Dr. Edvard Šefer (Doctorate at Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) , founder of Monk Art, Martial art school of self-defense based on Kata forms.
Introduction.
Author started training sport martial art named Karate 55 years ago and for many years believed everything what he was told. At the beginning of this millennium he visited seminar on Kiaijitsu (art of using voices) and with this knowledge came awareness that designations – names and actions somehow do not fit together. His first break through to Kata understanding started with realization that uke 受け literary does not mean block but receiving. First awareness and findings based on proper translation of word uke author already expressed in 2009 in his book:
Kata is everything you need1. This was long before anyone else made a video or written document expressing that uke doesn’t mean to block, but to receive or as author thought at the beginning the catch which actually follow receiving. This discovery opened the author’s eyes and he began to look at Kata differently, seeing that he had been wrongly taught for many years.
Accepting that uke means to receive allowed the author to decode first the individual movements of Kata and then the entire content of Kata. Ability to decode Kata was the basis for him to start his doctoral studies and Kata research in 2016, which he successfully accomplished in 2022 under the mentorship of prof. dr. W. Cynarski.
Complete article is available here as PDF document (1 Mb).