As we progress though our martial arts career we set out goals and how we will reach them. The rub sometimes comes however in how we maintain that or those goals once we actually do reach them.
I was involved with a filming project years ago with my old Sensei and I was taken through just about the entire advanced kata system with personal one-on-two lessons (me and my uke). One film covered Koryu Dai Roka Kata and my uke and I must have spent a year to a year and a half working on that one kata of 39 waza in order to get right to Sensei's satisfaction before we filmed it and demo'd it at a summer clinic. That was some work and he covered the correct way to illustrate each principle (as embodied by "a" waza) plus how to allow uke attack and confound (or attack and then attempt to cancel out tori's efforts).
Notice I said "illustrate each principle as embodied by a waza". This is probably one of the most confusing and least understood rationales behind correct and principled kata practice and staying within the template. You are not simply "doing technique" after technique; you are using a physical koan to illustrate a universal principle. You can argue with me that varying a specific technique can be done but it's difficult to state that "modifying and changing" a base-line principle has any efficacy.
After all that work some 15 or so years ago, I looked up one day and realized that I had forgotten big sections of roku and could no longer simply step on the mat and throw it so I went back and pulled out all my notes and old VHS tapes (this was all pre-DVD) and re-taught myself the kata correctly. As we worked back through it all the old comments and excessive verbosity that Sensei had made came back and in fairly short order the kata started to feel the same.
Thinking on this phenomena I realized in a moment of mental insanity (partially fueled by sitting at the sushi counter, where I do some of my best "ki-analysis", with too much uni and sake in me while I screamed "omakase" at the cutter and with him yelling back "gomen nasai") that if I had not made a committed effort to go back and remember it the way I was taught I could have lost it forever and simply have gone forward doing progressively weaker and weaker versions while fooling myself into thinking that all my new variations are the way that it's always never been done before.
The difficulty, and indeed the trap that waaaaay too many Sensei fall prey to, is that of mental laziness. Much has been written about the proclivity of the human mind to work on learning something and then once it starts to feel "good" we slack off and never progress past that point. This is likely where the phrase "good enough for government work" comes from. A real danger here from the ego standpoint is that of knowing more than everyone else around you but not knowing as much as the person who originally taught you and who was billed as the "go-to" all those years ago. If not careful, a Sensei at that point will begin to self-reference, fall prey to the "halo-itis"and now you're really in a tsukemono (pickle) barrel.
Much of what has been bandied about on the web lately pertains to Kodokan Goshin Jutsu but it could pertain to any kata or set of waza/kihon drills. If we attend a seminar 10 or 15 years ago and learn a new kata (goshin/roku/whatever) and then we take it home and play with it for the next couple of months and then mostly put it down, our memory becomes hazy about the specifics. We cover some part of it now and then, or base some other lesson on it but we never really go back and do it right.
Now, it may be 10 or 15 years later and suddenly we have the opportunity to go to another seminar and do the exact same kata. We show up, tighten our obi, trim our eyebrows and lick our lips (or is it lick our eyebrows and ...... oh never mind)
and walk out onto the mat and walk saying "Wow, those were some interesting variations and some of that looked totally different from last time".
Question is (or should be), why does it appear different?
*Having not seriously studied it in toto' for the last 10 or 15 years did you forget?
*Did you "modify" or "change" it without realizing that you had lost portions of the principles?
*Have you spent the last 10 years self-referencing?
*Did the Sensei who may not have practiced it him/herself for the last 10 or 15 years forget part of it and have to remember on the fly in front of a large crowd (called "lack of preparation")?
*Was the uke worth their salt or did uke attack 85 different ways for 21 different waza?
*How many "Sensei" were out there on the mat simultaneously, each "teaching" the same kata in two different ways (and which one do you take home)?
*Did you originally learn it from your Sensei who didn't learn it right the first time or fully understand and now you have the wrong version second hand but you think it's the "right" version?
*Or, having gone through it as say a Shodan/Nidan or a kyu rank, did you not understand it to begin with but thought you did and now all these years later you're confused about what you didn't see then but may be seeing now, leading you to conclude that it's really two different kata when it's the same one taught the same way that you were unable to fully understand the first time around?
In being honest with ourselves we really need to explore all the possibilities, even some I haven't laid out here.
After my sake experience and realization (part of which was applying all of the above to myself to be certain that I hadn't just gotten into some low-grade maguro tuna) I and my seniors had a moment of energetic discussion and changed what we require for promotion; all to ensure that material was understood, not lost and could be successfully passed down. This was after taking every 35 year old beta-max and vhs tape of every one of my old Sensei I could find and converting it to DVD for a very large library of kata, waza and lessons on kihon and then going back and reviewing all it. (My biggest surprise was that all those old bald guys I hang out with these days used to have hair).
My GAWD! I had no idea how painful it was to actually sit thru' and watch decades of lessons.
.............. but in the end it was worth the effort.
At our dojo you have to demo every single kata in the system to make 6th dan. Goshin Jutsu for example is required for Nidan and I and the Hatamoto pick it apart to be sure it's up to snuff. Then, as part of being uke since we require full fledged promotional demo's for every rank ikkyu and above, a yudansha will have to uke for it after teaching it. This process of learning, demo'ing, teaching, uke'ing happens over and over again such that no yudansha can ever go longer than 2 or 3 years without essentially making a second pass through everything they had to learn to get to their current rank.
Our demo's are not a pass-fail system (it's all pass) but with so much practice of a kata/topic, the promotional candidate couldn't do badly if they set out to try to.
This system we have found (for the dojo as a whole and for each of us individually, including me as Sensei) works to keep the information fresh and on line for principle. Indeed, after this system was set up several years ago it began to work so well that I had no compunction at all in allowing all my senior yudansha to begin to openly experiment with any technique or kata they wanted since I had confidence that having established a "personal principle benchmark" that they would never "lose their way" and forget the important parts; nor fool themselves into thinking that they have no more to learn.
L.F. Wilkinson Sensei
Aikibudo Kancho
Aikibudokan, Houston, TX
January 2010
Very interesting, thank you - have referenced and linked to you back from our blog www.genryukan.co.uk
Posted by: Phil | January 14, 2010 at 08:16 AM