Traditions

The martial use of kobudo is uncertain. Only from very early times on the islands do we have records of its use in organized battle. Later use (fending off brigands, outlaws) is not well substantiated. There are some reports of individuals dueling but these are rare. The bunkai for the kata make assumptions about the modes of attack used that may not be realistic because weapon kumite, in the sense of free sparring is, for whatever reason, not widely practiced. While there is no doubt that the techniques of kobudo can be deadly and effective one must wonder what the evolutionary path is for this activity. Kobudo can certainly enhance the practice of the empty hand arts. But as an art in and of itself there is a feeling of stagnation in terms of practical application development. We've watch tournament empty hand sparring evolve spectacularly over the last 50 years. The introduction of footwork, higher kicks, combination attacks, have all occurred fairly recently under the pressure of open competition.

There certainly is a lot of controversy over some of these developments. The proponents of the martial 'arts' having big problems with the proponents of the martial 'sports'. In particular, tactics and attack/defense modes have changed to allow victory in a forum that has strict rules of engagement. Watch the traditional karate people dump on the TKD people of the WTF persuasion to catch the most spirited of these debates. On the other hand, the martial 'arts' have had less testing because the functioning modalities of modern warfare involve -- well, you know -- guns, planes, bombs -- do not leave a lot of room for someone with a great side kick. The most interesting developments for kobudo are the emergence of tournaments using protective gear and padded weapons, notably the bo and nunchuks, and the work of the Dog Brothers with their full contact stick fighting. The only other area that I feel needs addressing as far as kata are concerned is the stylist schism which occurs at the tournament level. Just as we see the divergence of 'art' and 'sport', we see the development of kata for the purposes of winning tournaments. On the one hand this usually means a lot of spectacular moves. Many of these moves, usually twirly type stuff are fascinating and breath-taking to watch but are such high risk that their use in combat would be foolhardy. The other issue is that to facilitate the fancy moves, the weapons themselves are being modified to be lighter, faster, shorter, smaller and more maneuverable. The main problem with this trend is that by altering the weight of the weapon you change the inherent characteristics of what you can do with it. You can twirl a light bo faster but you could not use it for crushing blows, and the weight would naturally change the ways in which you recovered from non-landing blows.