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.
Any competition with rules is actually a kind of kata. For example, how would MMA change if you could bite? How about finger breaks? Like the legendary (did it really happen?) ‘wrassling’ of the Mississippi Riverboat Men, eyes could be popped out of people’s heads, noses bitten off, fingers broken one after another. Then again, isn’t the reality of human combative situations that fighters often have friends and allies? Shouldn’t it be permissible for someone in the audience to throw in weapons, like one of the old ECW wrestling matches? How about a live grenade and stop the entire show right there? True story follows:
When I was a young man, training muay thai in Koei Gym in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, a Thai boxing coach tried to recruit me to go to Thailand to fight, specifically to be a two-meter-tall, half-starved middleweight freak farang who would travel with him to the rural areas to fight village champions and make money through betting on the outcome. I said that as middleweight, I’d be so weak that I’d barely be able to move. He said, “Yes! We bet on you to lose! If you win, someone might throw a grenade in the ring.”
Kata is any imposition of order on the bloody chaos of combat. The only question of value, then, is if the pattern drill serves the purpose for which it is created. If I bring a pattern to a tailor, will the clothes fit? If I bring a music score to an orchestra, do the various parts create harmony among the musicians? If I develop a martial arts pattern drill, does it create training scars, habits that actually make you vulnerable rather than stronger, or does that kata enable you to integrate skills so that you can use them effectively, without hesitation, in combat or competition, whichever is the purpose?
This essay is one of many that has been revised to make the writing itself more graceful, but more importantly, to incorporate my own developing perspective on this subject. It is now part of my new book, Roots Still Cracking Rock: Refections On My First Fifty Years Within Classical Japanese Martial Traditions, which in addition to revised essays from this site, contains new work as well. Below you will find a picture of the cover as well as a QR code to order a Special Edition of the book. In this group order of ten books or more, Ran Network will make a special print-run with a dedication on the title page to your dojo or other institution.
The general release of the book on Amazon (equal in quality of the binding) will be on approximately April 20th. I will place that link here as well when it is ready.
Chris Leblanc
I think kata bear tactical lessons and contextual cues that sometimes have been forgotten.
A kata that addresses dueling – whether armed, as in two swordsman, or unarmed, as in grappling, starting from a place of equal initiative and squaring off, tells us a lot about when it was developed and what purpose it has, in ways that might even be at odds with the putative origin of the ryu. Dueling is not efficient on a battlefield – especially not a Sengoku era battlefield – and the nature of the engagement will be radically different. There are glimpses there as to how, and maybe even when, a ryu changed. Like excavating an archaeological site and digging down through the layers of an 18th century manor, a 16th century castle, all the way down to a Roman villa.
Obviously some ryu kept the early layers and added or evolved kata for taryu shiai later. Cues I look for are whether there is a starting point with an initiative deficit – early torite and kogusoku kata are often one person being attacked unawares and responding, or the attacker dominating the uke for capture or killing. These hold more interest for me as the context is more relevant to combatives, even today. across various environments. There are also things you just don’t want to do on a battlefield, in a combat situation, in self defense, or in the capture of an armed and dangerous criminal that would be fine in a grappling “match.” When I weigh the idea that a ryu is supposedly “combative” against what they are doing in kata contextually, these things can be at odds. Interestingly it has given me a perspective today when considering the push to make jiujitsu (the Brazilian Judo version…) mandatory for police officers. It is taking a taryu shiai grappling art and attempting to make it torite….they are not the same thing though many attributes and even certain techniques are shared, the contexts are wildly different.
Taking context into account can inform how we train and vary kata “in context,” as well as using it as a jumping off point for live work. If we stay in context, it can funnel our options a certain way versus turning into a mano-a-mano “bout.”
Chris Zell
I have enjoyed this article several times. It’s one of the most honest and useful I have read on the topic. Thank you for sharing your knowledge! A question that I would offer is how quickly should one transition from basic kata training to live training, intensity etc?
Ellis Amdur
Chris – that’s a hard question for me to answer. With grappling, one can do such ‘sectored live training’ much quicker – at least if people already know how to grapple. Honestly, if one wants to do this with a hand-to-hand system, I would insist that they already have experience with freestyle grappling of some kind (judo, BJJ, wrestling, etc). Those without a grappler’s body will muddle about and the weapon will make things worse. With weapon on weapon forms, I would want my students to be pretty well versed in the kata – enough so that the kata principles are engrained in the body.
When I was young, I trained in Alan Lee’s Kung Fu Wu Shu, which was, in the early seventies, considered one of the tougher schools in New York. They did contact sparring hard to the body, kicks to the head, but no punches to the head. And we started way to soon. So basically, people tried to survive with what they already did – the karateka did karate, those with boxing did that, and those without just got hit a lot.
So, the question is that the pattern drill must be ‘drilled in’ – (then, people worry if they get in a box, and are stuck in the ryu’s system and aren’t prepared for other things. That’s where tameshiai and te-awase come in …..I wrote about that in a previous article here.).
One such example – we were doing the training in Araki-ryu where we lined up at opposite ends of the dojo, with each with a naginata, and ran full tilt towards each other (big dojo) and when in range, tried to strike the other person down. Kind of scary. On the third time, I went into taka-gasumi, a Toda-ha Buko-ryu kamae. I thought it’s utility was that it was a formidable, intimidating stance. But what happened is my opponent was nearly stabbed in the face – and it’s one of the only times in my life I did a no touch throw. He was so close to being stabbed in the face (no protective equipment) that the only way to avoid it was to lean backwards while running forward. And he hit the ground. I hadn’t realized that the name of the kamae, as is so often the case, is coded-information. Taka-gasumi means ‘high fog’ and one nuance of that is concealing something. There is almost no technique where one receives an absolutely horizontal thrust to the face – without being able to track it as it rises. Without live training, I never would have learned this usage of this Toda-ha Buko-ryu technique – – – – and we never would have learned a weakness in our Araki-ryu that we had to take care of. (the technique never worked again against my training brothers).
Matteo Maria Brambilla
Great article.