Author: Ellis Amdur Page 5 of 11

What Are Kata?

It is in vogue—and has been as long as I can remember—to deride kata as idealized, sterile, impractical choreography, a poor simulacrum of real combat. Only through unrestricted freestyle practice, such critics say, can one truly understand the realities of combat. Before I question this absolutist assertion, I will start by saying that I’m a proponent of sparring, and freestyle practice—but it is not fighting any more than pattern drills are. Only fighting is fighting. Once you bring weaponry in, how do you do this safely without killing each other? In fact, that is true for unarmed competition as well.

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Araki Murashige (荒木村重)

Araki Murashige was a warlord in central Japan, from an area that encompassed Settsu, Itami, and Izumi (all part of current-day Osaka prefecture). For a relatively brief period of time, Murashige sided with Oda Nobunaga when the latter’s sphere of influence started extending into his region. Murashige was a man of culture and leadership, exemplifying two values Nobunaga treasured. He became one of his top generals, alongside such legendary warriors as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shibata Katsuie, and Akechi Mitsuhide.

Nobunaga was a paradox—an elegant beast. His character was perhaps similar to one of Machiavelli’s princes: intellectually curious and highly adaptable, yet utterly ferocious when opposed, a man responsible for the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women, and children.

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In a recent blog, I questioned the mythos around the founders of various traditional ryūha. However, beyond the question of whether the founder truly created his martial system in the archetypal manner that is the usual account, there are several other questions:

• Did the putative founder actually have any role, direct or indirect in the creation of a particular fighting system?
• Did the founder even exist?

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A very common trope in the accounts of the origins of traditional Japanese martial arts goes as follows:

According to the Takenouchi Keisho Kogo Den . . . Takenouchi Hisamori retired to the mountains near the Sannomiya shrine to train his martial skills. He practiced there for six days and six nights, wielding a bokken (wooden sword) two shaku and four sun in length (about 2 ft. 4 in. or 72 cm), a relatively long weapon for his purportedly short stature. On the sixth night he fell asleep from exhaustion, using his bokken as a pillow. He was awakened by a mountain priest with white hair and a long beard who seemed so fearsome to Hisamori that he thought it must be an incarnation of the avatar Atago Gongen.  Hisamori attacked the stranger, but was defeated. The priest said to him “When you meet the enemy, in that instant, life and death are decided. That is what is called hyōhō (military strategy).” He then took Hisamori’s bokken, told him that long weapons were not useful in combat, and broke it into two daggers one shaku and two sun long. The priest told Hisamori to put these in his belt and call them kogusoku, and taught him how to use them in grappling and close combat. These techniques became called koshi no mawari, (around the hips). The priest then taught Hisamori how to bind and restrain enemies with rope, using a vine from a tree. Then the priest disappeared mysteriously amidst wind and lightning.                                                – Wikipedia entry Takenouchi-ryū (with several grammatical corrections by this author)

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 From the book Dueling with O-sensei: Grappling with the Myth of the Warrior-Sage

Musubi is a talismanic word in some aikidō circles. Its mundane definition is to tie things together. In aikidō, it is often linked with another term, awase (to link or blend together). For those with a romantic view of aikidō, this is imagined as a martial pas de deux in which, at the moment of contact, peace is established and two spirits blend together in harmony.

This was not the viewpoint of Ueshiba Morihei, however. To establish aiki was to impose order on chaos. Ueshiba’s oft-quoted formulation of man establishing harmony between heaven and earth made humanity, potentially, a cosmic force, reconciling disorder in any realm, be it that between people in conflict to the universe itself. Musubi and awase, therefore, imply blending and twining with another’s essence to move them in the direction that they should go.

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Half a century ago, my parents took me a talk by Rabbi Abraham J. Twersky. Twersky was a descendent of the Chernobyl dynasty of Hasidic Rabbis. Over the decades I have seen the name Twersky elsewhere: always on attorney or doctor’s offices or on academic papers – beyond religion, they have been a dynasty of intellect. Rabbi Twersky, a psychiatrist, merged Mussar (Jewish ethics) with elements of the Twelve Step Program, becoming a profoundly important figure in the field of the treatment of substance abuse. Despite his incandescent intellect, he was a down-to-earth man, who worked with those suffering from addiction disorders from any walk of life, and who wrote books whose profundity was encased in simple accessible prose and images.

I do not remember the overall theme of his talk that evening, but part of it concerned his upbringing, which he told in the third person, in a charmingly lyrical Yiddish accent. “Twersky was a brilliant boy, a chess prodigy. He was crazy for chess, and would seize any moment to go and have a game. It became a kind of addiction. And one day, there was a chess tournament, and Twersky, only ten years old, had to go. Twersky had to go! He would be playing against much older boys, even adults, because chess is a game of intelligence, and winning and losing is based on the merits of the mind and the will. But it was the Sabbath, the most Holy day of the week, when G-d descends to earth to unite on that one day with the Sabbath bride, the Shekinah, the divine feminine presence of G-d. Think of that! G-d loved humanity so much that He exiled a portion of Himself so that creation could occur. It is on the Sabbath that G-d’s sacrifice is redeemed, that G-d in His Fullness is reunited. Our celebration of the Sabbath is in gratitude for G-d’s sacrifice for us. It’s that important!

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Preface

There are only a few extant koryū bujutsu that date back to the Sengoku (‘warring states’) era. Despite claims to the contrary, none of them are pristine. Many claim founding dates that are historically inaccurate, often by many hundreds of years. Some claim founders who actually had nothing to do with the school in question. Still others have founders who may have initiated the ryūha, but they surely never imagined the current state of what they created—it has been altered over the centuries almost beyond recognition.

This is not fraud. The term 流 (ryū ‘flow’) means something quite different from ‘organization.’ Whoever truly created a school often gave credit to those who flowed into its creation, going back centuries, if not millennia. This could include one’s family lineage (the core of one’s identity), one’s inspiration (this could include deities, ancestors, even someone in a war tale or legend), as well as antecedent schools that were directly or indirectly related. For example, a large number of schools  list famous warriors or tutelary deities associated with Shintō-ryū (schools associated with a nexus of activity in the general area of the Kashima and Katori shrines), as these are generally considered to be the primordial martial traditions of Northeastern Japan. However, the technical parameters of a particular school may have very little to do with Shintō-ryū itself.

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