INTERNATIONAL SHURIWAY KARATE & KOBUDO SOCIETY

 

OLD KARATE & CHANGE

By Carl Hoffman

The concept of going back to the old ways, of original karate, of "re-engineering" original, "real" karate before it was watered down, spoiled, commercialized, introduced to public school students, etc., is a constant theme these days.

As is the question of change itself, and the seeming contradiction between conservative traditionalists who believe that we shouldn't change kata and the obvious fact that kata changes, and has changed—and did so long before we westerners got involved.

But the problem is, as others have stated, we have no idea of what that "original" karate is, or was. Beyond pure speculation we have a mere handful of photos, films and books by guys like Funakoshi—but even they date back only a few decades.

The Progression of Training

If we are to be truthful we simply can't speculate. We have to go by what we know. And what I know is this: I am 46 years old. I began training in karate in 1970 when I was ten years old under one teacher, and he is my teacher today. My teacher began studying karate on Okinawa in early 1960, and he has trained under two men only in the past 46 years.

When he started training in 1960 he was the first American student of both his teachers. Neither had an association; neither taught karate as a business; they taught karate for one reason, and one reason only: themselves. They taught the way they had been taught; they studied and trained the way they wanted to study and train—they had no concern for keeping students or paying the dojo rent or building an association. Since my teacher was the first American, they taught him just like they taught everyone else.

Their karate at that moment in time was pure; pure in the sense that it had not been changed for commercial purposes, or to address a fad, or to compete in tournaments, or to appeal to Westerners. We have no idea how that karate was different from karate taught in 1800 or 1850 or 1930; we only know what it was like then, at that moment in time.

So what was that "old" karate like? They did tens of thousands of repetitions of basic techniques; tens of thousands of walking drills; they did huge amounts of makiwara work, lots of kata and kote, lots of fighting; and they did it all in a progression that emphasized closed fists and hard blocks long before ANY open hand techniques. Beginners were not taught nerve strikes or so-called pressure points not because they didn't exist, but because in the traditional hierarchy, beginners didn't deserve those techniques until they had proved their loyalty and conditioned their bodies.

The Evolution of Instruction

My teacher's teacher eventually became a full-time karate teacher and built an association. Gone, ironically, were all the hard basics and the mind-numbing repetition, replaced by much-more-exciting-to-train "advanced" techniques. The cart was now before the horse. What had really changed wasn't even so much the techniques themselves, but the way they were taught and the order in which they were taught. Gone was the intensity and the patience required to do basics over and over again.

Now, 30 years later, I have been privileged to witness one man's changes. My teacher says he changes nothing, yet changes creep in; you can't stop them. He thinks about a move, tries to understand it, and as his understanding evolves, small differences in timing or targets appear. However, there is a big difference between those changes that inevitably creep in and wholesale changes that you yourself initiate because you think you know better.

The problem with change is that the more casual we are about it, the more we risk the dissolution of something that we may not—yet—understand. It's not that change is necessarily bad, but that a too-casual attitude about it risks chaos and the loss of something that may be important.

Courtesy & with permission Carl Hoffman from CyberDojo Post.