Kata and the Transmission of Knowledge: In Traditional Martial Arts Book

This is a strange read. By the title, you'd think you were going to get a lot more information about kata and their development, but above all else, this is a history book, and, eventually, a martial philosophy book. We're three quarters of the way through the book before we get anything more than vague statements about how such and such a circumstance/philosophy/development influenced kata.

And not necessarily how it influenced kata, just that it did influence kata.

I do enjoy the author including a lot more things as "traditional martial arts" than frequently happens, including armed and unarmed combat techniques from a variety of eastern and western cultures. While he's at it, Mr. Rosenbaum draws a lot of comparisons and parallels between eastern and western arts, which is really cool. The author gives a lot of examples of weapons and techniques through various ages, as well as detail on how those weapons suited the culture and time they were developed in, ranging from ancient to almost current cultures, and quotes extensively from a variety of historians and sources on the idea of ritualized solo practice.

But somehow it's hard to get past how misleading the title is. This book is more of a historical perspective on how all arts have something in common, the basic concept of solo practice to build a better warrior. Considering the kata themselves, it's far more about the thoughts that might lie behind kata rather than being instructional in any way. I started the book hoping for thoughts and methodology on how to look at things to understand and analyze kata better. Not what I got.

Through the course of the text, something that comes through very nicely is that the idea of kata or solo forms being both common and standard through civilian and military combat systems. Rosenbaum makes the attempt to expand the definition of what most martial artists would initially refer to as kata, however, taking things to the level of any structured/ritualized solo practice form. In some ways this isn't a hard thing to swallow, even if I don't quite agree. Just doing something by yourself doesn't make it a kata, though the author doesn't quite come right out and say that.

The primary argument of the book is that kata are just as much a form of communication as they are instructional. For modern martial arts students, the author feels that kata are often just a ritual, something to learn to get past the next grading so you can learn the next kata to get past the next grading. In seeing things that way, we're missing out. The idea, and it's not a new one, should be to study each kata deeply, learn more than just the movements. Embedded in each kata is a distillation of the time and place it came from and we miss out on so much depth and information by touching the surface.

And the author seems to make the point quite strongly that he believes the combat aspect of the kata are the most important thing and that it was a sad day when guns removed most of the need for the life and death struggle between individuals hand to hand on the battlefield. Considering the history I do know, I can't quite agree with that opinion. But it's important, Rosenbaum insists, to retrieve that life and death outlook when practicing kata, to practice them with the more serious intent they were originally developed with.

If your objective is to learn the kata more completely, to get everything you can from it, learning, in a way, how the creator of that kata thought and learned and fought, then this can absolutely help you. Rosenbaum stops short of actually letting us know how to go about that, though.

Finally, it might be worth noting are the illustrations. There are a several dozen scattered through the book, relevant to the part of the text they occur in, but often almost rough sketches that detract from that text rather than adding to it. In most cases the book would be better served by leaving them out. This is a minor quibble, but it seems to me, considering how well researched the rest of the book is, from such a variety of sources, the illustrations could have been as relevant as the quotes.

Overall rating: 3 stars. Like I said earlier on, this is more a history and philosophy book than a martial arts one. I tried very hard not to let that colour my rating because while it wasn't what I wanted from the book when I first started reading it, what I got from it I did enjoy. It was an interesting read, over all, if not quite what I was expecting.