Are there any such things as kata in aikido? Of course there are – it’s a silly question, but if you take it that aikido is the invention of M. Ueshiba, then originally, surprisingly, No.
Nor were there names of waza. That just knocked me over when I first learned of it. Ueshiba didn’t call kotegaeshi, kotegaeshi he just called it aikido. He didn’t call iriminage, irirminage, just aikido. No names at all – Just undifferentiated aiki. The flow of the moment did this, so he did that, and there you have it, just AIKIDO, expressing itself through him in a multitude of ways. He didn’t teach techniques, he just taught aikido.
There were just actions and reactions — the expression of what he did from the general principles he embodied. Whatever he did–whatever stuff happened was aikido. No organizing structures, no teaching devices like kihon, katas or the like. Everything was Henka; everything was just variations on the general themes. And he made that work—and work well – he was the top of the heap, ultimate martial artist of his time and place. And he was tested—tested like no one else I’ve learned of since— shinken shobu–tested with live steel and if the legends are right, bullets too. Bullets may be a bit far, there might be some smoke and mirrors showmanship here, but nonetheless it is pretty well known that he took on all comers, judo, kendo, sumo you name it—he was unrivaled by all accounts, both armed and unarmed.
Names of techniques and katas and such came later. Much later. Had to be introduced by a whole other crowd. Gave students and teachers something to hang on to conceptually. Made for a simpler (and paradoxically in some ways more complex) learning experience. Of course some of that structure probably harkens back to the aiki predecessor, Daito Ryu—but I have to think that there is a substantive difference here. If Ueshiba was just teaching Daito Ryu, then why go to the trouble to found his own thing? There is certainly lots of Daito Ryu stuff in his work but I would argue that he wasn’t just reinterpreting Daito ryu curriculum. His was a unique new expression in martial arts that had unique aims and purposes. Once we’re in AIKIDO, we’re just not in Kansas anymore– it just ain’t old Takeda’s world at all. Ueshiba’s expression was something new, creative and inspiring—and originally undifferentiated.
That’s still a shocker to someone who has inherited a very systematized, rationalized, kata-oriented approach to aikido– it bakes my noodle, in a good way–I find it fascinating to consider AIKI from this completely different angle; and incidentally, from here to notice that the Rational approach sort of marginalizes the Founder even as it extols his genius. His undifferentiated aiki becomes somehow “less than” our better thought out new fangled systematized ideas— in some ways he is either held up as a god-like figure, whom none can replicate (not good for research purposes–replicable results matter) or he is diminshed/dismissed as an anachronistic spiritual mystic of some sort; while we are modern and better educated, logical , and consequently better equipped to teach the Founder’s art …
Oh really?
Are we really more efficient teachers than Ueshiba? Yea, right. Like he really had trouble teaching guys like Tomiki or Mochizuki or Shioda, come again? Our rationalist fantasy of superiority just allows us permission to deviate from the course.
Still, this reflex away from the mysterious and mystical toward the system of education is natural, evolutionary perhaps. We don’t all have to become spiritually endowed in order to realize benefits from aikido training, but I think what may get lost in such a move (the move toward making the mystery intelligible and known) is a sort of reification, ossifying the fluid concepts of AIKI into “known entities” and then promptly getting stuck on them. There is a beautiful fluidity and power in the undifferentiated and maybe in time we approach it in toshu randori if we’re lucky. But even then it does require that we let go of our knowing and understanding and more pointedly learn to operate out of that part of ourselves that remains undifferentiated too. The old zen proverb says, “to study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self…” It’s not too scary. Just forget your self a little and turn loose and let the undifferentiated aiki flow through you, and see what happens.
Kata are learning tools for us lesser mortals. Bless Saito sensei for having the humility to simply teach THEM rather than show off his personal skills.
Its funny I should read this article to day, I learnt aikido through Kata, Saito sensei,s teaching metod is a blessing I agree with Mr Warren on this, what is taught in Iwama is clearly defined, and easy to understand, and as I started to teach easy to impart.
That said, I just returned from a seminar with Endo shihan, which was very educational and informative, some of the people I was with found it difficult to follow as he never really repeated any specific technique in the same way, it was more according to what the Uke gave him that he responded too, I must confess that I could see all the solid basics in his technique, but what was diffrerent was his relaxed flow, and I think that this is ultimatly what Aikido should look like
Idont know if Im making a point, just that one should lead to another, and the danger of kata is that one can become enslaved to it ….
The Buddha achieved understanding beneath the boddhi tree, but he had to use the structure of the “Four Noble Truths” and the “Eightfold Path” in order for others to make sense of what he had understood. Same with Jesus, who codified his understandings through parables and “The Sermon on the Mount”. I seems to me that profound epiphanies (such as Ueshiba Sensei’s), must be encoded into a system that can be accessed and replicated or it is unlikely to be passed on effectively. I agree with the previous poster that one can become obsessed with replicating the surface reality without understanding the underlying principles. Miyamoto Musashi stressed “Know one thing to know many things.” He was talking about understanding the principles.
O’Sensei studied kata when he started training in martial arts. Right? This is just history repeating itself.
If you’d asked O-sensei if there were “kata” in Aikido, he’d have probably said no. Then if you’d ask him to teach Aikido to a child, *bam* you’d see “kata” reappear. If you’d then ask O-sensei why he showed the child “kata” and not Aikido, he’d probably tell you it’s because the child can’t do Aikido (yet). The implied thing here would be that O-sensei probably thought, with his pre-war mentality, that every able bodied person of age could “steal” his technique if only one tried hard enough to be “at one with the universe”. Hence he didn’t have to “teach” anything. Of course that’s a bunch of bullcrap, but that’s what happens when you wander off in religious abstractions, universals, absolutes, etc.
The way I see it is this. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, true. But the whole is not some mystical thing that somehow transforms or is added to the parts. It’s simply the links between the parts and their possible interactions, the “information” that is added by the structure formed when the parts coalesce into a whole. To give an image of a whole, think about a prime number: it is only divisible by itself and by one (a “whole”). But that doesn’t mean that prime numbers are magic or that they are somehow “better” than other numbers. You can easily add numbers to get any prime number and you can subtract from a prime number and lose the primality. So, if Aikido is much like a prime number, then there is an infinite number of Aikido. This would agree with much of what O-sensei said. Now, it may be that Aikido is another kind of unusual number, but in any case these can invariably be found to be in infinite number. To continue with the prime numbers analogy, the problem then is not to show that Aikido has kata or not (or whatever else denomination you give to a martial technique), but to prove that YOU can factor “Aikido” from this or that “kata”, “technique”, “movement”, “principle”, “whatchamacallit”, etc. What you can’t say, following the analogy, is that you do Aikido because of your “uni-ty” to the “uni-verse”: “one” is not a factor of prime numbers! (though I guess that, conversely, you could indeed say that by doing Aikido you are “one” with the universe in some limited sense). In any case, the whole of a system of techniques is obviously much more information than the conscious part of our brain can handle at once, but by linking all the specialized parts into a coherent system of responses, something like an “art” can very well be born.
Now is “Aikido” something only O-sensei, with his “genius”, did? Not at all, if you consider “Aikido” as being primarily “aiki” with an ethical twist of “do”. “Aiki” itself is an old concept (maybe not the word itself though) and any martial artist worth his salt had to master it to survive in combat more than once. Any art (read “collection of technique”) that wants to win against an opponent in a better position (the enemy is stronger, is armed, is on top of a hill, etc.) will need to use the opponent’s force against him. As juujutsu were practiced mainly as a last resort, it comes to reason that most of them if not all were guided by the principle of “aiki” or “yawara” as it was more commonly called; “yawara” referring to the suppleness of a tree branch – a living thing – and not to the laxness of a piece of string. A very important distinction indeed.
The tricky part then, is to teach this “aiki”. Takeda Sokaku and Ueshiba Morihei had a different approach to the way they displayed their “techniques” or art, but the basics were the same: techniques are shown at speed and the students must “steal” them somehow. This is a very elitist way of teaching, since only a fraction will have the necessary skills to both observe the movements correctly and then implement them skillfully. And then only a fraction of those that “got it” will further be able to develop true “aiki”, especially in the modern world where practice time is limited and opportunities for hands-on experience are next to non-existent. The only remedy is a more scientific approach not only to the techniques, but also to their integration – much like how we can “learn how to learn” to use our limited time more efficiently when studying. The other way would be to practice more, but that may not be sufficient for some (in olden times, these students would be thrown out of the ryu or even not accepted in the first place) and may prove impractical for most.
I think here that the Iwama system developed by Saito-sensei is a step in the right direction, as it integrates not only hand-to-hand and hand-to-weapon techniques, but also weapon-to-weapon. By handling weapons correctly the importance of ma-ai is made more evident, especially concerning the risks of injuries and the timing of strikes. The only thing I would emphasize more is that “the kata is the technique”, meaning that the way you practice the kata is the way you will execute the technique. The more precision in the kata, the easier it will be to break free from its restraints because you will have assimilated the technique much more rapidly than if you change the execution/timing/resistance/etc. every time. By changing what seem like minute details, you really are simply telling your body to learn another, slightly different, “kata”, a slightly different way of moving your body, that will compete with all the other slightly different patterns of movement when comes a real attack. Instead of climbing directly to the mountaintop, it’s like spiraling your way around, trying to chart all sides of the mountain instead of simply doing so once you can see down all around from the peak. From there you can also look further away at other mountains and thus “steal” from other masters, which is a nice privilege O-sensei liked to exercise often it seems.
That is why the wrist locking techniques are called by numbers in traditional Aikido rather than name; Ikkyo, Sankyo, …