Why do we do things the way that we do? What was the initial source of those habits and methods? And are they relevant today? And why ask this question in the context of leadership?
A brief story may help to explain this:
A young woman is preparing a pot roast while her friend looks on. She cuts off both ends of the roast, prepares it and puts it in the pan. “Why do you cut off the ends?” her friend asks. “I don’t know”, she replies. “My mother always did it that way and I learned how to cook it from her”.
Her friend’s question made her curious about her pot roast preparation. During her next visit home, she asked her mother, “How do you cook a pot roast?” Her mother proceeded to explain and added, “You cut off both ends, prepare it and put it in the pot and then in the oven”. “Why do you cut off the ends?” the daughter asked. Baffled, the mother offered, “That’s how my mother did it and I learned it from her!”
Her daughter’s inquiry made the mother think more about the pot roast preparation. When she next visited her mother in the nursing home, she asked, “Mom, how do you cook a pot roast?” The mother slowly answered, thinking between sentences. “Well, you prepare it with spices, cut off both ends and put it in the pot”. The mother asked, “But why do you cut off the ends?” The grandmother’s eyes sparkled as she remembered. “Well, the roasts were always bigger than the pot that we had back then. I had to cut off the ends to fit it into the pot that I owned”.
Why do I post this here? Because when we do kata, a lot of people are just doing a bunch of moves and if you ask them why they do something a certain way, they’ll say I don’t know it’s the way my instructor showed me. If you go back and back through the lineage of their training you’ll get the same answer, till if you could go back in time you may get the answer. It might be relevant to the time period such as clothing, hairstyles and/or weapons. Some things were just held back, forgotten due to interruption ie world war II, some wasn’t taught because the student didn’t ask or wasn’t offered the explanation or he simply didn’t train with that instructor long enough. One important thing that we forget it that maybe the instructor didn’t know how to explain a move due to a language barrier.
I’ve watched videos where they had an interpreter, which makes you wonder the quality of the explanations. Some words don’t translate well. We take the Japanese word UKE to mean block, but we also take it to mean, the person who is thrown or taken down. The true meaning is to recieve. Now the reason it applies to both things now becomes a little clearer. So when looking into your bunkai, try to think of more than this is the way my instructor did it.
