If you browse the web for discussions on the meaning and usefulness of kata (the term varies for non-Japanese martial arts), you'll get wildly different opinions. Most practitioners will tell you that kata are very important, but I suspect that not that many can fully explain you why, and it is more a reflex of saying so because your sensei tells you every week.
Personally I find myself deeply fascinated by kata, and quite enthusiastically committed into learning them, perhaps even a bit disappointed (but wrongly) by the fact that our karate style Goju-Ryu only has a dozen of them, while other styles have many, and some has more than 50.
Let me first try to describe what is a kata in my understanding. On the surface, it is a sequence of attack and defense techniques combined with movements in specific stances and performed start-to-finish on your own, representing an imaginary battle against multiple opponents. Learning the sequence is only step zero of the whole process, because there is a myriad of features and details to understand and practice for improvement: there is the visualization of the imaginary opponents implying directions and distances; there is "embusen", the pattern of steps and positioning that you invisibly trace on the floor during the sequence; there is proper modulation of strength at different moments to match the meaning of each technique, and the accompanying changes of speed; there is an overall rhythm to achieve, when putting together strength and speed variations with correct breathing and embedding pauses at proper times; there is "kime" or focus, and the additional emphasis to a decisive strike with the "kiai" shout; there is "zanshin" or lingering attention after the end of a combination. All considered, it doesn't at all feel that 12 kata are but a few!
So why practicing kata then? Many people approach martial arts for sports or self-defense, and it is understandable for them to have a down-to-earth practical attitude, so it comes as no surprise when I hear someone saying "if you want to learn to fight, then you need to fight someone, not practice kata". And yet I read that the masters of the past, including Gichin Funakoshi founder of Shotokan karate (the most popular karate style in the world), based their teaching on kata and included almost no sparring in their practice, and I'm pretty sure their students could fight!
To continue with my musical metaphors, a kata is like a written song or etude, while free sparring is like improvisation. There are blues and jazz musicians who practically only improvise all their lives and probably never sit down doing technical exercises or studying and writing songs. It's all good for their chosen music genres, but I think everyone can see that this means to ignore a large potential of music as a whole.
But from my still very short experience, I can tell already that there are at least 3 levels of reading into a kata that can be convincing of its importance.
At first level, you see kata simply as an extension to kihon: you are now increasing the length of the combinations, effectively removing the idea of repetition, just like when you move from piano exercises to learning a full song. This brings your practice to a form that is intermediate between repetitive patterns and total freedom, and can be essential to strengthen the connection between pure technique and its applications.
At the second level, you will be explicitly introduced to the many possible applications of each technique or section of a kata. Usually the kata is taught first in its entirety, and students are supposed to at least somewhat get used to it, then gradually they are exposed to the kata's bunkai: this is when one or more training companions join the fray to perform what could have been the attacks of the imaginary opponents that prompt your kata techniques as a response. While there may be an official version of the bunkai, the truth is that the potential applications are many, and thus many should be the variations explored.
There is however a third level to read into a kata. In a way, each kata as a whole also represents a fighting style, or perhaps more appropriately I should say a fighting strategy, since "style" sounds more like a matter of personal preference for matching one's best skills. The strategy implied by a kata is something that is situational by nature, and an expert karateka should probably be able to switch from one to another during the same encounter if needed. As a white belt, am I currently focused on learning our style's first kata. It's called "Gekisai dai Ichi", where the word "gekisai" means something like "attack and destroy", and that's exactly the strategy that this kata reveals: to fight aggressively and decisively, because attack is your best defense (this does not mean to be aggressive in general, karate is always defensive and in fact every kata starts with a defensive move, but it rather means to be responsively aggressive once you've been attacked first), and make your every attack a winning blow. If you really get into this, you can actually think of yourself in "gekisai mode" even when you're training in kihon or kumite, or anything else! Clearly, this is only the simplest and most obvious strategy to have in a fight. Later but soon in your karate experience, you will encounter new kata with different hidden strategies: there's a "Gekisai dai ni" kata which introduces evasion, and then a "Saifa" kata which brings forth positioning tactics (pushing and pulling the opponent, or moving yourself around him), and then others about hands/limbs manipulation or throws and take-downs. The unhurried and foresighted student takes the study of one kata at a time, and gradually adds their implied strategies to his own capabilities, and this is what will ultimately make of him a complete fighter.
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