Are we witnessing the end of karatedo?
By Gary Lever, Published July 6, 2008 budo , goju ryu , karate
Apologies in advance for this rant!
After turning up alone to an empty dojo again today I began wondering whether interest in karatedo has finally passed.
A quick browse along the shelves of your local newsagents might further highlight my concern, with Fighting Arts International having not been in circulation for a good few years, and the admittedly quite poor Traditional Karate now being reduced to a few pages at the back of the ‘video games and movie’ magazine Combat.
What magazines are left out there consist of mostly MMA or doorman-reality-urban-combat articles. Even magazines which are aimed toward the more traditionally minded budoka appear unable to fill their pages with articles related to the traditional martial arts and resort to filling the content with hybrid systems. A look at the contents of the current Meibukan Magazine for example lists only one article relating to the Okinawan martial arts in the entire issue! The rest of the magazine consisting of articles relating to Krav Maga, Russian Systema, and the police…
Whilst I despair at the current state of Karatedo, I also wonder whether it has been a victim of its own success? Argubly karate is still the most widely practiced martial art in the world. Despite this, a quick visit to the majority of dojo in your local area will show poorly prepared students following the instructions of equally poorly prepared teachers. A potential student who will have no doubt seen the finely honed skills and physiques of their favourite MMA fighters or movie star will probably be quite unimpressed with karate and will look elsewhere.
The reputation of karatedo has been harmed dramatically over the past decade with the emerging populartity of MMA and Youtube. With a simple search of the internet, people are now able to laugh at shambolic claims from the likes of George Dillman relating to karate’s secret no touch knockout skills, and see them methodically trashed by the media for the whole world to see. Unfortunately the average person with little knowledge of karatedo may assume that we are all as idiotic and deluded.
I feel we are at a very critical point in karate’s history. As strange as this may sound, it is my hope that interest in karate fades even further to the point that it becomes a minority study, much like Japans Koryu Bujutsu schools. I think that this would make karatedo more managable so that teachers can be correctly prepared and the art more able to be passed on intact and with dignity.
Karatedo will only be able to survive another century if we are able to cut away from the morons and begin to rebuild the reputation of the art as something worth preserving.
At the moment I remain embarrassed to admit that I practice karate.
Reply on Gary Lever’s “Are we witnessing the end of karatedo? ”
After studying karate for more than 30 years, I too, cannot deny that most youngsters are more attracted by modern martial arts. To me it looks curious, because I attended seminars of Krav Maga and Systema, too. My conclusion is that I did not learn or see one technique that I have not learned already in Karate before. Systema uses similar techniques as they appear in Okinawan Tori-te [Chin-na]. In Krav Maga, kicks, and punches, joint locks and destabilisations are the same as taught to me by my two teachers, Patrick McCarthy and Hokama Tetsuhiro. It’s mostly the way of training those techniques in these modern arts that differs a lot. They don’t lose time with courtesy and nicely bowing.
In karate we spend lots of time learning correct techniques and body mechanics. You have to train a mawashi-geri until it’s perfect; where for example in Krav Maga or Muay-Thai you just start kicking roundhouses for low kicks. The result is that students go faster, (but due to poor technique, they suffer injuries, after not that long time of training.) They create a kind of “instant fighting”, while in karate you spend years training kata and techniques, which in most schools are useless in a street fight.
I don’t think that the pioneers of karate, kung fu or other arts, at the very beginning, in need to protect themselves, had much kata or kihon in their minds. They developed techniques for real fights, in their own era, which was rough enough!! (Sensei McCarthy’s translation of Choki Motobu’s “Watashi no karate”).
The whole karate school-system came later. When “masters” started to sell techniques you had to learn first stupid things until you proved yourself worthy to learn the real stuff, or worse the ”secrets”… Later, in Japan, by forging karate in the same way as they had done with kendo, a philosophy was created rather than a fighting art. Under General McArthur, fighting arts were simply forbidden.
For this I can recommend my friend and student, Filip Swennen’s university work “The creation of the myth of traditional Japanese karate, under the pressure of pre-war nationalism”. This work appears on our Sensei McCarthy’s quarter-journals and can be received by sending a simple mail to (jos.robert-ronin@skynet.be).
A second thing is the “physical appearance” of karate and its practitioners. There are lots of average-aged practitioners who train their kata and applications in a really interesting way, but even that won’t work if they would be aggressed by a Mike Tyson-type of beast. This is because they train without adrenaline dump. They do techniques, but they don’t fight. There is no threat in the dojo(’s). I see fewer classes where they really grab you in an aggressive way so, that you “have” to make your technique work. In a Muay-Thai dojo, for example ,you will be challenged, for sure.
Although karate is one of the most practised martial arts in the world we can’t deny that 80% of the schools are sports karate. Competition karate is the nicest game I know, and you really have to be an athlete to make it there. But they train with “rules” who in order to become Olympic are getting softer and softer and therefore of no, or less use in a street fight.
I consider it as our task to “re-discover” a way of practising karate that will work in any type of confrontation. But then we’re heading to a type of combat-karate rather than the traditional karate-do.
Patrick McCarthy and others forced the doors open and we have to follow, to explore the treasure that ancient karate really was and still is!
Jos Robert
Ronin Karate
Original post on shinsokai.worpress.com