Secrets of Karate
“There are many secrets in karate that people will never know and will never understand. These ideas are really not secret if you train in Okinawa under a good teacher. You will see the teacher use these so called secret techniques over and over again until they will become common knowledge to you. Others will look at it and marvel that it is an advanced or secret technique to them. That is because they do not have good teachers or their teachers have not researched their respective styles. Karate is much more than simple punching and kicking and blocking.” Hohan Soken
The secrets are the Kata's and what is contained within them.
It is not necessary to know a practical bunkai for every move of every Kata. Funakoshi even has stated, that you only have to understand the true meanings
of one kata to understand the meanings of all kata's. However I feel it is important
to learn various kata, so that you can pick which ones you really
want to research and learn from. Applications should change as you
advance and learn more. In the Naihanchi kata's there is so
much to learn from such short and what look to be simple kata's. When you read and research karate history, and see that
originally most masters only knew one or two kata's and that was
their complete fighting system, and some have even said they would spend up to 10
years learning one kata. Logically they didn’t spend 10 years just
practicing the moves like many do for competition. They spent that
time learning and practicing all the possibilities of the
applications for each and every move in that kata. Not block and
turn your back on that opponent, then turn to just block the attack
of someone that just sneaked up behind you. That’s not even close to reality! All
of the old kata's are techniques for use in realistic self defense
situations to quickly control,
cripple and or destroy the attacker.