Bunkai Must Be Changed

I believe it bunkai. I believe in kata. I don't believe the current state of both are conducive to self-defense without a great deal of change. I believe, for the Isshinryu system, the bunkai taught currently is not for self-defense. I also believe the so called the "Shimabuku Tatsuo no Kumite" drills for self-defense fail to meet enough criteria to teach self-defense or to be used for self-defense.

Granted, within those things there are things that can be adjusted for self-defense but that takes a very experienced and knowledgable person to bring out the self-defense capabilities of bunkai and kata. 

I have been studying the Isshinryu kata bunkai for a while now and I see one theme throughout all of it, the "dueling paradigm (Rory Miller, Martial Mistakes dtd Saturday, August 03, 2013)" These kata and their bunkai, while good tools to teach you various fundamental principles of martial systems, tends toward squaring off with an opponent. Does this occur in real life violent encounters? It does occur most often in sportive events where competitive rules govern the what, when, where, how and why of any violent action. Is this true to the street violence with no rules, etc.?

Some things that Mr. Miller wrote in his blog bring this thought to my mind such as asking yourself, "How can you know when such a small percentage of your class will ever use self-defense" and "Deadliness, you can't know unless you kill people." What about asking yourself, "Will the bunkai and kata I practice actually work in a truly violent attack?"

I feel a good marker to determine the validity of your system for self-defense is to ask yourself if that training and practice takes you way away from your comfort and certainty (Rory Miller, Community dtd Thursday, August 01, 2013). Reading both articles by Mr. Miller should give you a better idea of what I am trying to say, "Our bunkai and kata must be changed to reflect reality or we are just fooling ourselves and our students into thinking it will work in self-defense."

If we use visualization along with two person drills are we allowing for chaos, unpredictability and the seeking of outside that box of the monkey dance driven dueling sportive thing we all are glued to dogmatically to keep our comfort and certainty of self-defense perceptions as dictated in news and entertainment driven venues are we doing a proper service to ourselves and our students? 

Don't we owe it to ourselves to know and promote these types of distinctions? I wrote a comment to Mr. Miller for the artical "Martial Mistakes," that simply says, "Articles like this one to dispel the misconceptions regarding karate are important. Except, the ones who really need to read this are the ones who will fool themselves into NOT reading this."