Originally Posted by
sanjuro_ronin
You may have a point, I heard that to ( and read about it).
IMO it does make sense BUT as you stated, it tended to be counter-productive in the long run.
To be honest, any fighting sequence done as a kata is not very realistic unless you have a pretty good grasp of the core of the system so it may have been a away to guard the high level stuff not so much from outsiders but from practitioners that hadn't paid their dues yet.
I toughly enjoy Ian Abernathy's stuff BUT to be honest, at times, it seems a bit of a stretch.
I can say this though, many of the moves in forms are NOT counters to strikes but attempts to grab or grapple or to counter an opponents attempt to engage.
Here is where many people get stuck on kata application.
Kata was a mnemonic device to aid students. Much like students learned Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally to learn the order of operations in basic math...parenthesis, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction.
The applications were trained first and then a student learned that piece of the kata. The movements in the kata would help the student remember all the different applications. The kata would have multiple applications for a series of movements that were VERY similar. As we know in the Chinese arts, some moves are not "applications" but conceptual movements or chi gung movements to train things. Also, the okinawans admitted that there were layers of application in the kata depending on who they were teaching. There was a very good article in Classical Fighting Arts, that an okinawan karate master said that he was taught by his instructor that each application had 3 levels, the basic block/punch/kick, the grappling aspect of throws/locks, and then the lethal applications of tearing/gouging etc.
Fast forward and an art that was passed down to a conquering people and many instructors killed during that war or stopped practicing due to survival and much of the applications passed on were the first level of application--block/punch/kick. They adopted the Shotokan sparring distance (which was based on Kendo) and you make a civilian self-defense system which was close quarters combat and turn it into a long distance sport. The applications don't fit the range, which is why in Japanese karate the emphasis was the 3K's (kihon, kata, kumite) and the kata and kumite have no relation to each other.
Since applications were lost in some cases, we have instructors trying to reverse engineer them based on their experience. Some ideas are good, but others are not. But, I have seen the tendency to have applications for ALL movements and they won't admit that some of those movements were not applications but conceptual (for example, the bridge hand training at the beginning of Hung Gar's Taming the Tiger).
Going back to the previous example of "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally", and if the math books were lost and just this phrase was passed on to future generations who were not familiar with it, we could in all likelihood bet that it could be misconstrued as a phrase used to teach manners to those 20th century school kids. Much like the state of karate in many cases.
"God gave you a brain, and it annoys Him greatly when you choose not to use it."