Pissing Contests

A friend posted a link the other day on Face Book for yet another karate blog complaining about karate and how to fix it. Note that my very special blog offers no solutions whatsoever: I am just bitching about what a pile of crap we have all collectively created.  The author writes well and makes some great points, but I am afraid he is yet another symptom of one of the problems we have in karate: the idea that karate is all about self-defense: http://ryukyuma.blogspot.ca/2014/07/10-things-karate-must-do.html

So the above blog assumes that the goal of karate is to train to defend against realistic street attacks. The author suggests that we should all train, from the very start, to defend against head shots thrown in a multiplicity of ways with intent to harm. The incoming attacks should be multiple, should be using both hands and should be from a realistic distance. We, as the defender, should use both limbs in our defense, dispensing with the traditional "hikite" unless we are planning on simultaneous trap and attack strategy.  Our writer also frequently refers to the famous Chokki Motobu as his inspiration and muse.

The man is right: if we are trying to learn how to street fight, traditional karate training is of little value. If you are simply interested in warding off attackers at the ATM or during the inevitable, expected and eventual apocalypse, you should probably just join a fight club and duke it out with like- minded thugs street style.

On the other hand.......

Let me deconstruct the above argument.

1. The hopelessly paranoid belief that we all need to be able to defend ourselves in hand-to-hand combat:

While all of us will suffer petty theft, burglary and public aggression sometime in our life, very few of us are ever going to be faced with the necessity of physically defending our lives or the lives of our loved ones. In fact, while hardly any of us are ever going to be assaulted, every karateka will be injured while practicing karate (if we train with any intensity).

 I personally have had a severe knee injury requiring surgery, a torn bicep muscle (permanently damaged, has never worked properly since), a crushed testicle (destroyed and had to be surgically removed), a broken nose, three broken ribs, broken bones in my hand and have been knocked out at least twice while sparring (once by a 5th degree BB who supposedly had "perfect" control. Same jackass crushed my testicle....for fun he said.). This is all by "friendly fire" training in the dojo with club-mates. Meanwhile I can only think of two incidents in my adult life where I might have needed to actually defend myself; both of those were well covered by keeping my distance, calmly discussing the problem and calling the police.  In fact, I only know one person in my life that has been physically assaulted several times, and my brother-in-law is dumber than a prairie dog dropped on his head at birth.

Unless you are intentionally looking for fights, are a habitual thug or a law enforcement officer (or dumber than a gopher), advanced combat training is just an invitation to visit the emergency with training injuries. You would be better served by learning to run fast, call 911 and learn conflict avoidance. Hell, truthfully, each one of us would be better off taking defensive driving classes since we are far more likely to get in a car accident than we are to get mugged.

BTW: The original karate, as described by Funakoshi and his cohorts, appears to be more about fighting than true self-defense. Funakoshi describes  covert, barely organized gatherings that are essentially "fight club" and a few street challenges that amount to gang rivalries (followers of a Sensei against drunk sailors and neighborhood punks). Very few of the "tales of yore" describe the typical modern street attack of blind-side blitzkrieg followed by rape, robbery or murder. Combine that with the tendency of old men to tell big fish stories when describing their distant youth, and you cannot believe much of anything written about the masters of old.

2. We should compare ourselves and be answerable to "real" combative training like MMA.

So, just for the fun of it, let's just compare karate clientele with MMA clientele and ask ourselves if it is in karate's best interest to "take it to the streets".

  Enter the typical commercial karate dojo (or non-profit club for that matter) and you will find many different types of people. There will be the ill-mannered children sent by parents to learn self-discipline and get physically active. There will be the rare adults that started karate as children, enjoyed it and just kept going. These exotic birds will usually be your tournament players and they will be the long-term members who dominate the club. There will be the adult hobbyists who joined karate as a disciplined pass-time, perhaps looking for that mystical mind-body connection touted so widely by martial artists. On the other hand, there will be very few true combat-ready "fire breathers" who want to mix it up with like minded individuals and who don't mind getting hit and spilling blood.

Now walk on down the street and visit the local MMA/ Brazilian Jiu-jutsu Club and look through the door. What do you see?  Well, there will probably be the ever-ubiquitous children enrolled in martial-arts day-care. There will be quite a few teen-aged boys trying to emulate their television  tough-guy heroes. There might even be a few tom-boy girls challenging the male-dominated status-quo (and several girls who joined to chase the above boys). That leaves the overwhelming majority of the paying members who are typically young, athletic men who desperately need and want to find their manhood in the salt of the sweat and the metallic smell of flowing blood. The MMA clubs attract and are filled with those mythical "fire breathers" who love competition and don't mind limping into work each morning having to explain yet another black eye, broken nose or bloodied lip.

You cannot and should not compare MMA with karate: they are different things and attract different clientele. If the karate dojo tries to go head to head with the MMA dojo, they will alienate their bread and butter and that spells financial ruin. Karate is a martial art, the emphasis being on "art", while MMA is a combative sport. Two different things.

Oh, and yes, I am sure your club trains for reality. Everyone thinks their club is the real thing; it's called loyalty and that is a good thing. I have trained with many clubs and have been told by more than a few that I am a bit too intense for their comfort level. It's kind of funny: I think of myself as a bit of a coward and barely competitive at all.  Just take it from me: very few karate clubs are real enough to be street lethal.

3. Traditional Karate training is useless and unrealistic.

Yes...unless the instructor really understands the drills and uses them appropriately. Unfortunately, a huge number, perhaps the majority, of instructors have no idea what each drill does, how to use that drill, and when to stop using that drill. The typical instructor teaches the way his sensei taught and his sensei probably followed suit the same way. Test your sensei sometime: ask him what a specific drill trains and critique his answer. I would bet that many of us would get the standard answer: "Shut up and train". The rest of us will get a convoluted, cryptic answer that makes sense only if you are drunk, stoned or stupid.

  Here is general guide of what the heck some drills might be about:

a) Five step sparring: teaches distance, range (how long your arms are) and timing for the receiver.  It only takes a couple of strikes in the face for the student to figure out the timing of a block (and maintaining distance). Why five? Repetition left, repetition right ....repetition again.  For beginners the drill is Ok, for black belts it should be relegated to "warm-up" and then should be done at full speed with intent....until the sweat is flowing.

 If you really want to challenge fighters, you can have them play with the timing of the attacks and the length of their steps (broken timing, variable distance challenges). Try that and just see if a few of you black-belts don't get smacked upside the head.

b) Three step sparring is more advanced only because the student only gets three chances to get it right. At this point the student should be trying to play with timing and variations on a theme. We SHOULD be playing with karate; that's what having a hobby is all about. Again, this should be relegated to a warm-up drill rather than an integral part of the session.

c) One-step sparring: should never be done slowly unless you are teaching alternative responses to attacks. For the standards, it should be done full speed with intent.  The point of a "stepping in attack" IS NOT realism; it's about giving a student more time to pick up the attack and effectively defend. Of-bloody-course students should be using alternative attacks once they have the basics mastered.  This is a step wise program where the student must learn to walk before they run.  Having said that, karate needs to remember that kids learn to run very soon after walking; we should be pushing the envelope for each belt rank for each session.  All sorts of attacks should be attempted, but appropriate attacks should reflect the ability of the student: if you beat the crap out of your white belts, don't expect to have too many students of higher rank around. Nobody except the MMA guys like bloodied lips.

d) Free sparring is not about learning to fight. It's about learning to control an opponent, think on the fly, keep your cool under pressure and, perhaps, learn to enjoy controlled aggression.  If you are not getting that out of sparring, then you should quit karate or find a new club. Sparring should not ever be about the alpha of the dojo bullying the losers (but usually it is): it should be about everyone in the club testing, challenging and teaching each other.

  Sparring on a regular basis MIGHT help you in self-defense, but don't expect your dojo training to come into play much when some drugged-out psychopath jumps out of the bushes swinging a baseball bat and demanding your wallet.  Even you steely-eyed black-belts will likely scream like a little girl, soil your shorts and run like a gazelle when that happens. 

e) Kata is part of the art. It defines karate. If you dump kata, you are not doing karate. It would be like skipping the tea in the tea ceremony.  Having said that, there bloody well should be some effort to find intelligent applications for each move in each kata, even that goofy jump in Unsu (I have one for that that really works; damn near killed a student once and I never tried it again). If you are not "playing" with kata then you are not studying karate; you are just memorizing and regurgitating for the useless grading.  Make the kata useful as intellectual challenges and keep the karate examinations useless as they always were and always will be.

f) Kihon is about exercise and....repetition.

 Hikite? At kudansha level it should be done for form in kata and while teaching, but at kyu level it is about using both left and right arms.  Watch your beginners: most of them do the technique with one arm while allowing the other to hang like zombie meat ten-days dead. If all our students started in Tai Chi, they would automatically use both limbs simply because all the Chinese forms assumes two arms acting simultaneously but doing different things. Karate likely assumed the same action back before some tournament white pajama wannabe (as I was once called by a martial arts celebrity and famous author) turned it all into a kicky-blocky-punchy game of tag.

Either way, you need to have some basic standards and skills before you can break with those standards and skills (hopefully somewhere around Shodan).  Otherwise we might as well do....Tae Kwon Do.

Now that I have offended everyone, I would like to piece this all together. Karate is an art, a hobby and a pass-time.  If we are passionate about it, we should be concerned about doing it "just so".  Doing the kata properly matters to karate the same way that performing a ballet properly matters to a ballerina. Have standards and pride yourself in being exacting in those standards. That is why this is a demanding discipline rather than an easy going, anything goes crap-fest.  This is where the "zen" nature of karate comes in; winning a competition does not matter nearly as much as how you performed. Furthermore, this is where the "training for life" comes in. The fire-breathing macho combat-boys will never understand this until they enjoy their first trip to the hospital for a bad back, a kidney stone or new titanium hip, but enjoying the exploration of the art of karate will always eventually replace the love of the battle.

By the way: Chokki Motobu is a great unknown in karate. He was never well liked or widely followed as an instructor in his time. He left practically no records detailing his beliefs and the majority of what we know about him is second hand or manufactured posthumously.  By all accounts, he was best known for drinking excessively, fighting frequently and rolling in the gutters. He was a thug that us westerners have adopted as a "karate legend" simply because created history has fogged reality. Holding up Chokki Motobu as an authentic karate master is like holding up Mike Tyson as a boxing hero: both men were indeed great fighters, but a thug is still just a thug no matter how gently history treats him.

Toxic Ranks

After more than a decade of reading his eloquent posts, I still follow Rob Redmond. Despite his sometimes caustic tone, there is much truth in what Rob says. Sometimes I think he might be the last truthful man in America.

Just the other day Rob posted something to the effect that karate ranks were essentially meaningless. This was nothing new from Rob and, frankly, after having some detailed arguments with Rob on the subject years ago, I fully agree with his point of view. Karate ranks have no more meaning than ranks in any other pastime: whether it be computer gaming or a community service lodge such as Rotary.  Karate ranks, while being a badge of honor and achievement, do not improve a person's social or professional standing in the "real world" one iota. In fact many people might just consider a person little more than a brutal thug for being interested or participating in a blood sport. Publicly claiming a specific karate rank may in fact hurt you in the "real world" where people hear the word "karate" and think of bloodied ring fighters or prepubescent children in white pajamas.

I was not really shocked by Rob's comment that karate rank was meaningless; I was shocked by the acidic reaction from many, if not most of Rob's readers.  I mean, I can accept some of junior kyu grades still being naïve and defensive over their bunny-eared and treasured belt, but I would have thought anyone over Shodan rank would have figured out the reality of their belt rank by the time they had spent a few years in the dojo. Ranks are achievement ribbons; hard earned by the individual but of no more value than the prizes earned at childhood sports-day outings. Unless you are planning on teaching (or coaching) martial arts as a life-long career, that rank is worth nothing outside the dojo. In fact, considering the miserable state of world wide karate politics, your rank is likely worthless outside your own home dojo.  Go to the dojo across town or across the country and your very special rank diploma becomes little more than expensive but coarse weave toilette paper.

Some of the replies Rob received were barely more than veiled threats of violence: "Go tell Dave Hazard or Scott Langley that their ranks are worthless".  My thought when I read that reply was two-fold: my first thought was that the writer was suggesting one of those two gentlemen would violently reprimand Rob for daring to question the value of their rank while my second thought was that the writer was assuming Mr. Hazard and Mr. Langley held the same juvenile opinion of karate ranks as themselves. I did not see any proof that either of those suggestions was true.

  The other thought I had was that both Mr. Hazard and Mr. Langley both do value their karate rank because, unlike the vast majority of karateka, they actually earn their living as karate instructors.  For those rarified people that are actually professional karate instructors, rank actually does mean something....within very specific bounds.

So exactly where do karate ranks actually count? Let's look at that logically:

1. In the real world? As a business owner and a karateka, I can confidently say that having a black belt in anything would not influence my opinion of a potential employee in the least.  My business does not employ "door men", "bodyguards" or "enforcers", so the ability to physically subdue potential customers does not interest me. While earning a black belt certainly does take some dedication and physical effort, it certainly is no reflection of intelligence, professional capability or management skills.  In fact, in my experience with many black belts (myself included) is that we tend to be slightly obsessive, somewhat self-absorbed, and often quite combative.  While some of these values can benefit a professional, they are hardly key qualities for professional or social advancement.

2. In the karate world?  Do we even need to discuss this?  Everybody knows that rank certificates are rarely honored between affiliates within an association. Ranks are almost never honored between clubs of different associations within the same style (consider the alphabet soup of Shotokan associations alone) and if you change styles, you will almost always be busted back to white belt, even if you can chew-up and spit out the senior sensei of the club without breaking a sweat.

In an addendum to this, black belt ranks are often not honored by the associations that actually awarded them. When the KUGB imploded, many of the high dan ranks were suddenly busted back to kyu grades by the JKA, while Nishiyama himself demoted all Canadian dan ranks during a 6 month fit of anger over some ITKF financial issues. I even heard Mr. Scott Langley had his credentials questioned simply because he had the temerity to publish an autobiographical book without getting the nod from JKS head-office.  How can rank mean anything if the powers that be can snatch that rank back the moment they don't like your politics (or the flavor of your book)?

Of course there is also the other side of the coin: the "signing bonus" dan rank if a leading instructor decides to jump ship and join the competing association.  We have all seen this bizarre little twist: a sudden dan elevation over a short summer when a controversial instructor decides New Generation ITKF is better than Old School ITKF (just as an example).  How seriously can we take Dan ranks if they are held out like carrots on a stick for political favors rendered?

3. In self-defense? I don't want to address this in the least. The most dangerous men I have ever met were untrained sociopaths who would smile one moment and kill you the next. We have all met dan ranked karateka who could dance like the devil on the dojo floor and would pee themselves in fear if anyone ever approached them with evil intent outside the dojo. Hell, I have met highly ranked kudansha which fold, spindle and collapse if you give them the slightest pressure in sparring; these athletes are depending on the referee to save their biscuits and often win by forcing a disqualification.

4. In the larger world of martial arts: Judo and jiujutsu think karate ranks are a joke because we don't have to fight for them, MMA thinks karate ranks are a joke because they don't use ranks, and aikido don't think much about us at all because it disturbs their Ki.  Certainly nobody seems to know what our ranks actually mean (and neither do we, really). Some groups seem to assume black belt means "sensei" while other groups just assume it means "registered killer".

5. How about in your own dojo? Nope. I cannot count how many times I have heard someone say that a person earned Shodan based on a "pity-grade". Hell, I have heard that about myself (and it might just be true despite the fact that I spent more time training a the dojo than any three other club members combined in the years I was most active; I'm just not that talented.) I personally have sat through dan gradings where I was practically rolling on the ground laughing at the pitiful performance of a karateka as they graded for a higher dan rank. I once watched a poor middle-aged woman stumble through an abysmal performance of two upper kata and then get literally dismantled in sparring by a kid twenty years her junior.  I personally would have busted her back to about 4th kyu or lower, but she successfully attained Nidan rank that examination. Her dan ranking was all about her personal journey, not my vision of what karate should be.  And that is the point.

Rob Redmond clearly stated that karate ranks have no true value, but he did not say they are worthless. Anyone that has attained a dan level ranking in karate has something to be proud of because it represents years of hard work and dedication. We should all be proud of our dan rankings, but not one of us should have it appear on our resume or expect it to carry any weight outside our own dojo (and, depending on who is attending class that day, sometimes not even there). Unfortunately, any mature adult with any degree of common sense will have to admit that his dan rank is comparable to any personal award, including on-line computer game rankings: something to pat yourself on the back about because almost nobody else cares.