Clockwork Soldiers.
Technical article: (Switch to paid subscription to read the whole thing). Just what do we get from performing combinations? A reflection on the evolution of combinations over time.
If I think back to my earliest training, I must have looked at syllabus-based combinations, ‘renraku waza’, as it was then, in two ways:
The first and most basic being a string of Japanese words in my syllabus book describing a hurdle I have to get over for the next grading.
Secondly, purely pragmatically, I understood combinations as the link between the formality of kihon and the free-play of shiai (competition) or jiyu kumite (free fighting, sparring).
In the Wado syllabus certain techniques were canonical, common to all organisations who wanted to call themselves ‘Wado karate’. These tended to be all the key foundational techniques of junzuki/gyakuzuki (and variants), nagashizuki and keri waza (kicks). As well as the nine core solo kata up to Chinto and, of all the many paired kata available, the ubiquity of the ten kihon gumite remained solid (although I recently met a guy who claimed to be a Wado Dan grade from what he said was a traditional organisation, who had no knowledge of the Kihon Gumite, but he was from across the water).
But, the point is that other items that appear on people’s syllabus book pages are pretty much arbitrary, they are made up.