On Kata...and henka and adapting the art for

Good conversation.

In the beginning that might be the case. When you are an advanced student and perhaps even teaching, it shouldn't make a difference. Whether their arm is protruding, retreating, or already out, you should be able to apply all of your techniques regardless. Was this not the case then the arts would be useless against feints and the fickle hearted attacker who wasn't sure what he wanted to do. They are not, and can be applied no matter what. Remember too that some parts of the art deal with attacking first.:evil:

I guess you didn't read the OP as this was all explained in detail. It isn't problems you are trying to solve, it's learning how to master yourself and then apply that mastery of self outwards into interactions with others. Physically that amounts to putting yourself in the best position to accomplish your goals while hindering them from doing the same. If he throws a jab, you shouldn't let the cross come. If it does though, there are a myriad ways to deal with it. The was we incorporate movement, he has to continually reorient to try to attack you. Any attack can be met because there is no difference between a jab, a cross, a hook, an uppercut, a downward cut, etc save the incoming direction and distance. These martial arts were designed to deal with combat so if you are looking at it from a "what do I do if" perspective, you still haven't mastered the kata or principles found in them. It doesn't matter what he does, the answer is already there.

You don't need kata to transmit those things necessarily, but you do need something kata-like to transmit a body of teaching. If you want to learn to fight using a certain style, it is a universal way of learning how to.

You misunderstand. Moving your head out of the way might've worked in that situation but when you are dealing with weapons whose main goal are to cut you in half or pierce you, it is not the most practical or effective way of moving. If your head is moved and your body isn't, you die. Of course you can have an open casket because your face is still pretty but...

Moving your head is an instinctual response anyway, so you don't need to train to do it in a pinch. Why would you need to create a kata for an instinct is beyond me, martial arts are to replace and/or supplement where are instincts are lacking or not life saving helpers in a situation.

Hence why you don't move just your head. Trying it out against weapons makes it apparently clear pretty quickly why this is a failed strategy.

Read the OP. There is nothing new under the sun.

You still don't understand that movement is the same. A strike requires certain things to be effective, same for a throw or a choke. You learn various ways of doing things but in the end you are learning the same thing. If you can distill the principles you get beyond what you are asking. Who cares if he throws a hook or a diagonal slash or a straight right, they all have to land to have effect. Kata aren't just "moves" that only work in the way demonstrated in the basic beginner level choreography. If they were, you'd have to learn millions of them just to be able to fight. Think of it like walking. You learned how to walk, can you only do so in a straight line going forward?

That's not how it works in ninjutsu. Kata is how the art is transmitted. If you're understanding of them is as you stated above, you are correct in that you will never be able to use them.

It's all there if you know how and where to look.

 

Without proper basics, there is no foundation. No foundation, nothing really to prove right or wrong. Too many people out there haven't got a clue but are dedicated to sharing that cluelessness with as many paying bodies as they can. The remedy is learning to see, not just look, at what the masters of these arts are doing differently from everyone else. They have been doing the same things for decades yet people can't seem to get it.

Fighting, sparring, crosstraining, and more are all good things to do, but first you have to learn the real deal or else you are just fooling yourself. That's the biggest problem with the modern Bujinkan, too many people pulling the wool over themselves and looking for somebody to hold their hand and point the way instead of doing what it takes to figure it out for themselves.

 

No, the problem with the 'modern' Bujinkan is that it is all just theory. Nobody actually steps up physically. The techniques are theoretically sound, but nobody has proven them empirically in recent years.

Or is it Rationally that I am looking for?

I don't know with all those long words...

Let me try again - 'shut up and train' with a guy that is actually skilled at his art, and beat him, and slap it on YouTube. Repeat, 20 times.

 

Chicken?

Or egg? They have nothing but theory because they didn't learn the real art. If they had, it would be apparent. So again, if you don't know the real deal, how can you back it up?

 

But in that case aren't you creating Henka on the spot? [is that the gramatically correct way of putting "henka" in a sentence?] It might be a good aspect of training for you if uke doesn't know what they're doing, but it doesn't sound too great for them. Plus, if that does happen to beginners, you are training them to react to feints as if they are real strikes, when they should be ignored or exploited in other ways.

That's simply not true. Plenty of martial arts have no kata.

But against a punch, or small knife, it might be just the ticket, and more efficient. It's about being aware of context, no?

 

But 'they' equals most people I have seen. To be fair the more worrisome chaps weren't actually training in Japan but were tourists.

And I do enjoy the level of skill of ambulation from many of the residents too.

But I haven't seen anyone I would want to put money on beating a fiesty Judoka.

 

Didn't say it was good or bad, just irrelevant. No, they aren't creating henka. Understanding and applying the principles in real life.

I said kata-like. Name a martial art that doesn't have some form of pre-choreographed pattern that they use to teach something. Even boxing has kata. If there are arts that don't use something like a kata, they are in the minority and they probably don't have much breadth in the matter of curriculum.

How do you know it's just a punch or a small knife coming at you? If your attacker has any skill, as you move your head out of the way and expose other targets, he will be exploiting them. I already said that doing so was an instinct anyway and doesn't need training to do. Even if you find yourself subconsciously doing so, you still want to be moving your body or else you break a basic tenet of these arts. If you aren't doing ninjutsu, it doesn't really matter though as your teachings will be different.

 

Again, if you learn the art right and the way it was traditionally passed on, it is a non-issue. 99% of the people out there aren't so "most people" either have to fake it, make it up, or mix it up with something else.

In a judo match? Ambulation? Do you mean the running rabbit stuff?

 

Again IF.

Exactly.

Unfortunately I have seen too many for the possibility of that if to exist. I think there are many cool chaps who are enjoying their learning curve, and many of them are ahead of mine. But no, the art as it is lauded is dead until such time as someone steps up and shows it working.

That doesn't mean that it is bad, or unworthy of pursuing, but it's a theoretical pursuit of excellence (something that I actually find valuable) not a viable martial art. I'll be happy to change that viewpoint once I see a person at the proper level.

At its peak, training is about the person, not the art. There aren't any people putting in the time in a hard enough environment to produce the results that the art is capable of.

Not that the platform isn't there of course.

 

We're mostly agreeing except that I am saying there are things you haven't seen and people you may not know of. Hence your statements of absolute certainty have to be prefixed with, "As far as I know."

Sure it's a viable martial art, not just for theory. Pursuit of excellence is what all great martial artists have in common. Might not be their goal but it is a nice side effect.

 

Yeah, but if the kata states uke punches tori in the head, but uke doesn't try to do that, isn't that a variation of the kata? A small and insignificant point, but an answer would increase my understanding of the line between kata and henka.

So you did, and right you are

I presume you're getting at preserving structure during movement. I think we may be talking about different kinds of head movement (I was thinking more boxing slip or weaving into someone's guard), but I take your point on your tenets and me not training in your art.

 

Sure, they should try to hit you but if they don't that doesn't negate the effectiveness of the technique or your ability to apply it. It isn't a henka as much as getting to know how the principles work and how to apply them to whatever you are presented with. Henka can be looked at as different techniques instead of variations of the original if you want. It is an already determined way of doing it that is different in some way from the original. There are henka as in techniques and to henka, meaning to change what you're doing. Many confuse the two.

Partly, but try moving your head around with a heavy helmet on and see how it affects your balance and ability to move, let alone see. There are oh crap moments where whatever you do to save your butt is better than nothing, but that is different from training a particular way.

 

I have. I didn't like it. Not one bit.

Armour feels more like a death-trap than protection to me.

The battlefield is not for me, I'm more of a running-retreat through the woods to fight (or preferably not) another day kind of guy

PS. Thanks for the Henka explanation.

 

I've seen enough for me to say "I know". But I remain hopeful that this might change and someone will start training a bit harder.

There really isn't any doubt now, I haven't seen everyone, but I have seen all the top chaps, and their top students, and I have seen people from other arts as a benchmark.

I still believe the concepts are solid.

 

I'd disagree, but only slightly. I think one of the greatest problems is the constant goal-post moving by many over what constitutes 'being good'.

Now, I think there are some legitimate discussions to be had over how important it is to learn X or Y bits which may not be relevant to life anymore but are parts of the history and so on.

This is a martial art. It seems to me that the notion of physical effectiveness should probably play in somewhere. I would even argue it should play a primary role. Sure, the fact that Mike Tyson can kick my ass doesn't make him an expert of Japanese martial arts. However, if two people have different methods of training and learning 'Bujinkan' (whatever that is) then the test of those respective methods is the physical.

There's no need to go all throw down deathmatch, it's a matter of dials not switches and I've had some of my favorite training experiences turning those dials up as far as I can with people I respect and trust while they beat the crap out of me in a non-injurious and controlled manner.

But, here's the thing. If person A says that the proper way to learn the 'real deal' is X but they are not physically more effective than person B, then I would probably call into question the actual relevance of X.

Going to Japan, living in Japan, speaking Japanese, being able to read the scrolls, discussing on the internet, reading about modern bio-mechanical theory, etc.. are all very good strategies to get results, but they are not results themselves. There's too much goalpost moving. Some people re-brand these things as the results. Then it all devolves into a discussion of who's particular mix of moved goalposts are correct. Inevitably, the 'correct' ones for any person are the ones they've done.

Being physically effective is necessary but not sufficient to be said to have skill. Therefore if you are not physically effective, you do not have skill. If you are, you may or may not have skill. Judging people on their effectiveness then is a great way to immediately narrow the focus on the much smaller group of people who may or may not 'get it' rather than those who definitely don't. At that point hairs about turning your pinky this way or that or stepping with the right or left foot can be split, not before.

Every person I know, in any field, who is ridiculously, insanely good at whatever they do (not just pretty good or skilled) invests in the process of finding the truth, which is necessarily composed of finding out where one is wrong, rather than being seen to be 'right'. They will argue their beliefs passionately but will turn on a dime when new evidence is presented because it's not their beliefs that they hold that they define themselves and get their self image and self worth from, rather it's their results. These people not only accept evidence from others that they are incorrect about something, but they seek it out themselves, trying to prove themselves wrong. They usually have to do it this way as some point because they pass others so far that no one else is able to even see the defects in their methods.

For example, the smartest person I've ever met who is ridiculously and insanely good programmer spends far more time in any conversation pointing out why he may be wrong and you may be right than most of the people he's talking to (read: me), who are also, almost infallibly wrong. I don't think this is unrelated to the skill he's developed.

But, it's not this method that is used to decide if he's good. It's the results. The method contributes to the results, I think, but it's not the results. Someone can't just copy the method and be labelled 'good'. The fact is that at the end of the day he delivers software that is measurably superior than other people. That's the metric.

The Bujinkan is like any organization, company, or collection of people. It's very easy for groups when they get large enough to begin to focus on internal rather than external quality metrics. Sometimes internal metrics can be useful, but they should always be less important than external.

Some examples:

Internal: seniority, coding standards, procedures, rank, location of residence
External: revenue, market share, physical effectiveness

Internal metrics are meant as a way to help reach the important external ones, but when they become an end in and of themselves they lose their correlation with the external. This idea actually has a name: Goodhart's law. It says: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)

This is exactly what we see, isn't it. How many discussions are about the ineffectiveness of rank as a measure? How many about how people seek rank instead of worrying about skill and letting it happen as a side effect?

This is why I'm leery of criticism of people which doesn't first address an external metric before describing why an internal one should be changed. E.g. 'Customers are not buying our product because it is slow, we should require computationally intensive parts to be coded in C++' or 'I trained with this guy and completely owned him, he should do more X'.

Sure, it might be polite to leave off the first part in public conversation, but it should still be there even if unsaid.

All of this other stuff then gets easy:
'You have to code this section in C++.'
'Why?'
'For speed'
'I've measured it in manner Y and this section is responsible for less than 1% of the total latency, here are my results.'
'Oh, ok then, good to know, thanks!'

Is better than:
'You have to code this section in C++.'
'Why?'
'The corporate coding standards say so. It's right there on the wiki.'
'It's not important though.'
'Well, your personnel review will suffer if you don't adhere to the standards - you'll be rated as "poor"'

 

Wow, not sure what you want to say TLDWT(want to)R, but I'll give you some simple points.

Not sure where you went with that last bit of stuff but the reasons and results are known to all, it's just a matter of whether or not they wish to face them. Pretty simple.

 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record player, let me reiterate that you don't move to Japan because it's cool or trendy, but because that is where the only masters of the art(who are actively teaching) live and the only way to really learn it in its entirety. You learn the language because that is the way you enable yourself to communicate with said masters. These arts can't be learned through distance courses or online video tape feeds. You can try if you want but will get nothing but a bad case of blue kukan well you know the rest.

Learn the kata from a master the way they learned them from their teacher, learn how to apply the principles on real people and quit fooling yourself is my advice to those who are still lost.

 

<...sigh...>

Short version: 'Talk is cheap'.

 

Yet, being the martyr that I am,:hat: I did read the whole thing and even responded to the relevant parts. There is no angst and confusion that can't be cleared up by as little as a college level of dedication and effort to learning directly from a master of the arts. Yes, talk is cheap. Actions speak tomes and yet there are many who are happy to talk about why they can't make the effort...

 

Some people would. And I don't think they'd admit it if that was the case.