Real Fights vs. Kata in Karate

Let’s start with definitions, because good definitions make good conclusions, like good fences make good neighbors.

In my dictionary, a real fight

1) is not voluntary. If you can walk or run or snivel or apologize away from it, and you fight anyway, it’s not a real fight (note; this doesn’t suggest that you can run away from a fight and leave your poor mother/sister/wife to the whims of the evil bikers, because sometimes you gotta fight, period. Don’t wait until you’ve received your first head butt, right? Which means don’t let ‘em get that close!);

2) involves two guys who are really trying to take each other out. A status fistfight at the local bar, where everybody knows your name, doesn’t count as a real fight. That’s because neither guy is trying to kill or maim the other guy, since they know there will be consequences (there are always errors in calibration, of course, but the perp generally didn’t mean to kill the vic in those circumstances, which is cold comfort to the widow);

3) does not involve pajamas or referees, and normally does not involve bare feet, although there are those occasional beach blanket slugfests;

4) does not involve an altercation between two martial artists trained in the same style. In specific, it’s not a boxing match, a wrestling match, or a karate tournament, although all of those can result in major injuries or death. But they’re still just plain clean fun compared to real fights. Note that in sparring matches, there are feints, and those work on other guys trained the way you were trained. Feints are, generally speaking, invisible to guys who didn’t get trained the way you did. If you do a shoulder fake with a non-boxer, he doesn’t see it, and a conditioned response does not result, and your head gets taken off at the shoulders by his untrained giant roundhouse right hand;

5) does not involve sixteen three-minute rounds, or any other time periods. Generally, a real fight is very short. One guy (the vic) gets clipped by a right hand and he goes down. One guy (the perp) jumps up and down on him twice. Total time, seven seconds. Note that Jack Dempsey, who had a buncha experience in real fights as well as being heavyweight boxing champion, pointed out that the longer a real fight lasted, the better chance that you had of getting hurt, so it was important to wrap up a real fight fast. My guess is that Jack Dempsey is a source of valuable knowledge in the area of real fights, given that he had as many real fights as most guys had lunches.

Now let’s look at karate kata. They are defined, in contrast to real fights, by

1) a totally predictable outcome, and the complete absence of chaos (unless I’m performing a Kata for my Shotokan belt rank exam, in which case anything goes);

2) pajamas, judges, smooth polished floor, and bare feet;

3) the performance of a sequence of techniques which somebody strung together at some unspecified time in the past in order to pass along functional defensive and offensive techniques to those who came after.

Now, here’s the secret, which has become less secret over time: kata are very useful.

They aren’t useful in that “I’ll practice my kata a thousand times and then win in sparring tournaments everywhere” sort of way.

Kata won’t help you learn to spar.

Sorry, you heard it here first.

Kata may help you survive; they are not designed for sparring, they are designed to help you survive in the context of a real fight with a non-martial artist who is unloading on you big time.

Note: if I’m wrong, it won’t be the first time.

Note: I’m not wrong. Of course, I didn’t think I was wrong before, but this is different.

Okay, a kata in Shotokan Karate is generally a complete fighting system in condensed form: just add sweat.

If you want, you can quibble that the Heian Kata (formerly Pinan Kata, and still Pinan in some systems) don’t constitute a complete system; but, as usual, you are wrong, Grasshopper!

You just have to look at the five Heian Kata as one kata. Satisfied? Ditto Tekki.

It’s easy to see how a kata like Kanku-dai, the longest kata in the Shotokan Syllabus, might have within it a complete fighting system. It’s a little harder with the Tekki Kata.

But Choki Motobu referred to those kata, and more, as “systems” of fighting, and he was a pretty smart, and pretty tough, guy. And according to tradition, he normally practiced only the Bassai-dai and Tekki kata, and they worked just fine for him.

And when you watch the Iain Abernethy Bunkai-Jutsu series of dvds, you will come to understand that each of the major kata contain a complete system of fighting, and at the very least, contain answers to various pressing questions like, “what do I do now that the bad guy has grabbed my forward wrist and is punching the heck out of me with his right fist, owww, owww, owwwie?”

Now, if Shotokan is a complete system of fighting, and if each of the kata in the Shotokan Syllabus contain a different and complete system of fighting, what does that mean?

Well, it means that there’s a lot to learn, if you want to learn it.

The syllabus of Shotokan Karate clearly includes kihon, basic technique.

And frankly, if you only practice kihon for twenty years, you’re likely to be a pretty fell fighter.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s also Shotokan sparring, which is sort of a brand-new martial art built by Sensei Nakayama.

And it’s a lot like old bare-knuckle boxing, with kicks and sweeps added in for fun, and a lot of safety rules (like “not in the face! not in the face!”). Shotokan sparring does not include some of the throws used in old bare knuckle boxing, which were among the most punishing techniques in that really rough sport.

But Shotokan sparring is a darned effective martial art. If you are a consistent tournament winner in JKA Shotokan Karate Tournaments, you’re probably a pretty good fighter.

Are you Superman? No. Will you fight well if somebody hits you very hard from behind with a skateboard? No.

But you can protect yourself from fast, straight punches, you can move, and you can generate powerful and fast kicks and punches; and that ain’t bad for starters.

But the Shotokan Syllabus contains an entire universe of fighting technique in addition to sparring techniques (including all the throws shown in the Master Text, and more), and the real magic is in the kata.

So find a kata that you love, and figure out the bunkai. As of today, there are a fair number of bunkai videos about kata in the Shotokan Syllabus on the Internet, particularly on youtube.com, and if you start with Iain Abernethy’s dvds, you can’t go far wrong.

Once you have dug out the applications to the kata that you love, practice that kata, with those applications in your mind, about two million times over the next twenty years.

Why the kata you love? Well, because if you don’t love it, you won’t do it!

And throw in all the supplemental exercises on the makiwara and heavy bag and double ended bag you like. Can’t hurt, probably do some good, you know?

And when I said “can’t hurt”, you knew that wasn’t true, right?

p.s. my model for a “real fight” involves two guys. Bear in mind that a real fight may, after the initial passage-at-arms, involve everybody in the joint, including very pretty Japanese girls with very pointy shoes, who will kick you again and again in the head. See “Angry White Pajamas” if you don’t believe me.

So don’t get in fights in bars, and if you do, don’t. Get the heck out of Dodge. You do not get a raise in pay for winning a fight in a bar. You do not get a pay raise for losing a fight in a bar. So don’t spend your time getting in fights in bars.

p.p.s. there are studies which seem to indicate that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts may extend your lifespan a bit, if you are not predisposed to become an alcoholic.

There are also studies that indicate that if you spend all your time in a bar with pool tables and pool cues(“means”), pretty girls with very few clothes and lots of tattoos (“motive”), your chances of getting sucker-punched and hit with a club (“opportunity”) go up rather dramatically.

Church socials. Church socials, I tell you. Much, much safer.

Oh, sure, the hand-cranked ice cream can give you diabetes. But it takes a very long time!

And you can burn off the ice-cream sugar and carb calories doing lots of kata!

p.p.p.s. You do understand the conclusion here, right? Practicing the right kata in the right way can help improve the chances that you’ll survive a real fight, although it will not improve your sparring even a little bit.

p.p.p.p.s. My model of a real fight involves two guys (a “fair” fight model, even though the bad guy will outweigh you by a hundred and fifty). I do not include in my definition of a “real fight” a contest at arms between one guy and two guys, or one guy and three guys, or one guy and four guys. Because with very few exceptions, that is not a fight. It’s a massacre.

Probably final p.s. I have a buddy who is a remarkably tough guy. He was once beaten and stomped at a construction site by a dozen guys, after one sneaked around to his back and nailed him with a blackjack while he was distracted by a guy in front.

He is not in the least shy about moving so that people are not behind him. He doesn’t care if people around him think he is eccentric. He simply didn’t like that painful experience, and is willing to to anything that it takes to prevent it from happening again.

Which makes a fair amount of sense to me.

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