Book Review
| Title: | Five Years One Kata | ||
| Author: | Bill Burgar | ||
| ISBN: | 0-9544466-0-7 | ||
| Date of Review: | September 2003 | Reviewer: | Dr Zoltan Dienes |
| Opinion: |
In recent years there has been a small revolution in the world of karate and
cognate disciplines, as people have come to see that kata can really be
useful for self defence. Thus it has become fashionable to develop bunkai or
self defence applications for kata moves. This is a healthy development in
my view, but sometimes the bigger picture is not clearly seen. What Bill
Burgar has expertly done is show the bigger picture - how one kata can be a
complete self defence system, not just a bag of random applications. An
impressive amount of thought has gone into making the set of applications
coherent and effective: Coherent in the sense that the set of applications
as a whole provides responses to all of the most common acts of physical
violence Bill believes he is likely to face, in the sense that there is
balance in covering this set of likely attacks, and in the sense that the
same moves can be used as likely continuations of outcomes of using the very
same moves. Bill has thought about efficiency in terms of reducing the set
of moves to as a small a set as possible to prevent complicated decisions,
while maintaining flexibility in responding effectively to different "what
if" scenarios. Further, Bill points out that the problem these days is not
in generating SOME application for a given kata move; it's in mercilessly
throwing out applications that do not get through a strict filter. Bill
provides a list of criteria to assess potential applications against; those
that fail must be discarded. In my view, the genius shown in the book lies not in any individual bunkai shown but in how they all fit together, how Bill satisfied many simultaneous constraints to create a lean efficient but flexible self defence system. Further, he showed how other martial artists could do the same themselves. This is a "must read" for black belts in karate and related disciplines; to read how Bill actually practices kata is an eye-opener that leaves one's view of kata completely transformed. |
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