Research into European Martial arts has a huge amount of support from within its community and rightly so, the work being done and the fascinating results are being fed back into modern practises which in turn are revitalising arts that for a long time have been preserved only in books. Some treatises are quite obscure in their descriptions and demand real work is put in to decode the meaning and extract the techniques. This is not an easy process and requires time, effort and patience.
Karate researchers have an advantage in that the source materials for Karate are not recorded in books they are recorded in movement, the kata! The various martial arts forms collected and preserved in Okinawan Karate also demand the same time, effort and patience to unlock the original function as the European martial arts manuals do.
The prevailing attitude amongst many kata 'specialists' is that it is not possible to know the original functions of the kata. Does this belief extend to those trying to understand antique martial arts from books and treatises? Clearly not as many embrace the Bubishi as containing knowledge and skills that can be extracted and applied. So Martial arts can be worked out from books but not from movements?
The belief that the original functions are lost is false and just as many great European martial arts are coming back to life thanks to the serious research and effort being made, so too are the martial arts preserved in the antique kata. With a huge body of work and research from various groups like the Kodoryu group whose sole purpose for over 30 years has been to unlock the original functions of the forms inherited from China. The evidence is overwhelming and just waiting to be tried, tested and critiqued!
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