28 - Jissen Magazine

A WHITER SHADE OF PALEby Andi Kidd

It’s happened to all of us – hasn’t it? You’re at awedding or birthday party and suddenly‘Wooo-oo-oooo – ooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’

the dulcet tones of Carl Douglas over thespeakers signalling yet another play of the 1974classic ‘Kung-Fu fighting’. A friend or relativerushes up to you to tell you that they have had itplayed especially for you so you better come anddance. You laugh as though it is the first time ithas happened and, depending how drunk youare, attempt to politely refuse, or get up withpeople asking you to ‘show them some moves’.

It doesn’t matter if you do kung-fu, karate,kickboxing or krav, people not ‘in the know’ thinkthat the song relates to you and to what you do.The meaning of the song, to them, is arepresentation of something that you are involvedin. The song may have a very different meaningto you and maybe a completely different meaningto what the man who wrote it was thinking as hepenned it.

Kata is very similar to this. We spend manyhours researching the meaning of themovements and can have very different

interpretations from each other for the sameoutward physical appearance. Are any of theapplications conceived the same as the ones theoriginator thought of? How could we possiblyknow if they were or not? Even if they are, oraren’t, does it really matter?

Take the song ‘A whiter shade of pale’ by ProcalHarum, there are huge debates about what thissong means, ranging from drink and drugs topenile dysfunction! The author says that hedoesn’t know what it means, but is he just notsaying, enjoying the debate or does he not wantto say for some other reason? Some people saythere have been extra lyrics at concerts (thushaving special insider knowledge) and that atone point it implies part of the song is aboutraping a woman! So what is the truth?

The truth is that we don’t know and save adeath bed confession, we are not going to findout! This is also the same as kata. Looking atBassai/Passai we know that the originator is notwith us and he can’t tell us the meaning of themovements, we also know that it is very unlikelythat any new written evidence will appear toenlighten us on the subject. One bit of evidencethat we do have is Funakoshi saying that some

.

As the opponent attacks with a grab/punch,use both hands to ward this off. The knee canbe deployed as a strike or to take the opponentoff balance Drop both hands down into the neck

Jissenmag.com - 29

of the movements in Passai/Bassai are‘Kusariwa’ the ‘Arm Ring’ which essentially is adouble leg take down. This is mentioned inKarate-Jutsu (1).

Although anecdotal evidence like this may pointtoward the original bunkai it may also just beFunakoshi’s own interpretation. When fitting thisin with my karate, this interpretation comes inthird to two others, one semi stolen and one ofmy own! So just because there is evidence ofwhat the possible original intention was, it doesn’tstop us looking at the kata to try and find othercombative functions. It also means that we don’tall need to have the same function for each move

If we are trying to recreate what the originatorintended when he specified the movements wecould all well be wrong as there is no way oftelling what was in his mind at that point. If weare trying to find workable techniques that canbe used in actual self protection, as long as theyare thought through properly, we could all beright.

Some movements in kata seem to be veryobvious just like some lyrics in songs.

If you take the iconic ‘Smoke on the Water’ byDeep Purple, it is well known that this is a storyof actual events ‘They burned down the gamblinghouse, it died with an awful sound’ is a prettyobvious lyric and with other backgroundinformation (Ian Gillan’s autobiography for one),we know exactly what it means

This shows us that if we know something aboutthe creator of a specific kata then maybe we

would be able to better speculate on what themeaning of the kata was when he wasconstructing it in the first place. We know Itosuinvented the Heian/Pinan kata and we know fromFunakoshi’s writing that he used to leaveopponents face down unconscious ( 2), so doesthis help us to work out bunkai in any of thesekata? It can help and gives us clues as to theoriginal meanings of the movements, which inturn should lead to good, solid and useablebunkai, but if the inventor was of a different bodytype, size and/or strength, they still may not bewhat you want and/or need.

When analysing bunkai there are many factorsyou have to consider, two of these being therelative size of the combatants and threat levelof the attack.

Size is important no matter what anyone tellsyou (ask any woman who is strapped to apolygraph machine!) In combat there is no waythat a smaller person can use some techniquesagainst a much larger opponent, or if they canthey would be silly to try. Some throwingtechniques spring to mind and before people startthrowing (excuse the pun) their arms up inoutrage, I know it is all about leverage etc buttrying to throw someone of twice your weight inthe street using a Tani-otoshi (3) seems likeasking for trouble. He actually mentions thishimself in the narration before the pictures inKarate-Jutsu (4).

The threat level of any attack will also determinethe level of response. I have argued with somepeople about this but I cannot see how you canjustify the same level of force to be used against

Alternate is to grab and strike at this point Use the stepping punch as a neck crank

30 - Jissen Magazine

someone who is trying to kill you and yourfamily and a relative who has drunk too muchand is getting leery at a wedding and or familyparty (this is usually just before Kung FuFighting is requested!)

Looking at it in this way and realising that theinventors of kata knew about fighting, thisbrings us to yet more questions. Did theoriginator of the kata decide on one principlefor every technique or several dependent onother factors? Take Shuto Uke (knife hand blockor sword hand reception depending ontranslation) for example. In my club this isprobably the most prolific source of variedbunkai for a single movement and like ‘a whitershade of pale’ could mean any of them. As longas they are functional surely it doesn’t matterwhat ‘we skipped a light fandango’ actually wassupposed to mean and is more important aswhat it means to us and how effectively wecan employ it.

Did the creator of the kata have a specificidea in mind for the shuto at the exact point ofa kata? Or did he think that this could be usedfor x, y and z as well as p, q, r, s and t as well?Did he have one explanation, three or five?Otsuka said that Naifanchi/tekki was aprofound kata that would take more than alifetime to master. Was this down to the inventoror was this down to Motobu’s excellentanalysis?

If you have ever fallen in, or out of, love thenyou will probably know that the lyrics to somesongs change in your perception. One day thewords say one thing to you, the next they aresaying something completely different. The

Jissenmag.com - 31

same with applications; perspective iseverything. If we look at the movement just afterthe third yama zuki (mountain punch) in Bassai/Passai, where you turn 270 degrees into a lowstance, anyone who knows judo will have seenit before as a throw. I discovered this at 4.15amone morning many years ago. My daughter wasup in the night and I was trying to comfort herto get her back to sleep. She wouldn’t settleand I decided to turn the TV on as she snuggledinto me (the way that babies can to make youforgive them anything). The Open Universitywas on (there was nothing else in those days,not like the 24 hour TV culture now) and therewas a programme about the structural integrityof pylons. As this went on they showed a judo-ka throwing someone, then him performing thetechnique again without the uke, demonstratingthe stability in his stance. I stared at it andwondered why I hadn’t seen this technique inthat move in Bassai before. It was all a matterof perspective.

I am almost sure that we read more into katanow than was originally intended and that thecreators of kata would be impressed with someof the bunkai that has been invented. Thereverse engineering method may not behistorically accurate and we may end up overanalysing everything but as long as the bunkaiproduced is combat functional, does it matterif the kata masters are sitting on their cloudlaughing at our attempts to analyse their whitershades of pale?

Footnotes

1 Interestingly if you look at the same ‘throw’ inTo-te Jitsu and Karate Jutsu there arevariations of the explanations and the names.

To-te jitsu it mentions grabbing the opponent’sarms instead of his legs, saying “when theopponent tries to strike ones face with both hisfists, defend and counter attack by attackingwith both hands and stepping towards himwhile attempting to grab both of the opponent’sarms.” P 62

Karate Jutsu says “parry an opponent’s two-fisted attack towards the face with a rising blockand then leap in and use both arms to encirclehis legs with udewa.” P 55

Are these translation errors or two possiblebits of bunkai read into the same thing by thedifferent translators? The two passages, whichhave been translated from the same text, havevery different ideas; this is food for thought forany document that has been translated.

2 “I now recall a well-known incident whenItosu was set up upon by a group of youngtoughs, but before long the hoodlums were alllying unconscious in the street. An eyewitness,seeing that Itosu was in no danger, rushed offto tell Itosu about the incident. Interrupting hisaccount, Azato said, ‘And the ruffians, ofcourse, were all lying unconscious, with theirfaces to the ground, were they not?’ Muchsurprised, the witness admitted that that wastrue, but he wondered how Azato could haveknown.

‘Very simple,’ replied the karate master. ‘Nokarate adept would be so cowardly as to attackfrom the rear. And should someone unfamiliarwith karate attack from the front, he would endup on his back. But I know Itosu; his puncheswould knock his assailants down on their faces.I would be quite astonished if any of themsurvive.’” Karate-do: My Way of Life – GichinFunakoshi P18-19

If referring between the books, ‘To-te Jutsu’,‘Karate-Jutsu’ and ‘Karate-do

Kyohan’ you will see that the Kyohan has adifferent set of pictures for the Tani-otoshi. TheTani-otoshi referred to in this article is calledSakatsuchi in Kyohan.

To-te Jutsu – Gichin Funakoshi P 62

Karate Jutsu - Gichin Funakoshi P 55

Karate-do Kyohan - Gichin Funakoshi P 232

4 “I will mention, however, taking thetechnique called taniothoshi (“to drop off a cliff”)as an example, that when one is much strongerthan one’s opponent, the technique can usuallybe executed smoothly and with ease. But whenfacing an opponent of equal or larger size, thereare also times when the technique just will notwork and in order to defend oneself one mayhave no alternative but to “swallow one’s tearsand resort to using one’s head as a mallet.” P53