I know karate, I know jujitsu, I drive like a gangster when I’m coming to see you.
My whole life I’ve done martial arts. Karate, wrestling, jujitsu, boxing. Even sumo for a brief period. Large Canadian tore my ACL in the dohyo (sumo ring). Fun times. If it were up to me some form of combat sport would be a standard part of public education. Builds character. They’re also fun, good exercise, and, if I were the sort that formed life-long friendships, allegedly they’re good for that too. Not that I would know about the last one. Everybody at my old karate school no longer speaks to me. If you read my post on Rachel Held Evans, you might be noticing a theme. For now though, let’s leave aside the glaringly obvious implications about my social skills that such implies and talk about something else. Let’s talk about kata.
Don’t check out yet. I promise this goes somewhere semi-profound.
Kata translates roughly to “form” or "forms.” If you’ve ever been to a traditional martial arts school you know what I’m talking about. Katas are sets of choreographed moves that, allegedly, train you to fight. How precisely they do this was never explained. Literally For like, a hundred years, nobody ever explained it.
On the surface kata don’t even make sense in that regard. How could artistic shadow boxing the air train you to fight an actual person? It obviously couldn’t. Real people move, and dodge, and hit you back. The air doesn’t do that. Nonetheless though, a legion of pot-bellied senseis across the world were undeterred from offering explanations to the contrary. The more honest ones would admit they had no idea what kata were about but still believed they should be practiced for “spiritual development” and “discipline.” The less honest, more creative types would instead come up with all manner of explanations for the movements in the forms, some of the plausible, some of them not even remotely.
“You punch this guy see. And then, I guess, he dies. And since he’s dead you can turn your back on him and fight this other guy. You’re fighting, like, 9, no, fifteen people here. Like a Bruce Lee movie. Okay so anyway no you low block this guy to death and turn away again. Yeah. And then guy number three gets a karate chop.”
I exaggerate, but not much.
Sometimes it was almost that bad.
From the introduction of karate to mainland Japan (it began on the island nation of Okinawa) in the 1920s, student after student, and teacher after teacher, has gone on doing this forms, without really knowing why. “Well, my sensei said they were important, and his sensei told him they were important so…”
That’s the power of appeal to authority. You can get hundreds of thousands of kids around the world doing nonsense artsy shadow boxing for decades by appealing to authority. Great rhetorical maneuver to keep handy in your back pocket. Read enough books and you can eventually find an authority figure saying just about anything you like.
Neat trick.
I was one of those kids. Every Tuesday and Thursday for ten years I would go to my karate class and the local rec center do katas. We’d do other stuff too of course, sparing and so one, but the backbone of the class was always the katas. Kata makes karate, karate. Without the forms there’s nothing really to distinguish it from any other form of kicking and punching, except maybe the outfit. Not many other warriors go about in white pajamas. For those ten years I did the forms, over and over again, never really knowing what they were for.
We had ideas. Now and again the more advanced students would get together and speculate. “I think this movement is a headbutt.” “No, no, that’s a neck crank.” Some of our ideas were even plausible and the four or five of times I got in real, honest fights, they even worked. Again, let’s ignore the glaring implications about my social skills.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Holy is He Who Wrestles to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.