My friend, the late Bob Orlando had a great quote, “All training is a simulation of combat. The key word is simulation.”
If you are training for combat, and yet you don’t kill or seriously injure your partner, then obviously there are some things that are not realistic about your training. Quite simply, you can’t do everything that you would do when your life is on the line when you are training. And yet, people seem to expect that.
There are drills in most martial arts that are especially unrealistic to do in real life. I remember sitting down with a group of Silat stylists to watch a video by a Silat fraud they were talking about. They were laughing their asses off. I stayed silent. When asked, I said that the forms he was showing weren’t realistic for a real fight, and I didn’t have the experience in the art to spot the flaws of understand what he was trying to do.
Now, if you script something that is supposed to simulate combat, I can tell if you leave your back open to being stabbed, etc. But those are not drills or learning exercises. Those are things that you say you would do in actually combat. Drills, kata and exercises just can’t be 100 percent realistic, or someone would die.
Most complete training systems have many different ways of training. What needs to be left out for safety in one can be touched on in another that leaves out something else so everyone goes home safely. If you only look at one thing, be it sticky hands from Wing Chun, Pole Standing from internal arts, forms from Korean martial arts or kata from Japanese koryu demonstrations, you won’t see all that makes the art combat effective.
Heck, for that matter a lot of training is slow for both the sake of safety and being able to recognize mistakes. Rory Miller pointed out that no one that trains slow tries to fight slow. And there are times when the training can be quiet fast indeed, but not a majority of the training time in some systems. Yet there are many that bad mouth any slow training, doing things fast all the time. They usually suck pretty bad to my eyes.
And that brings me to kata demonstrations by Koryu (old style Japanese martial arts from the mainland.)
I just watched a video by an idiot that is making up his own art involving swords. He is at a demonstration in Japan watching a demonstration of various koryu and he is bad mouthing all of them as being unrealistic and saying that they have lost all combat relevance. Of course, he sees himself as bringing back the combat aspects of the koryu with what he is creating. He can’t even read a Japanese newspaper, has never trained in any art (much less koryu) to get to a teaching level and yet thinks he can tell the Japanese how all of their older martial arts just don’t get it like he does.
Yeah, ego is rampant in the martial arts and he is a perfect example. Of course, if anyone else in Japan actually knew how to use a sword then the best thing would be to go to them and learn it instead of doing his own thing. Nothing from this idiot makes me think he wants to take the time to learn before he sets himself up as a soke. So in his mind, he has to believe that the Japanese koryu have lost their relevance, because otherwise what he is doing is just plain silly and a monument to his colossal ego.
Kata in koryu are there to teach. They are not done exactly as combat dictates. That should be obvious. They teach skills, but they can’t actually go full out or do all the things needed in actual combat.
Over the centuries with all the various swordsmen that developed their arts, the way they go about conveying the lessons differ quite a bit. Different folks have come up with different ways of keeping combat lessons alive to be passed on. Some might work better than others, but that really is a matter of opinion since it is so hard to test these types of things.
As an example of how to break down things, the Kashima Shinto ryu has three stages of training. At first, the students practice with bokken. They are trying to get the movements down perfectly as the kata demands. (The is the Shu phase of Shu-Ha-Ri.) They do not vary even a little from the form. Next they practice with bamboo swords. They still go through the same kata, but now if there is an opening they are free to try to quickly smack their partner. Last, they use steel swords while doing the kata, which brings a intense focus to the training.
You can’t watch just the first part of the training (or any) and claim it is all unrealistic before walking away. Yes, if you only do the first stage of kata training you won’t learn how to fight. But that is like saying that if boxers do punching drills they won’t learn how to move and fight so punching drill are silly. That is what training back in the dojo is for. The kata shown at demos obviously are usually the most basic parts.
Another example. I learned a throw that looks kind of silly. It is done slowly, with a bunch of kiai (yelling) done slowly at certain points. Just as the thrower is about to make his final move, he gives a kiai, the other responds and as the throw is started the receiver does a back flip.
The fact is that the throw is supposed to lift the opponent off the ground backwards and slam him into the ground in such a way that his entire body weight puts pressure on the C-7 point of the spine, breaking it and killing the opponent. No matter what kind of armor and helmet you have on, it won’t help save you. It can’t be done full out, realistically at speed. The silly- sounding kiai are vital parts of communication between the students. When the thrower is ready to throw, he lets his partner know so he can ready himself. The partner gives a kiai when he is ready to escape death by doing a back flip at the right time. And a set period of time after that, the throw is done. It is done slowly and carefully because speed can cause an accident, and that can kill someone.
The throw is deadly, and yet when practiced like this it looks rather silly. When shadow boxing at home, you don’t have to do it with safety for the partner in mind and cut the corners. But without the partner, even that looks a bit silly.
So when you see kata done in demonstrations, or just about any aspect of training, remember that you are seeing one angle of the lesson and not all sides of training. To reject everything based on a limited view and knowledge is the mark of a fool and an inflated ego. Again, this is for learning exercises, not when someone demonstrates what they say they would do in a real situation- blast away in that case.
Systems that have survived for centuries usually have for a reason. If you don’t understand how they can be used for combat, that is usually a lack of knowledge on your part rather than a problem with them.