Karate Nobody

 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 t...

 Now that I’ve described the two competing bunkai paradigms that I’ve worked within – the Core Bunkai Model  that I ascribe to and the Flexible Bunkai Model  which I grew up ‘learning’ – I thought I would take some time to describe a third model that is common and, I think, also useful. While I was struggling to understand the Flexible Bunkai Model,   I stumbled upon a critical book called Four Shades of Black by Gavin Mulholland . This book is a must-have for any Goju-ryu practitioner. Mulholland has a clear point to make and he drives it home in a beautiful and illustrative book. I can’t recommend it enough. The basic idea is that the Goju-ryu kata form a progressive curriculum so that the student develops more advanced karate skills as they move through the kata. The book uses the first four Goju kata to illustrate the point (Gekisai Dai Ichi, Gekisai Dai Ni, Saifa, Seienchin). Each kata gives the student a new area of study and a new set of skills to develop...

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, Soc...

 I don’t know if it has subsided yet, but there was a period of time – let’s say 2005 to 2015 – where bunkai exploded. Suddenly the karate world was all about kata applications.   I think this coincided with the maturation of the internet and social media. Suddenly there were YouTube channels and Facebook groups that really spread the word about bunkai and how to practice it. They also spread the word about bunkai books and DVDs. I really enjoyed this and think it was good for the art as a whole. I certainly feel that I took advantage of it.* The dojo I grew up in always practiced bunkai applications. It was part of the testing requirements for each kata, but that is where it ended. There were allusions to “layers” of bunkai or higher-level applications, but the kata were never revisited to extract these applications and we never did “deep dives” into a single kata. Looking back, I view many of these bunkai as superficial, block-kick-punch level bunkai. My bunkai practi...