I don't hate. Honest. And I do try to be polite.
When I started training, kata was just another thing. Part of my training. Required, along with basic exercises and the Japanese terms for our kata and exercises, for promotions. We were taught, of course, the 'meaning' of the kata we were learning, often known as 'bunkai'. We practiced kata with partners and without; when we practiced with partners, we practiced the bunkai, with the partner playing the part of the attacker who 'forced us' to do the attack or defense inside the kata.
It was only later, much later, that my eyes began to open to a fuller appreciation of kata. I would say 'understanding', but I cannot claim to have any real understanding yet. There is advanced bunkai, applications that are different than the 'obvious' bunkai for each part of the kata. That's fun and eye-opening and I love it. There is a depth to the bunkai that I won't live long enough to fully explore.
But it goes well beyond that, even though that would be quite enough to keep me busy forever.
I'm trying to think of an apt analogy, and I'm drawing a blank, but here's a couple that come close. It's like the difference between being given a mathematical formula for solving a given problem, and being given access to the whole of mathematics, free to more fully understand the solution you've been given, but also to experiment and develop your own solutions, solutions which might be more elegant or work even better for you.
It comes in bits and pieces, joyful little moments when you apply a technique from a kata, like say tipping an attacker's elbow up slightly while leveraging their forearm down, and suddenly realizing that this flows perfectly into another technique from another kata, even one that is overtly designed to do something else entirely, and it ties into your overall understanding of what the heck it is you're doing.
It's being in a meeting at work and suddenly realizing you are practicing kata when someone decides to toss and attack your way. You find yourself accepting, redirecting, off-balancing, and defeating your opponent and only later realizing that you just used your kata to deal with a business issue.
It is that 'ah ha!' moment when you see an attack coming during sparring and you react with a kata movement that doesn't even (on the surface) apply to the situation, but yet, it does, and holy cow, it works anyway, because the principle is solid and you've trained your body to do it. In one specific example, there is a move in Wansu kata where just before the 'dump', you pull your right hand back to your obi, preparatory to digging in and scooping up the opponent's leg; in this case, a punch came towards me and I used that same 'put my open hand on my obi' move to slap his attack down and away from me. That was actually automatic; I didn't think about doing it, but it worked perfectly and set me up to counter by turning my opponent's body towards me and opening them up. The basic bunkai of that kata doesn't address any use of that hand other than to place it on your obi and *then* use it to scoop the opponent prior to dumping them. Yeah, it works for that too. But the act of just getting your hand to the obi is also a strike/block and boom, there it is in the kata if you spend time thinking about it, and more so if you spend time practicing it. "It's all in there," as I hear over and over again.
For me, kata has become everything. It's more than just my basic exercises encoded into a series of movements that train the hand-eye coordination and create muscle memory. It is more than just a boring series of things I have to learn to get promoted (actually I don't have any more open handed kata to learn to be promoted, but I'll work on all my kata for the rest of my life and still won't be proficient at them). Kata is moving meditation, a book of recipes, a tome or storehouse of knowledge that opens when the mind is ready to see the answers. Kata is my friend and companion on my journey. I can talk to my kata, my kata talks back.
It's not mystical or anything. It's not a religion, nor is it spiritual, at least not to me. I'm not Japanese or Okinawan, and I don't particularly identify with the culture, I'm American and I think and act like one. But I recognize that something happened here. Kata developed for whatever historical reasons, and I have read some things that seem to indicate about as much thought went into it as I would think about how to change the oil in my car (get a bucket, get a wrench, buy some oil, get busy). But as time has passed, I have found something inside kata that to me represents a much deeper way to think about, well, everything. How it got there, I cannot say, but it sure does seem to be there. It's like reading a dictionary; it might seem like a weird pastime, but it sure is fun for those who have learned to take it as a storehouse of knowledge.
I don't think kata makes me a better karateka or a better fighter or a tough guy or anything at all specifically better, although as I illustrated, it can certainly help me and has done so. I think kata has opened my eyes to the fact that I am on a journey, one which doesn't have an end, and one which I deeply enjoy traveling.
So when I say that kata is karate and karate is kata, for me at least, it's true. It wasn't true in the beginning, but it is now. Again, for me, and I accept that it's not for everyone.
