Gekisai:
that sequence could also be a strike/sweep/takedown ...remember what the leading leg is doing?
kindof like this....except imagine the defender turned the other way.
http://sirgarnet.com/CAUK/Sweep.jpg

Oviously a mixture of disguise and misinterpratation Medulanet, i dont disagree with what your saying.

However for something to misinterpreted it was proberly presented incorectly, or as taught...............

Yes there are hidden/unclear self defence movements in all kata.

It is a case of working out the movements (all of the movements) and where the kata came from and why it was created.

Study human anatomy.

The opening hand sequence to kushanku ?
Study kung fu forms. (It does have a fighting explanation)

Why was Naihanchi created?
What was the bunkia?

Study the old masters on black and white film. Drilling it.

(Although parts of Naihanchi are suppose to be missing

Hello

<<As for neko ashi dachi, I was told it was also used as starting position for throwing sand to the attacker, first digging the food in the sand.

Grrrrrr. But that is completely 100% situational, isn't that a tactic rather than a secret??? Why use cat stance, would not ALL kicks work for the purposes of kicking sand???? What happens to those who are in the cities no where near any sand?!? Not, NOT trolling on my part at all merely saying aloud something which is difficult to reconsile to my mind anyway. How can a fundamental secret (cat=sand kicking) be strictly situational?

J

ah yes, I think I saw that in the oldman's famous boobishi....
move: 'cat flings kitty litter on razwell'.

'As for neko ashi dachi, I was told it was also used as starting position for throwing sand to the attacker, first digging the food in the sand.'

and there was me thinking it was for shifting weight slightly back to recieve, allowing use of the front foot!!!!

I discussed the issue why goju-ryu has 1 secret technique in every koryu kata with Takeshi Uchiage.
Secret means that the technique is shown different or not shown in the execution of the kata.
This comes from a Chinese/Okinawan tradition not to teach everything to a student untill he is part of the trusted most close circle of students. A student could learn from many teachers and create his own curriculum or school or style. To avoid giving him everything, a teacher would keep certain techniques for himself and hide them from the kata untill he felt that the student could be trusted.
To uphold this tradition, goju-ryu karate still has 1 secret technique per kata in the sense I explained (not shown or differntly shown in the kata). I was confused about the 2 secrets per kata as this secret is applicable twice, usually into 2 opposing directions and opposing sides.
The mystics about the secret techniques have formost an historical background. Nowadays information is globaly available through different means (internet, travel, ...) In older days, most people would not travel beyond the boundaries of there village and had far less communication means, usually only by talking to each other or an occasional letter. In that sense, 'secret technique' has a different perception than nowadays.

The arguments about whether there are secret techniques can go on ad nauseum... clearly, there was information witheld from the general populus of a school until they were "trusted" by the teacher because of the methods employed in teaching martial arts in the Orient at the time of their development. Word of mouth and "in person" teaching (usually without the benefit of books, tapes, and scrolls) made "secrets" inevitable. It also had something to do with the student's ability to understand the secrets.

I've taught my senior student much of what I know, and when it was being done, I told him that he wouldn't understand some of the information for at least 10 years if he continued to practice. He's now in a completely different art, and he still comes to me and says "hey, I remember when you taught me such and such, and it just "came to me" when we were practicing how that applied to what I'm doing."

The ability to understand some information is just as important as the transmission of it in some cases, and it's not because the student is a dunce, but because their technique isn't at a level to integrate it into their practice. Since kata was the preferred method of teaching karate, it makes sense that the old masters would integrate movements that could be changed slightly later to "reveal" their secrets to trusted students while everyone else just got the "vanilla" version.

I recently watched a DVD with a current "master" showing bunkai of a particular kata that I was familiar with, and it was clear to me at what point he started "making it up as he went along". His statements started turning to "you can do this, and you can do that" rather than being specific on the nuances and changes that should have been in the kata.

That doesn't make what he was teaching "a secret", but rather a failure to understand the information himself. Over the years, I've seen a lot of this, and it is prolific in the MA community now. Many of the "secrets" aren't secrets at all, just failures of information transmission.

This isn't a direct quote, but close enough to make the point as to why there were secrets...
"The art of war is found in the ability for deception"
Sun Tsu