The Flexible Bunkai Model

In the dojo I grew up in – and the organization I stayed with for nearly 30 years – the end goal of training was what I came to think of as the Flexible Bunkai Model. (As opposed to the Core Bunkai Model I talked about in an earlier post).

In the flexible bunkai model, the student is exposed to many many MANY kata and corresponding bunkai. This dojo trained the 8 classical Goju-ryu kata plus 20 other kata from different Okinawan styles. All the kata were ones the organizations Founder learned on Okinawa – as an example, the syllabus included Sunsu kata, the final Isshin-ryu kata created by Shimabuku because our Founder trained with and was contemporaries of Tatsuo Shimabuku. I think many of the supplementary kata were like this – historical records from the founder of our organization and preserved as a part of that history.

In addition to preserving these kata as a history of the organization, I thought many of them were useful and continue to train in them today. Nijushiho, Sochin, and other “crane” or “soft” forms are very useful when trying to develop some of the sought-after softness, especially in the black belt ranks. In Goju-ryu we are trying to develop hardness and softness. That can be hard with just the Goju-ryu kata to work with!

Another advantage of these supplementary kata is, in more modern lingo, that new kata provide a form of “muscle confusion” – a way to continue exercising the mind and body with different movements. I see a lot of value there as well. Balance, coordination, and the art part of martial arts are all hit by training these supplementary kata.

That being said, I think this dojo/organization went wrong by requiring bunkai for each of these kata. Kata from very different styles that may or may not follow the principles of Goju-ryu karate, the style we were actually studying. In Goju bunkai, we look to counter, close, and control the opponent. Is that what the bunkai for Wansu should do as well? Eh I’m not convinced...

Even more problematic was the sheer amount of bunkai. If every kata had 5 bunkai applications, that’s 125+ bunkai altogether, not counting possible variations. This is a daunting amount to memorize, understand, and practice. I’d argue that it’s pretty much impossible for the average karate-ka.

Here’s where the Flexible Model comes in: You don’t need to memorize these moves. We aren’t creating a sheet of plays like a football defensive coordinator of move and counter-move. Instead, we are putting together a dataset to train our self defense algorithm.

The idea is that as you go through bunkai after bunkai you are training yourself to see the attacks, see the openings, and see the counters. With practice, you are able to respond naturally and flexibly to a range of attacks. Really any attack since you’ve either seen something like it before OR you can extrapolate from what you have practiced.

In the end, a student of the Flexible Bunkai Model transcends the formal bunkai altogether. It’s just response.

I think for this to work you need to drill, drill, drill. You need to work each bunkai to the point where it is second nature, then repeat for the next kata.  This amalgamation of muscle memory is then accessed in a real situation to provide a natural response.

The dojo I was a part of never spent this much time on bunkai. I’m thinking you need to spend the entire class on this, or a healthy portion of class, for weeks at a time to get it ingrained.

You also need to have quality bunkai to begin with. Practice makes permanent and shoddy bunkai – bunkai that do not follow sound martial principles or are otherwise risky – will train you to have a shoddy response. It was this concern that led me to search and work for years on gathering a set of quality bunkai that I think helps the student develop their defensive skills. (I call this “Thematic Bunkai” and I’ll talk about it more in a different post.) I tried for a long time to practice to the level where I had a sort of flexible response. I never reached the level of my Sensei, who truly had natural and flowing counters. I was always tripped up by the need to recognize and respond to techniques – my thinking mind was never bypassed.

One of the reasons I eventually moved on from this dojo is that the methods didn’t follow the goals. I think perhaps Sensei had the sort of dedicated training in bunkai to develop her flexibility, but I never got that training from her and didn’t see any other students getting that type of training. The training methods have to correspond to the skills being developed and they simply didn’t in this case.

Of course, the other glaring reason for leaving was that this Flexible Bunkai Model is entirely my own invention. It is just the conceptual framework I came up with to contextualize the training I was receiving. I think it is pretty good at explaining both my teacher’s skill and the dojo’s curriculum, but it was never explained to me like this. My sensei rarely talked about flowing, natural bunkai, and never mentioned anything about training to develop that skill. Certainly nothing about realistic, quality bunkai to start from. It was just – here’s the next kata, come up with some bunkai and I’ll judge from that how skilled you are. Not even any guidance on how to extract quality bunkai from a kata! Sheesh it’s educational malpractice.

So with all this being said, I’ve moved away from the Flexible Bunkai Model because I think it is too burdensome for most karateka – myself included. With limited training time, I don’t think it is a realistic training paradigm. AND I don’t quite know how to reach that goal for myself, let alone lead someone else there.

Instead I’ve cut most of the kenkyu kata (research forms) out besides a few of the softer ones to practice without bunkai and focused instead of the 8 classical Goju-ryu kata and the core bunkai from those. I think this presents both a smaller set of bunkai to practice as well as a better reflection of Goju-ryu as a style. I’m a Goju-ryu student after all.