Scope and Purpose
Mr. Keenan, while in Israel and teaching Isshinryu karate, you also formed a personal relationship with Krav Maga founder Imi Lichtenfeld. What similarities did you find between Isshinryu and Krav Maga, and what, if any, insights or adjustments did you make to the way you viewed bunkai in relation to self-defense and combatives in Isshinryu?
This question requires a long answer but I'll have to be satisfied for now with giving a short one.
Krav Maga and Isshinryu karate have a lot in common when it comes to self defense. I think it's safe to say this about karate in general. There is an emphasis on doing things in specific ways and training scenarios are often similar. Isshinryu, as I originally learned it, was a primal karate system. The focus of the practice was on self defense rather than sport or performance art. In this respect, the approach to hand-to-hand combat in Isshinryu had a lot of resonance with the Krav Maga approach.
The systems differ widely, though, based on their scope. Krav Maga is, by design, a limited system with a central focus - hand-to-hand combat. Karate systems, in general, have whatever focus a practitioner wants to give them. In other words, one can practice karate without emphasizing self-defense and yet have a full engagement with the art. This is why some might think karate is not as useful for self-defense as Krav Maga is. What's probably more true is practicing karate without emphasizing self-defense is not as useful as Krav Maga. At the same time, karate will be more useful than Krav Maga for art, sport, self-expression and as a philosophical approach to life.
Krav Maga was not designed to be a "way of life". When one tries to make Krav Maga into a "way of life" system, one is essentially re-inventing primal karate. Since karate systems like Isshinryu started out as primal systems, taking this route will then eventually lead the Krav Maga practitioner into all the things not useful for self-defense.
The most significant adjustment I made in my own thinking based on my life with Imi Lichtenfeld was adopting a strict application of the five features of an optimal self-defense gesture: shortest, fastest, strongest, most natural, and to the point - with "to the point" being the governor of the others.
By the time I met Imi, I already had a pretty good handle on the flaws of many self-defense practices in karate. I was documenting these in the early 1970s. My favorite flaw example is stepping outside the space-time continuum. This is where the defender gets more action beats than the attacker gets. For example, the attacker throws a punch and stands there while the defender does an entire sequence of actions. In real life, everyone gets the same number of "beats". The bad guy is not going to stand there while I do my dance.
The bottom line is one must try to resolve the situation in as few beats as possible, preferably one. Imi and I agreed on this and it shows in the Krav Maga training.
Karate had this to begin with - you can see it in some of the early works on karate - but later generations of practitioners seemed to get stuck in patterns of multiple beats. I think this might have arisen over a fundamental misunderstanding of the analysis of movement in karate, bunkai.
Bunkai literally means analysis but I think a better translation would be "example". For instance, a movement using an arm to intercept an attacker's arm might be "analyzed" as a "block" but the movement is only an example of one possible use of that gesture. It seems people's thinking has gotten locked into a rigid idea of the "meaning" of movement when, in truth, the meaning of a movement is that movement in all of its possible meaning. In this way, "bunkai" has become fossilized. And we all know fossils are dead. This deadness seems to have taken over the way people learn and study the forms of karate, the kata. Instead of investigating the kata, practitioners become more concerned with doing a kata "performance" or with frozen examples of applications. This is the opposite of the way kata should be learned and practiced.
When I met Imi, I had already understood this lesson and studied kata as it should be studied for self-defense and not as performance art. As a result, looking at the Krav Maga drills - the kata of Krav Maga - I could easily see the gestures of Krav Maga in the Isshinryu kata. In fact, with only minor alterations, one can go through Isshinryu kata as if they made up of Krav Maga gestures.
There's a lot more that can be said but I'll leave it for another time.
James F. Keenan