Shotokan Karate has a bad characteristic: it takes about a decade of steady training under a very good instructor to become competent in the basic techniques of the system.
Clearly, when you're working to teach a system that's primarily a self-defense system, ten years is impractical, and always has been.
There are a bundle of systems that are designed to make a student a competent combatant in short order, including the Fairbairne approach taught during World War II.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that karate in Okinawa was an effective system of self defense and combat that had a learning curve that was fairly short. And that makes sense, because if you're a bodyguard to the King of Okinawa, you really need to know a bunch of armed systems, as well as unarmed systems, and you can't spend all your time practicing unarmed technique!
It has also been suggested (citation on the way) that the techniques in the kata are funky because the kata are often designed to be performed with weapons in your hands, rather than empty handed.
There's a story that's gone around that when McArthur's people were asking whether Shotokan Karate ever employed weapons, the answer was "No! Never!" and that the official answer became the real answer over time, starting at that point.
And the weaponless, harmless appearance of the "native folk dances of Japan" passed muster, and Karate was practiced during the occupation of Japan by U.S. forces, when the "warlike" sports of Kendo and Judo were banned.
There's been a resurgence of interest in Bunkai, the applications of the kata.
Iain Abernethy, a teacher in Great Britain, and a heck of a nice person, has been one of the most effective teachers of Bunkai.
He has a website and sells DVDs. He teaches Bunkai in connection with several kata that are taught in the Shotokan syllabus, and he teaches variations of those kata and bunkai to reflect the various major styles of karate that have come out of Japan.
They sure look to me as though he knows what he's talking about.
Remember that a part of karate during the occupation of Japan was the need to appear cute and dancelike, not mean and martial. So it's at least possible that the effective techniques embedded in the kata weren't taught to everybody.
But the occupation of Japan is now over.
And interest in Bunkai has blossomed.
Summary: I'm an enthusiast, not an expert. Maybe the Bunkai taught by Iain Abernethy have some relationship to the "real" historical Bunkai, and maybe not. But his ideas look pretty useful to me, and reflect the convergence that has marked martial arts development in the last decade or so. That is, to watch the dvds and listen to the explanations of Sensei Abernethy, you'd think he was suggesting that in Okinawa, martial arts used strikes, throws, locks and chokes, all in one integrated system.
Which again makes sense to me.
And was that the best system of martial art EVER? Well, it seems to me that there isn't any such thing. There are a lot of very good systems, including boxing and a dozen kinds of wrestling, sometimes with jackets and sometimes without. And Savate. And Wing Chung. But I think Iain is a worthwhile teacher, and that his dvds may give you something additional to think about while you're doing your ten thousand repetitions of Kanku-dai.
p.s. Rob Redmond, in his excellent Shotokan Karate blog, has suggested that the best marital art EVER is what you get when you put together the pieces that are prohibited by the other martial arts. Actually makes a fair amount of sense.
