shameless plug |
 By the author of this site. Buy on-line from Amazon USA | UK |
| Editorial |
So you want to be a university lecturer? Read this first! Speak like your boss: new developments in managerese |
| Computing features |
|
File handling in the Linux kernel: an in-depth look at how Linux handles files, filesystems, and file I/O
All sorts of Linux stuff Confused about CLASSPATH? answers are here First steps in EJB using jBoss (recently revised for jBoss 3.2) |