Kata and Flow Drills

There was an interesting post over at Budo Journeyman about distilling drills from kata. The full post may be read here. Below is an excerpt.

Chiefly about Naihanchi, but can apply to other scenarios.

Introduction.

It could be argued that any kata sequence can be turned into a useful paired drill, but it depends on how contrived and prolonged it is.

Back in the 1990’s I had an itch I felt compelled to scratch. It was all about Naihanchi kata. I just found it perplexing and frustrating; I honestly didn’t get it.

Clearly, in Wado karate it held a very important position. It wasn’t just an add-on, an oddity, but instead had a central position in the wider curriculum. However, anything beyond ‘just do it, then do it again’ was just not delivering for me.

I pushed into every available corner to try and figure it out. I consulted experts from other systems (I still have a box file of letters, printed out email replies and photocopies sent to me by the then leading scholars). But, the pieces still didn’t sit together easily.

It very quickly became apparent that any explorations in the direction of how the techniques from Naihanchi actually functioned at a practical level, just led me into a quagmire of reverse engineering.

Reverse Engineering.

Definition: ‘Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so’.

I had a very interesting and honest email exchange with an expert in the field of kata interpretation (I won’t name him here). I asked him about his published applications of Naihanchi (Tekki Shodan)? He was very open with me; he admitted that he used the process of reverse engineering and said he had applied a ‘bunch of stuff he learned from Aikido and Judo’ to come up with some of his conclusions.

The problem seems to be that, apart from the above-mentioned researcher, nobody wants to admit to reverse engineering, because in doing so they lose any claim to a timeline that goes all the way back to 19^th century Okinawa, or maybe beyond. With reverse engineered kata ‘authenticity’ starts and ends with the instructor who created it.

Oldest version?

In the process of my research, I came to the conclusion that the nearest I was ever going to get to an oldest original version of Naihanchi was from Okinawan Shorin Ryu. But even there, nobody seemed to be prepared to put forward an explanation of what was really going on with kata. (Motobu was an interesting case, but my feelings about his interpretations was that they were idiosyncratic to him).

To continue the story. Curiosity got the better of me when I stumbled across an explanation of Naihanchi that was just too intriguing to ignore…

Nathan Johnson and his book, ‘Barefoot Zen’. Naihanchi as a flow drill.

I read the book first, before I visited Nathan Johnson’s Dojo in Southampton. The actual trip down was the first weekend in June 2001.

(His organisation is ‘Ko-do Ryu’ or ‘Zen Shorin-Do’, a synthesis of different stylistic approaches).

I had previously spoken to Nathan on the phone before I decided to drive down from Essex to Hampshire and experience this for myself.