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Deciphering Bunkai Across Styles

 I’ve spent a lot of time training kata and studying bunkai. It is really at the center of my training, at least mentally or intellectually. When I think about karate, I’m usually thinking about bunkai.

The dojo I came up in had many many kata, something like 30 kata all told. As I discussed in my post of the Flexible Bunkai Model, I think there were several reasons for this and I’ve continued to train a number of those kata beyond the 8 classical Goju-ryu forms.

However, what I’ve stopped trying to do is decipher bunkai for those kenkyu or research kata. I’m sure I could slap together something obvious (and have had to do that before for testing), but I don’t believe it would be close to the Core Bunkai I would want, the ones the kata was built around.

For Goju-ryu, I think I have enough of a map to find those Core Bunkai. For example, Goju-ryu bunkai will usually have you move off the line of attack, get in close to control the attacker, and finish with a strike to or twisting of the head and neck. This is the Goju-ryu strategy – Counter, Close, Control.

I don’t know if Shorin-ryu or the other Okinawan styles follow this strategy, so while I may be able to apply it for a few moves, I’m not sure if it gets me closer to the essence of those kata.

One thing you see with Goju-ryu is that the kata movements are quite similar across kata. Goju kata have a lot of opening and closing hands (grabbing techniques), striking with the forearm, and very few kicks, mostly kansetsu-geri to the knee. This doesn’t seem to be what is happening in Sochin or Anaku. Those Shorin forms are much… lighter? With a springiness and snap and lots of body movement… it’s clearly a different style.

Which brings me to another problem with deciphering non-Goju-ryu bunkai: Even if I could determine a strategy governing some of these kata, would be it be same strategy for every Shorin kata? I can see some similarities between Sochin and Anaku… but is it the same for Naihanchi? Jion?

I do not know enough about the history of these kata to parse it out, but here is a major advantage for Goju-ryu: the classical kata were grouped together by one person, the founder, Chojun Miyagi. The individual kata are certainly older than the style, and of all different ages, but Miyagi and his Sensei, Kanryo Higashionna, grouped them together and passed them along as a single style.

To me, this is evidence that there should be some similarity between the bunkai across different Goju-ryu kata – and there is! I can’t say if the kata of other Okinawan styles will have similar connections between them. I also need to do more work tracing back where the kata I learned come from, I’ve been using “Shorin forms” as a catchall term, but that’s a broad brush.

I am fortunate that Goju-ryu has this depth to it. Clearly there is a lifetime of study here for me. And so while I enjoy and still train the non-Goju kata, I am wary of bunkai experts who freely analyze across styles. It may provide a good starting point for analysis, but there is no substitute for long term study of a specific style.

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