How to get the best out of kata training.

A personal take on solo kata in Wado.

The header image at the top of this post describes one of the options as to how it is possible to think about ‘kata’. In this case, just as an identical factory product, churned out to be the same as all the others. This is not how Otsuka Sensei wanted Wado practitioners to understand ‘kata’. For him kata needs to be considered alive, individualised, bespoke, a growing thing, with Principles operating within a framework.

A reminder; this is another of my series on technical matters.

On this premium section of my ongoing Substack project, I thought it was time to share some ideas and opinions on technical Wado.

Free subscribers will continue to get the weekly (Tuesday) posts, but to access the bulk of the premium section you need to be a paid subscriber.

There are other advantages of going beyond the paywall; the most important being that you have full access to the previous, more in-depth articles, which include historical Wado and the technical background of Wado karate.

For these new pieces, free subscribers will see the opening section of the post (as a taster) and if your curiosity is excited then, by all means, do upgrade to the premium section.

Firstly – understanding it and putting it in perspective.

In this article:

· Kata as performance.

· Kata as an evaluation tool.

· Competition kata and grading kata, comparison.

· The highest levels of kata.

· The conundrum that is Naihanchi kata.

Introduction.

This is really a series of musings and observations on the performance and objectives of the solo kata we encounter in Wado karate and how we might engage with them at different levels.

I have to admit to my opinions shifting on this subject after reading the views of old time Japanese Shotokan master Yokota Kousaku, who, after being somewhat released from his position in the JKA, now has the freedom to share his opinions on Shotokan kata, Okinawan kata and the kata of other systems.

Although Yokota Sensei tends to be very specific in his technical descriptions of kata, it is his views on the performative nature of kata that intrigued me the most. He writes about the urge to turn kata into an event, a presentation and ultimately a metric to extract some kind of value judgement from.

We ‘Perform’ kata.

Someone once asked me this question: ‘Is the purpose of kata to get good at doing kata?’ A mischievous line of thought. This is kata as an expression, kata as performance.

But the question itself is like a chisel inserted into a cleft or fissure in a complex bundle of ideas, it demands to be prized and probed.

I suppose you could ask, ‘Who is the kata for’?

It is a multi-purpose tool. It is the personal physical workbook for the practitioner, for establishing the soft-wiring (I always say ‘soft-wiring’ because, as opposed to hard-wiring, it’s not fixed, it’s meant to grow with you). You are also supposed to tease out the agenda of the kata, the intentions passed down from previous masters, who added and adapted the kata over various generations.

Also, there is no doubt that it has been used to create a measure of skills achieved. (Gradings and competitions – see below).

How we got ourselves confused about what kata is for.