The
Iaido Journal Nov 2006
The Fallacy of Expanding Time in Kata
copyright © 2006 Kim Taylor, all rights reserved
This isn't strictly about sword, but about kata and kata-based martial
arts training. I'm thinking of Aikido as much as Iaido here, since it
was in Aikido that I first noticed this phenomenon, and in Iaido that I
first understood the fallacy.
What is expanding time in a kata? It's that moment when your partner or
your student says "but what happens if I do this...." And we fall into
the trap by saying "well than I can do this" And the student says but
then I can do this and you say... and now you're well into a rather fun
but ultimately meaningless (to the kata itself) progression of
movements. So time expands and the kata contains more and more and more
movements between the start and finish.
Now where does this expansion come from? Two places actually, one real
and one an artifact of trying to learn or of safety. The artifact is
simply created and easily understood while learning, we go slow to try
and figure out how to do the technique properly, since we're going slow
we tend to be in balance, off line of an attack easily, and have time
to think up counterattacks... so we do.
Expanding time due to safety in kata is a bit different, you're
supposed to stop or slow down at this point to avoid potential injury
to our partners. Now if we haven't had enough years of training or
breadth of experience to see that these spots are safety zones, we may
find ourselves trying to counterattack and actually changing or
misshaping the kata. A good example of this might be the Shindo
Muso-ryu jodo technique of kuri tsuke. Here the jo steps to the side
and brings the jo up over his head to catch the hilt of the swordsman
as he cuts downward. There is a pause at this point of contact between
sword and jo, then the jo slams the sword forward and downward to lock
the sword into the hip. The sequence is below
It's this pause point as you catch the sword where time expands. The
swordsman often loads up the weight here, making the technique tough to
do, or he starts to shift his body alignment to stop the jo from moving
the sword sideways or he does any of a dozen other things.
The pause is here for safety. Take a look at the photos again and think
how practical it would be to do this sequence without pause... a lot of
fingers would be crushed over the years. But because the pause exists,
and is supposed to exist here, students tend to want to fill it up with
all sorts of counterattacks.
The real expansion of time in a kata happens not because we slow down,
but because we drop all the extra bits of movement and thought after
enough years of practice. We become very efficient in our technique and
so have much more time within a kata compared to the student we're
practicing with. Since experience is the only way to gain this time, we
won't talk much more about it, by the time we're this long into
practice we're looking for ways to cut down the number of kata we
practice rather than trying to figure out how to make them longer and
more complex.
How do we check to see if we're in the fallacy of expanding time in
kata?
Pauses and slow passages in weapons kata are sometimes a problem, a lot
of explanation and analysis is often spent on how to move the jo
while the swordsman is pressing downward after the catch. One may swing
it up and out, slide it back or forth, this or that or the other thing,
but all of this is a warping of the kata and the technique due to the
fallacy of expanding time. The swordsman will simply not have that much
time to mess around if the movement is not paused here. Seniors may
explain the fallacy by showing the movement without pause... in which
case it becomes frighteningly clear that there's no time for messing
around with extra bits and counterattacks here, or they may simply say
"don't move that way" and leave it like that. Students sometimes have
to take it on faith that they'll eventually understand why they can't
counterattack into that seemingly big hole.
Most of the time in weapons arts this expanding time problem doesn't
come up. Weapons have a natural speed, swords drop at a certain rate
and that's that. In a technique such as Sasen from the Niten Ichryu as
seen below, uchidachi cuts down on shidachi's head, while shidachi
slides slightly out to the side and thrusts the throat. It's hard to
see where any sort of counterattack or expansion of this kata could be
made. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I find Niten Ichiryu so
attractive, and I suspect, why it's such a disappointment to so many
students who are looking for some sort of fancy, secret martial art.
It's mostly just "walk up and kill him". This art gets to the point
very quickly, it's easy to learn, simple to execute, and very difficult
to do well. Timing and distance and no secret moves. Very little in the
way of counterattack and continuation and not much chance of falling
into the fallacy of expanding time in kata.
Finally we come back to the case of two students trying to "figure out
the dance" moving slowly through a kata and finding all sorts of places
to counterattack. This happens a lot in Aikido where the movements are
defined by the instructor and the students then copy them. You can call
this "one step sparring" as per Karate or anything else you want, but
it's simply kata, defined movements practiced to learn principles.
So how do students who are moving from a simple case of "enter, do
wrist thow" toward some sort of "85-move-long windbag kata" avoid this?
By remembering that the entrance, the kuzushi is always the important
part of each and every kata. If, at the point of attack, the defender
does not avoid, deflect, intercept or otherwise deal with the attack
and put the opponent immediately off balance or out of action, one
hasn't really started the kata. Counterattacks come from holes in the
defence, not because we can somehow expand time to give us the chance
to regain our balance and regain the ability to "do this when you do
that". To avoid the fallacy of expanding time in kata, simply enter the
kata at full speed with full commitment to the attack. After this you
can slow down and do the technique with safety since it won't likely be
a temptation to try and counterattack while radically off balance or
with the pointy end of the stick in your throat.
I've come through 3 kata based arts and each one of them required a
long period of waiting until I understood that all those holes in the
technique, all those places where someone should be able to
counterattack were simply a case of the fallacy of expanding time. Have
faith, do the kata as it's shown, concentrate on the entry and don't
think so much. That way you'll get to the real expansion of time in
kata in less time.
