How to Create a Kata, and What It Reveals About the Old Ones

The quickest way to stop treating kata as sacred objects is to try building one. Not as iconoclasm. As an exercise, because the constraints teach you more in an afternoon than a decade of being told the forms are perfect.

Start with the constraints, because they choose most of it

Pick a space. A form has to fit a training floor, and that single limit does an enormous amount of work: it dictates the number of steps in any direction, forces the turns, and pushes you toward ending where you began so the thing can be run repeatedly without resetting.

Pick a length. Somewhere between thirty seconds and two minutes if it is to be practiced by a class without collapsing.

Pick a difficulty band. Techniques a beginner cannot perform will be performed badly, and a form performed badly by half the room is not teaching anything.

By this point you have not made a single artistic decision and the shape of your kata is already mostly determined. Anyone who has looked closely at the standard forms will recognize the result.

Then the actual choices

Now the interesting part, which is smaller than expected: which techniques, in what order, at what tempo.

You will find yourself grouping. Two or three movements that belong together, then a turn, then another group. You will repeat a group on both sides, because symmetry is easier to remember and trains both. You will put something distinctive at the start so the form is identifiable, and something with a strong finish at the end.

Every one of those instincts is visible in the existing repertoire, and none of them are combat decisions. They are pedagogy and memory.

What this tells you about the old forms

Anko Itosu built the Pinan forms in the early 1900s so karate could be taught to Okinawan schoolchildren, and said so at the time. He was solving the problem you have just solved, with the same constraints, for a class of children.

That does not diminish the forms. It explains them. A sequence assembled to be teachable, memorable and safe for a room of beginners is going to be shaped by teachability, memorability and safety, and reading every turn as a concealed throw means reading past the reason the turn is there.

The one honest use of your new kata

Teach it to somebody, then watch them.

Every ambiguity you left, they will resolve wrongly. Every transition you did not think about, they will do differently from how you imagined. Do that a few times and you understand exactly how a form changes as it passes through hands, and why two schools performing the same named kata a century after its author died do not perform the same thing.

Why almost nobody does this, and what that reveals

New kata are created rarely, and the reasons are institutional rather than technical.

A new form has no authority behind it. It cannot be attributed to a founder, it appears on no organization’s syllabus, and it cannot be examined, so a student learning it is spending time on something that will not count towards a grade. An instructor who introduces one is also making an implicit claim about their own standing that the culture of the art does not readily grant. The result is a syllabus that is functionally closed, which is a strange condition for a living practice.

Compare the arts where the practice remains open. Judo revised its own teaching sets in the twentieth century under the name of the organization that owned them; competitive sports invent and discard drills constantly. The difference is that those bodies claim the authority to change the material, and karate’s organizations claim the authority to preserve it.

That is worth noticing when the same organizations are also the source of the claim that nothing has changed in centuries.