Hey, watch out, your hubris is showing!

I'm getting so tired of looking at bunkai on YouTube and not being able to recognize what kata the techniques come from. I mean, how's that bunkai?! Isn't bunkai supposed to be the application of the moves of the kata? I was watching one the other day where this very senior Okinawan teacher was blocking the student's punch--very fast and powerful with good body mechanics and all--but it wasn't any recognizable technique from any of the Goju classical subjects. So I'm not really sure what's going on here.

Opening move of Saifa kata

Then I found another bunkai of the opening moves of Saifa kata. The bunkai wasn't particularly bad; in fact, in many respects it was a perfectly adequate bunkai. The funny thing about it was this disclaimer at the beginning of the video:

"Saifa is not a kata my group practises, but today (22nd of November 2014) I took the sequence to the dojo and we spent 10 minutes at the end of the class collectively exploring the possible uses for the motion."

In fact, it is difficult to find any information about what style it is that this group practices, though I suspect it's Shorin-ryu. And the analysis (bunkai) came not from years of practice in the system of Goju-ryu, but from spending "10 minutes at the end of the class collectively" figuring it out. Oh, that and posting a request for video footage from blog readers who might have their own takes on the bunkai of Saifa. And submissions came from people who practiced Goju, Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, Krav Maga, Shotokan, etc. In fact, someone had even re-posted my own video of Saifa bunkai, and without my permission!!!

End of the opening sequence of Saifa

Is there something wrong with this picture or am I just too Old School and ornery? I mean, why study kata or bunkai that is not a part of the martial system that you practice? Matayoshi sensei used to call these people "stealy boys." What good is it to take a kata or a bunkai without the rest of the system--without seeing how it fits in, without the themes and principles that go along with it? It's like playing at karate.

You practice a variety of kata and the bunkai of a system so that you can understand, both with the mind and the body, the principles of movement that the system is trying to teach. It is the principles of movement that you use and draw from in the instant that you may need your martial art for self defense. It's unrealistic to suppose that in that instant you will be able to call up one particular bunkai from a vast collection of unrelated techniques that you have amassed from watching YouTube videos or attending seminars. And yet year after year, people attend seminars with teachers that bring them new and creative bunkai from kata that their group doesn't practice. Or they practice "systems" that aren't really systems at all, just amalgams of whatever works that some self-professed expert put together.

In all fairness, these bunkai are not necessarily any worse than half the stuff that purports to be from authentic sources, but I can't help thinking that something's missing. And some might argue that this is a fantastic resource, putting up videos of various people's interpretation of the opening moves of Saifa kata. But is this really what martial arts training has come to? Can you really learn a martial art this way? Or is it just another way for some people to create a following and make a dollar? It just strikes me as the height of arrogance: I don't know this kata, but I'll tell you what it means. And on top of that, I'll take a video of myself doing it and post it on YouTube. The ancient Greeks would have called it hubris. You would have been set adrift on the open sea for 10 years, unable to get home. Or maybe you'd have to poke your eyes out or something.