Lost Bunkai and the Karate Revolution
From this 1965 8mm film we can conclude that bunkai knowledge was not being shared in the Matsubayashi community at this time.
I do not know what these people knew or did not know. I can see what they were showing in this exercise. It is not kata analysis.
These men have skill. They contributed to our lives and karate. They lived under conditions more terrible than most can imagine.
But we cannot presume that they were perfect. We have the responsibility to build on what they taught.
This film shows experienced karate practitioners – the lowest ranking is Takayoshi Nagamine, a Shodan at the time. Shoshin Nagamine participated, as did those who were senior instructors then and soon after – Kushi, Nakamura, Makishi and Omine.
This demo was not improvised.
If they or other people in the Okinawan karate community knew the real bunkai to these moves this group, would they have been demonstrating this?
Did they want to show something modern, easy to learn, and comprehensible to the uninitiated?
We can be certain that the originators of the techniques used in this kata did know the applications. They would not have created these highly specialized, unusual postures, stances, techniques and sequences, for no reason.
It is evident that these movements were not devised to be used as these practitioners are using them.
If an attacker is coming up to your left side, out of range, and punches in the direction of your side, you would not need to do the first move of Pinan Shodan. It would not be a good way to respond.
As shown in this film, the defender knocks the attacker’s punch to the side a little, punches the air, then turns around. Nothing is resolved. And the attack itself makes no sense, not at that distance or to that target.
The three chudan uke stepping forward are doing what?
The double chudan uke are not defending anything that would happen.
The nukite is doing nothing.
The kosa dachi’s have no purpose.
The turns to face a new opponent have no meaning.
Bunkai means divide and analyze. Where is the analysis? What skill set is this kind of “bunkai” teaching?
This was the “bunkai” I learned in the 1980’s. As we can see in this film, it was practiced in the 1960’s. This was the karate that Ansei Ueshiro learned at the Nagamine dojo in Okinawa, and imported to the US. People are still doing this “bunkai” now. It was what they learned from their teachers. They did not question it.
Some of us did.
Here are some of the solutions we have posted so far at @mountainkarate:
https://youtu.be/_sX1R3XN9c4 – nekko kosa v1
https://youtu.be/PXZ7cS3fRJk – nekko kosa v2
https://youtu.be/7W1F0XAO3Cs – nukite
https://youtu.be/_hpYREZg2y0 – chudan arch – two versions
https://youtu.be/3VNLxMatgGg – three shuto chudan
https://youtu.be/-BGJWCHoRiE – two shuto chudan
https://youtu.be/CqwZWzzwR_I – first direction
https://youtu.be/ndz68AQ6zcY – anti-takedown
There are many more out there. See the MBRKataAnalysis site for examples.
Bunkai disputes are not the critical issues of our time. Cultures are collapsing; cities are neglected; millions are afflicted with crime and fear; the prospect of nuclear war is back.
Not to be negative, but here we are.
For those of us who are working on this, it matters – for practical self-defense, the vitality of our martial arts, and the ability to honestly transmit skills that will serve our friends and students well.
The techniques in the kata, including Pinan shodan, are effective when we practice them with an understanding of their purpose. Anyone who sees these techniques work gets this. Why did Okinawan teachers not pass on the meaning of the techniques of their own art?
It was not the fragmentary transmission of karate to the west by inadequately trained, short-term visitors to Okinawa in the late 20th century that eroded the traditional arts of Okinawa.
It wasn’t just some entrepreneurs taking advantage of gullible foreigners. That happened. But the process started long before, during the modernization of Japanese culture – an irresistible force that transformed Japan in the early part of the century.
What happened on Okinawa follows the pattern of change of traditional arts in other industrializing cultures.
Its effects were faster and more radical in Okinawan karate because martial arts culture requires a personal transmission of knowledge and experience. There was no way to adequately record the content of the training. (There still isn’t.) You could draw pictures. You could write descriptions. There was some of that. But it was not adequate to capture the art or to inspire either the transmitters or recipients to maintain it, under the overwhelming pressures they suddenly faced: industrial modernization, its unlimited demands on time, resources and attention, war at home and abroad, cultural dislocation and spiritual toll.
A timeline of the events influencing the lives and culture of the Okinawan people, from the mid-19th to the mid 20th century, reveals the speed and momentum of events:
1853 US Navy Commodore Perry breaks the 220 year-long Japanese isolation, and the implicit threat of foreign invasion is clear.
1868 Emperor Meiji is restored to power and the samurai government is deposed.
1877 General Saigo’s Satsuma rebellion (the story told in the movie The Last Samurai). Saigo and his followers believe that all that is noble and strong in samurai culture is being sacrificed to make way for what is crude, ugly and foreign. His rivals in the capital believe that if they delay modernization, then what the western powers did to China they will do to Japan. The elite samurai are defeated by a conscript army (men drafted into military service) with modern weapons.
1879 Well known to the Japanese, western industrial power is winning everywhere – not just in China, but in the European wars of expansion against pre-industrial people in Africa, India, south Asia, the Middle East, and in the American Civil War. Victorious General and former U.S. President U.S. Grant visited with Emperor Meiji in Tokyo this year and shared perspectives on peace, prosperity, and the decisive effect of banking and industrial power in the military victory of the North over the agrarian, traditionalist American South.
What does that have to do with bunkai? Traditional ways are regarded as petty, old, useless, to be cast off and replaced…
1879 Okinawa is removed from the Chinese sphere of influence and placed under Japanese control. The Ryukyuan royal court is removed from power.
1895 Japan defeats China and takes control of Korea.
1899 The defeat of the “Boxers” (martial artists) in China by Western, Indian and Japanese military forces. Once again, the traditional way of war loses, the modern military wins.
1905 Japan’s modernizing military defeats Russian forces in Manchuria (China) and Korea.
War fever is escalating through Japan in a way that may be incomprehensible to jaded, modern westerners today…
1917 Miyagi Chojun travels to China to find his teacher’s teacher. He was not successful, but
it is clear from his writing and the memories of his students that he was imbued with the Confucian ideal of personal cultivation and intentional transformation through diligent study and practice as the best way to live a human life.
He represented this in his martial achievement and in his saying “Oku Myo Zai Ren Shin.” Although the saying has been associated with Zen training, Miyagi is following the ideal of the Confucian “junzi”, the cultivated person. This ideal was familiar, and often central, in the personal ethos of the elite in east Asia, including on Okinawa. Miyagi was an unusual person. But in this regard, he was not.
By the 1920’s the junzi ideal was being eclipsed, rapidly being replaced by the new, modern ideal.
The energy of the people – at work, in school, in the community and at home – was more and more being directed outward, to fulfill the demands of the state.
In less than a century, in civilian life, the enduring ideal of the junzi was replaced by the ideal of the salaryman. And the martial ideal of the elite samurai warrior was replaced by the universal duties of the soldier. What a society valorizes, subsidizes and rewards, people will do.
This change of mindset was an essential factor in the disappearance of kata bunkai, among many other vanishing cultural treasures and values…
1920’s Motobu and Funakoshi export karate to Tokyo, capital of the mobilizing empire. Funakoshi’s Okinawan karate was molded to suit the demands of the nation and the mood of the times.
1920’s Karate is introduced to the schools in Okinawa and broadly disseminated for the purposes of fitness and military readiness. Karate training was not introduced to the schools for self-defense.
The national educational mission long-included an emphasis on fitness for military service. Jigoro Kano, founder of Judo in the 1880’s, wasn’t a local sensei with an interesting martial art. He was a senior education official in the national government.
On Okinawa, karate, the indigenous art, was adopted by the Japanese government, changed, and built in to the curriculum in the schools. You can’t do high proficiency, self-mastery in an hour a day for a few years in school.
But you can get fit from exercises, and you can learn fighting spirit. In that setting the elaborate, detailed bunkai was not relevant. Students trained in calisthenics and kata for fitness, focus and uniformity in drill; in kumite for fighting spirit. No bunkai.
Karate was easy to standardize that way, and every hour of training was devoted to moving and getting strong. Everyone did it. People who taught this way well were promoted. People who learned this well were recognized. Recruits for the military were fit when enlisted. The training worked perfectly – for its intended purpose.
This was considered a modernization. It meant more, better, faster. Modernization meant converting resources to industrial power and minds to manning machines.
Some things were lost in the karate, but doing their own art, in the new, modern way, was exciting, alive, purposeful in support of a great and essential cause, and everyone did it together. It was the new way. The way things are done now. By winners.
Modernization seemed the only way to keep the global predators at bay. And if it meant the loss of some traditional ways, so be it.
Look at why armies use hand to hand combative training:
The US Army manual FM 21-150 says:
- PURPOSE OF COMBATIVES TRAINING: The many practical battlefield benefits of combative training are not its only advantage. It can also—
a. Contribute to individual and unit strength, flexibility, balance, and cardiorespiratory fitness.
b. Build courage, confidence, self-discipline, and esprit de corps.
Every army knows this, and trains empty hand for these reasons. (As do insurgencies, militias and gangs.)
1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The Japanese Empire overruns China through 1945.
1936 The famous meeting of karate masters in Okinawa known as the “Renaming” of karate. The leading figures in Okinawan karate, including Chojun Miyagi, agreed to change the characters for “karate” from Chinese hands (or T’ang hands) to the Japanese characters for “empty hands. The renaming was a symbolic public statement in a time of war. In addition to the karate leaders, in attendance were the leaders of government from the military, law enforcement, the department of education, public information officers from those branches, and representatives of the leading newspapers.
In this rapid cultural transformation, much of the traditional heritage of Japan and Okinawa was lost. Including the bunkai to the kata. It was no doubt preserved by a few, in a few places. But that was easily lost in the great transformation that touched almost everyone.
1939 Zen master Harada Sogaku, later greatly admired by leaders of the American Zen movement, (unaware that he said to his fellow monks): “If ordered to march, march! If ordered to shoot, bang! This is a manifestation of the highest wisdom of enlightenment! The unity of Zen and war … extends to the furthest reaches of the holy war now under way…” (cited by Brian Victoria).
His sentiment was widely shared, in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
1945 The Battle of Okinawa. Oppression, invasion, chaos, mass death and dislocation.
1950s US occupation, Okinawa rising from the ashes, takes a new view of the past and the future. Growing up in this time people wanted to live, not to dwell in the past but to recover and modernize.
The fields and farms in their day were filled with unexploded ordinance. Ansei Ueshiro, who brought the karate I first learned to the US, had his fingers blown off by a cast-off grenade he came across as a boy, they say.
The atmosphere that generation grew up in was not all sea breezes that visitors enjoy when visiting the island. There was fire and death in the air for a long time.
The healthy, athletic men in the 1965 film clip above, showing the old style bunkai, took what they had learned, trained with their friends and teachers, were proud of it and enjoyed it. They were well aware of the new international opportunity that western interest in karate offered them.
1960s It seemed promising to create an authentic, indigenous Okinawan alternative to counter the growing international influence of Shotokan and the Japan Karate Association, in the form of Matsubayashi Ryu, led by the popular public figure, politician, civic leader and martial artist Shoshin Nagamine. He and his group kept their art alive.
Conclusion
There is nothing standing in the way of recovering the applications within the framework of current dojo practice. As long as people want to learn them.
Some people worry about doing this because their sensei didn’t learn this material. He was convinced there was nothing to learn, and that kata practice would magically transform into combative skill.
This kind of sensei’s students, through the years, sought his approval. They followed him and looked up to him. So, the idea that there was more to the kata than he knew was dismissed, and any suggestion that there was more to learn was rejected as disrespectful and heretical.
They all got higher ranks along the way.
Without understanding how kata teaches fighting there were splits in dojos and between styles. Good athletes deemphasized kata. They focused on kumite. The competitive challenge pushed them to high performance. It was a thrill.
People less focused on athletics got interested in kata. They enjoyed training, and got a workout without losing matches. They deemphasized combatives.
Both approaches are deficient, because kata and kumite, rightly understood, are integral parts of complete training.
Because of this style-centric frame of reference, the knowledge-base of the style declined with each generation. In that 1965 film there are demos of grappling and throwing that disappeared from the curriculum. Why? We can put that back into the kata interpretations and training.
Now many people recognize that the time has come to restore the true depth and purpose of karate training. That is why there is a revolution in karate underway.
This revolution is not the sudden, convulsive, overthrow kind. It refers back the original useage of the word – which has been applied to all sorts of human institutions.
It refers to the fact that there is a life cycle to things, and the cycle “revolves”, it goes through stages, and the stages repeat, like the seasons, growth and decay, day and night, a heartbeat, or the compression and release in every move of every kata.
This karate revolution is well underway.
What was lost is being rediscovered. This is not the first time this has happened. Or the only dimension of human mastery in which it will.
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Post Copyright © 2023 Jeffrey Brooks
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