At Budo Journeyman there was an interesting post about how karate might have evolved from China to Okinawa to Japan. The full post may be read here. An excerpt is below.
In this piece:
· The original ‘Three Islands experiment’.
· The results.
· My view on where it might take you.
· How that can apply to karate in Japan, and particularly Wado.
· Did master Otsuka get it right?
I like this idea. I came across it on a UK karate podcast (‘The Karate Kitchen’, previously ‘Opinionated Bastards’). I contacted Robert Davis and Andi Kidd to gain their permission to present the theories – full credits at the end of this piece. I hope I get it right. But, anyway, here is my spin on it.
Introduction.
I have seen and read so many theories, assumptions and guesswork, centring around the transmission of Okinawan karate through the vehicle of solo kata.
Some of them are just wishful thinking, others are designed to bolster the pet projects of enthusiastic (and entrepreneurial) karateka who operate on the fringes, but are driven to prove that they are right and everyone else is wrong.1 But, nobody wants to admit that they just don’t know.
I do find myself pleased that there are some serious researchers on the ground in Japan and Okinawa, who are trying desperately to unearth the true historical facts, but, boy, what an enormous challenge. My fear is that the horse has long departed the stable, and all you are left with is the traces of what the horse left in in the stall, good luck in picking through that.
(Anecdotes from westerners who have been over to Okinawa suggest to me that the remaining indigenous ‘masters’ are busy backfilling the vacuum).
Anyhow; here is the ‘Three Islands’ project. What a great idea!
This came out of a seminar, an experimental project to set up a real and theoretical ‘Stanford Prison’ style project, relating to kata transmission.
Island number one.
This is the very beginning, where the team, the controllers, design a new short karate kata, something not seen before, concocted in secret.
This first ‘island’ is the origin location of this theoretical kata and the home of a kind of ‘master creator’. This originator supposedly comes with a huge conceptual framework in the fighting arts. The kata is used as a mnemic, or a kind of crib sheet for his students to learn the full comprehensive system from. The kata is, in part, a distillation of the system’s principles and a set of crunched-down pre-packaged lessons. The students are taught the kata inclusive of the Henka, Ohyo etc.
I don’t know how they organised this bit, but in the later developmental time-line the students become fractured and have to work on their own, and drift into their personal preferences, playing to their strengths, resulting in bits getting lost or (if they were not fully understood in the first place) overwritten. With no access to the original master/creator it’s an imperfect transmission.
Island number two.
On this island, a student turns up who learned the original kata, but not the applications or the logic of the master/creator. The form/kata develops some traction and is widely taught, but a crucial point is that the inhabitants of this island haven’t been living in a vacuum, they have their own take on fighting logic, perhaps gleaned from their own historical circumstances, so they are not ‘babes in the woods’. All the same, this imported form/kata holds enough attention for them to develop it and refine its practice. Basically, mould it into any utilitarian purpose they want (e.g. aesthetic or athletic).
What they did with the kata, and what it turned into, created a high degree of formalism within an exercise format. They also leaned into an urge towards standardisation, where it would be easy to say that someone was not doing it ‘differently’, they were doing it ‘wrong’, no space for flexion or interpretation.
Island number three.
As we island hop, this is where it really starts to happen. The kata is exported to yet another island location and is again greeted with enthusiasts wanting to explore this ‘fighting form’. But, they feel compelled to give the individual sections of the kata some meaning and so, from scratch, they start to reverse engineer; to work out how the movements might be interpreted as fighting sequences which are effective techniques against potential aggressors. They are making it up. However, like with the previous islanders, they have some ideas they can inject into the mix based upon their indigenous defence arts.
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