Following Iain's presentation on Miyagi, I was reading Toguchi's books and I'm kind of profoundly disappointed (and my day is ruined hahahah).
It starts very promising like other books alike, it tell us some things that collaborate our contemporary views on the subject and it even have some very interesting pictures of techniques I thought I knew but, as it is always the case, there is more to be learned....
But then.......we get to the application section and it's almost childish and it's not an isolated case.
The official bunkai I'm being forced to memorize part of IKGA curriculum is...let me choose a polite word....problematic. As it was explained to me, it is a interpretation created by Yamaguchi sensei (who I'm led to believe, learned from Miyagi directly).
I went to a seminar, full of black belts, with a whole afternoon dedicated to bunkai and as I look around, most of them are to the sides with arms crossed complaining that is useless and there is no reason to get involved. You can see by yourselves, but the bigger problem for me is that every section must have two different interpretations and at the end it not even looks like the kata it was based on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebTIn47tXD8
Higaonna have a approach much closer to Toguchi's explanation in his book, it is interesting if we consider a "first attempt" for young students to practice with a partner, but I don't believe it would hold against a adversary that doesn't stand there and waits to be punched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCppK8rHAzg
So...before this gets too long.....
As I see it, we have two options, all these very important and respected people were taught this sequences as they are, firmly believe in them and teach as they were instructed to, maybe even Miyagi himself never saw something different and taught as he was told to. Or they are most blatantly lying to us all.
I mean, Toguchi died in 1998, he had plenty of time and opportunity to, if not tell a different story, to teach others he trusted in the "real" explanation. By now, we should have too many people with this secrete knowledge and access to YouTube. Funakoshi made clear his dislike for "modern" karate, even if hi was bound by the old ways of secrecy, he must have taught at least his family and again the genie would certainly be out of the bottle by now in one way or another.
What am I missing here?
Try reading this thread from 2018. I walked down a similar line of thought and we had an enlightening discussion. Maybe it can also help you.
https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/content/kenwa-mabuni-bunkai-genius-or-not
Humm....
Yes, it's motivated by the same personal "annoyance", but everybody just keep coming back to the secrecy argument and I don't buy it.
This video I watched yesterday by Martial Arts Journey, I think they get a more relatable perspective, it's not that "it's a secrete", dudes back in the day saw that stuff in action and what could REALLY do, they have zero identification with our modern motivations and like my sensei says a lot "I'm responsible for what you do with what I teach".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRNGj3FZvl8
Growing up (before internet dammmmmnnnnn), I thought there were just 3 or 4 people that actually could be called "traditional masters" and if they all sat together and decided to let that knowledge die, that is very believable. But maaannnn, this days is like every week I learn about a new one and most of them had the theoretical credentials to learn the stuff we talk about.
Unless kamehameha and shooting lasers trhough your eyes is part of the classes.....then I would certainly agree withe them.
Maybe, what I'm asking is, are all these many people out there that should know this reallly reallly reallly good at keeping a secrete or are we, as everybody says, just the end of a broken chain and there is no chance to ever reconcile with the old true intentions?
Yea, I think this is the word, intention! We may find many useful knowledge and skill reconstructing kata without ever getting close to what they were like, but I must believe Miyagi, for instance, had a specific intention creating Gekisai and what annoys me deeply is that maybe.....it's what we already have.
So it seems like this is an issue more of understanding what is being shown.
Bunkai is the first of a three step process to go from kata to fighting. It just shows the basic analysis of the movements in the kata. Kata which encoded and layered applications into them so you could get more from fewer movements and your enemies would not understand your art by watching your kata.
After this you are supposed to play more loosely with the form, using the same ideas, like high block and counter, but maybe exploring use of angles or countering with a different attack.
This helps you understand how the same ideas can take mNy forms, so the final level is where you apply the underlying principles regardless of movement.
Viewed in this lens, those kata bunkai were simple, but not unreasonable.
Yes, sure, it feels obvious after the fact, but if we apply what Iain proposes, karate is "codified" with a different esthetics that the one we are used to and find the right point of view is key to decode the whole thing.
The official explanations for how to apply the kata are unreasonable. Even the humble 123 you learn on your first day of boxing is useful to the rest of your days of boxing, you can apply the process you describe and it still is a 123 with exceeding levels of strategy and technique... without ever stopping to be a 123.
That is why I talk about intention, we can extrapolate the "original" movements indefinitely and that is a good thing, but who ever created those sequences had a clear intention of what they are for when doing so.
You’re not missing anything. I did the Shoreikan curriculum for years, it’s impractical and in places, frankly bizarre. I don’t know why it is how it is.
There are “nuggets” of functionality in it, but you have to sift through and throw out all the bizarre stuff, moving straight back and forth and you punch/block etc. Incidentally both of my teachers interested in more practical Karate went through this process of “pruning” Toguchis bunkai material for the practical bits. At some point though, one of them just moved past it. I hate to be so dismissive, but much of the material itself is just ridiculous, no matter how you slice it. Sorry there’s not a more satisfying answer. There are bits in the bunkai drills that work if you remove them from the complex drill pattern and do them more realistically, in my experience. Compare them to the bunkai taught by someone like Taira sensei for instance, no comparison. Every move is functional there. Once I got instruction from my teachers in Goju Ryu bunkai that were functional, I haven’t had much use of the Shoreikan stuff and in fact, probably haven’t done any of it in 15 years or so.
It's not about getting a satisfying answer, but IF that is the answer, we should abandon karate all together. If we only like its aesthetics but it has no real practical meaning, lets call all these changes we are doing something else and let the old karate sunset like modern taichi. At least it would put some sense of this mess and we can have new stiles and new perspectives that actually fulfill a purpose. We are already doing that in a sense, just not abandoning the karate bit, it's an emotional bound I suppose.
The reality tough is that I (just like many others) keep finding all theses neat stuff in the kata and can't even test it in the dojo because it's "not the official answer". If you find one or two things that kind of make sense, it's just a coincidence. But if you can make a entire kata work and still keep it's original aesthetic? That is evidence or delusion.
Considering you are from Goju-ryu, have you seen my "solution" for Gekisay dai ichi? Would you mind giving me a honest no bullshit opinion? (maybe in DM or in the other thread, to keep this one on topic)
Maaaannn I'm extra grumpy today........Karate on Reddit keeps trying to make it be 4D MMA from Okinawa and it pisses me off.....
Where can I find your Gekisai “solution”?
Anyway, happy to give constructive feedback. This is is a -huge- question, so I’ll try to summarize a couple painful but necessary parts:
1) Lots of very “traditional” material is bad. We could speculate on why, but if you know it, you know it, you can’t un-know it.
2) Related to the above, having an “official” version is meaningless outside of practicality for teaching purposes. Understanding actual combative principles in the Kata allows for simply understanding how to use the movements. From my perspective, someone who doesn’t understand this actually doesn’t understand Kata as a combative analysis tool, it’s more of a folk practice at that point; “such and such taught x so we know it’s the only explanation” type thing. It’s just bad thinking, but IME very common in the Karate world.
The rub here is that you can’t really understand the combative principles without using them, and many of the passed-down, traditional Karate methods of drilling them are simply too limited and ritualistic to put the skills into practice in a way that would feed back to deeper Kata understanding.
If you train in a place that puts full faith in their demos (which is actually what a lot of yakusoku Kumite is IMO, rather than actual drilling, it’s original purpose) there’s not much you can do. Just get what you can out of training there and maybe see if you can find like minded people to have a Karate training group with.
I did that 17 years ago and still have a dojo from it, lol. People interested in this stuff are out there, but it’s a niche. Most people just do what sensei says and like social reinforcement of being a good student “honoring a lineage” and that kind of thing.
I guess I’d also encourage you to look at other more practical Goju folks, if only to contextualize what you are doing and get a different point of view. My own mentor Kris Wilder has a series of bunkai stuff you can access with a patreon membership, Paul Enfield has good videos you can watch on YouTube, or purchase for deeper dives. I’m sure there are others out there too.
You may have to put up with the silly explanations in the dojo, but I encourage you to explore other answers on your own, and with partners if it’s..socially possible in your dojo environment.
Last thing:
You -should not- have a ready made answer for every variable of every Kata. That is a thing that is discovered in training- by doing. It’s quite enough to pursue a few principles found in Kata and expand from there.
What I'm after is intention, humans do things with intention, they had a particular perspective when the kata were created and adapted. In that sense, I may be "stuck" on a ready made answer, but one that offers perspective and permits the techniques to be expanded.
I really like the parallel with the boxing 1-2-3, you can role this drill from the first day of training to your last day of training and can expand to a remarkable number of variations.
Anyway, Gekisay:
https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/content/my-interpretation-gekisai-dai-ic...
Gekisai impact
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aZBngiE72k
Mawashi uke/sukui nage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=356g1olMDT0
general geksai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E8IFi85tlI
Here are some of my examples, nothing super thrilling but most of these were made as a training record and student reference, so they aren't meant to be particularly cool and mostly are intentionally done "chunky style" so you can see what's going on.
. I really like your videos, congrats, you have made something much better than the Toguchi drills just by being inquisitive and training;) Not to take away from your hard work, as the process is an individual one, but what you are showing in these videos -IS- "traditional" Goju Ryu bunkai to one degree or another. Most of what you show I have learned as variations or primary techniques from my teachers. I've found that most people who seriously get into studying Goju Ryu end up with similar answers, in all kinds of individual flavors. So, in a sense you have validated your own thoughts on the matter.
Few things to share, not because I don't like what I see here - I definitely do, just areas to explore:
1) I like the framing the head on the first one, you can also play with framing stepping backwards the other way, when you are inside the arms. Similarly, you can follow through the punch with sukui nage if you step forward.
2) I wouldn't get too invested on starting everything from a grappling position. It's good to do for sure, but there are some built in aspects of Goju that will tell you other ways to use them - such as learning kakie well. None of my teachers much emphasized it that much, but I learned what I could from other teachers and if you get an understanding of it, playing with bunkai makes a lot more sense. Paul Enfield has a good video on it, and there are some videos of Taira Sensei on it floating around too. Anyway, there is a kind of "handfighting" of sorts involved in this, sometimes it goes in a direction that is a little too complex for my tastes, but some of it is really valuable, again I'd say look through Taira's vids to get some inspiration. Or, you can literally just practice from kakie position outside and inside, among other things, this is meant to simulate a kind of limb clash, and are generally good starting points for bunkai.
3) There are also some modern drills I use to facilitate bunkai practice I picked up from wrestling and Muay Thai. One is the common underhook drill from wrestling, the other two are muay thai drills where you try to obtain the inside position with the arms at longer clinch range, and then closer clinch range while trying to get a head clinch. both these drills naturally open up and understanding of range and timing for bunkai. When you do this kind of drill the bunkai will not always look pretty or "demo friendly", but it will be functional.
On the original intent, all we can really go by there is the Kata names and some of the things we know about Miyagi. Honestly, when I think "smash and break" your videos are more faithful to that intent than a lot of the complicated drills i've seen over the years, so good job.
No need to apologize, I asked for a honest opinion, I'm sure there would be more to explore if I had other people to train with more often, everything still looks a little to clean.
I have not found opportunities for kakie so far, my initial approach to Gekisay was more in that line, but I had to abandon it after finding a way to "explain everything" coming from a simple clinch.
I will try to document what i have come up with for Saifa, soon I hope, but the weather is not making it easy around here.
The way I learned to explore bunkai in Goju Kata generally, most techniques have a entering version, an immediate striking range version, and a clinch version. It’s not universal, there are some things that make more sense one and not in others, but just a way to explore different ranges of using the motions.