Is karate better now? 

Is karate better now?

We have a mountain of martial arts stuff to watch online and yet I don’t see the quality of by gone days.

Everyone is a master or a world champion and yet I see no depth.

This I think is because we have marketed the arts for the masses. It was Funakoshi who systemized karate and brought it to a logical and progressive way of learning karate. He introduced the belt system to encourage students to continue training, and he was then able to teach many people at the same time. In the past you were either a student or a master, there was not an in between.

Funakoshi goal was to enable everyone to train and to spread karate far and wide. He sent his instructors all around the world to promote karate and the JKA instructors’ course was legendary.

To be able to do this he watered down karate somewhat and made it a safer version. If you look at his book Karate-Do Kyohan (the master text) you will find a different fist formation and one that has been forgotten. Nowadays the three-quarter punch with the clamping of the index finger is a distant memory and the full twisting punch has been utilized as it is safer. Please check the book out as in the later versions it was removed as they did not want to give any secrets away and show you the real karate.

This brings me to that hot topic of Kata and bunkai applications. When I was taught karate some fifty years ago all the kata bunkai was block this and blocked that. This is not the whole system as old-style karate before it was changed beyond all recognition contained many dangerous techniques and applications. To give you an example Morote-uke = augmented block is a neck breaking technique, again to make it safe for the masses the application was interpreted as a block. When you studied karate in the old days it was to defend yourself and to be able to take out an opponent as quickly as possible, they did not want to block anything. It was kill or be killed. Yes, I know we don’t live in these times now, but it is a shame that we practice karate blindly without really studying it.

The point I am making is let us look at what we are doing and bring back some of the old ways and methods of training if it is not broken don’t fix it. If we don’t then things may be lost forever, and we may never understand true karate.

Keep training yours in budo

GM Angelo