Moreover, they say, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that
pattern practice is meant to be employed only as a tool for teaching and
learning the principles that underlie the techniques that make up the kata.
Once these principles have been absorbed, the tool is to be set aside. A stu-
dent’s training begins with pattern practice, but it is not supposed to end
there. The eventual goal is for students to move beyond codified, technical
applications to express the essential principles of the art in their own
unique fashion, to transcend both the kata and the techniques from which
they are composed, just as art students moved beyond imitation and copy-
ing to produce works of their own.
But while controversy concerning the relative merits of pattern prac-
tice, free sparring, and other training methods is often characterized as one
of traditionalists versus reformers, it is actually anything but new. In Japan,
for example, the conflict is in fact nearly 300 years old, and the “tradi-
tionalist” position only antedates the “reformist” one by a few decades.
The historical record indicates that pattern practice had become the
principal means of transmission in Japanese martial art instruction by the
late 1400s. It was not, however, the only way in which warriors of the pe-
riod learned how to fight. Most samurai built on insights gleaned from pat-
tern practice with experience in actual combat. This was, after all, the “Age
of the Country at War,” when participation in battles was both the goal
and the motivation for martial training. But training conditions altered
considerably in the seventeenth century. First, the era of warring domains
came to an end, and Japan settled into a 250-year Pax Tokugawa. Second,
the new Tokugawa shogunate placed severe restrictions on the freedom of
samurai to travel outside their own domains. Third, the teaching of mar-
tial art began to emerge as a profession. And fourth, contests between prac-
titioners from different schools came to be frowned upon by both the gov-
ernment and many of the schools themselves.
One result of these developments was a tendency for pattern practice
to assume an enlarged role in the teaching and learning process. For new
generations of first students and then teachers who had never known com-
bat, kata became their only exposure to martial skills. In some schools, skill
in pattern practice became an end in itself. Kata grew showier and more
stylized, while trainees danced their way through them with little attempt
to internalize anything but the outward form. By the late seventeenth cen-
tury, self-styled experts on proper samurai behavior were already mourn-
ing the decline of martial training. In the early 1700s, several sword schools
in what is now Tokyo began experimenting with equipment designed to
permit free sparring at full or near-full speed and power, while at the same
time maintaining a reasonable level of safety. This innovation touched off
the debate that continues to this day.
Form/Xing/Kata/Pattern Practice 139