How should we look at martial arts.

This is a bit of a funny one, how should we see martial arts when looking at the phenomena through academic glasses? Should we see the importance of body mechanics or even the social relevance of the ceremony of training. It is unclear.

As a student of sociology I am constintly being told about culture and history with reference to a specific social point, like looking at feudalism or looking at evil. The process of imagination is a necessity as without a strong image in your mind it becomes difficult to make sense of the big words and the boring chapters that you put in front of you. I find it hard, and it is a process that i think every student should have to put up with.

I do believe that what we look at in social science can make a differnece to the way that we look and think about our social surroundings. I have taken a jump into the deep end with my dissertation by discussing the sociology of karate. Bearing in mind I have been a karateka much longer than a sociologists the process is long and difficult. I do however find myself having to overcome a number of obstacles, for example every book I read with reference to karate I have to read twice; firstly to appreciate and learn as a karate-ka and then secondly so that I can look at it like a sociologists. As you can imagine it takes a while.

I don't think people can appreciate the complexity of trying to understand society, I find its a never ending battle that will always result in more questions asked. But this is why we need to discover and keep at looking at our social surroundings, because it always change and its never in a solid state. The same applies to karate, the heart of karate is extremely complex, its not just people jumping around in white pyjamas kicking and punching the air it is however much interpersonal and deeper than some would like to think. From a sociologists point of view it is a phenomena. After looking at some hard to find theories of martial arts the actually social implications of karate is baffling, It has so many social connections that many of us (both sociologists and karate-ka) neglect to see. Karate does have a major impact on our social lives and also on the life of our society. All you have to do is view blogs, facebook pages and website to see how across the globe karate has a extremely big and encompassing community. This is why I call it a phenomena.

May I just take this time to say thank you to all that have read and contributed to this blog. I began this as a place to begin to post some of my ideas about the connections between karate and society, but as well as this I have found new avenues to gather information for my dissertation. Thanks.

Rant over, time to write more dissertation.

Osu

Question 3

Hello again everyone. Its been a while.
Didn't think Uni would be as difficult.

Anyway here is question 3, Bit different to the other ones.

Has karate been affected by globalisation and will this be good or bad??



Osu

Question 2

Thanks to all of those that have answered the first question, its very helpful and good to see some strong debates coming. Here is my second question...

Is it possible to see/practice karate as a religion?

Bit of a different one this time, I look forward to hearing your opinions 

Osu

Lets Try Something New!!!

Right, heres whats going to happen. I'm going to post a question and I want people to give a quick answer for the questions in the commments part. Please don't just put yes or no, put some reason behind your answer.

Question 1.

Do you think that we can use the term 'Modern karate'?


Osu

My Lack of Posting

Hello everybody.

I just wanted to write a little bit just to explain why i have not posted in a while. The main reason is that i am at the moment extremely busy with a number of things.

Firstly its getting extremely close to the JKS World Championships, where I have been selected to represent JKS England. So as you can imagine, my training has taken over my life a little bit. I am enjoying it all, of course, and i am very greatful for the opportunity to train and be apart of a fantastic team of people and fantastic karateka.

As well as this my third year at university is also just about to start, so I'm also trying to get my head around enrollment and getting ready for a difficult year of study. One bonus is that it will give me a lot more time to write and think about karate and modernity, afterall i am writing about this for my dissertation.


In the mean time, please keep reading and thinking. If you have a comment then please please please share it with us all. My aim when i write is to create a thought, so that the readers can go away and theorise for themselves. Also let me know what you think of my writing style, as i am trying to find a bridge that can both be understood in the karate world and in the world of sociology.

Thank you again for reading my blog, It's nice to know that there are over 700 people that have read this and I hope that you have come away from reading my posts with new thought and a new interest.


Osu

Ambivalence in Karate

In my view there are many points that link our martial art to what it means to be modern. Sociology is a complex and diverse subject but to put it simply its aim is to understand our social surroundings. Yes sociologists use big words and complex sentences, often boring you to death – but hidden in the poetry of jargon lies some very good theories of how different people have viewed society. I’m going to introduce a bit of a sociological concept here, as I believe it has a strong relevance to karate. However please remember I’m using karate as an example, not as an explanation. If you want to read more on this subject please let me know and I’ll recommend some decent and non-boring text.

Ambivalence is the coexistence, in one person, of opposing emotions or attitudes. It’s kind of an individual preference between to opposites, good and evil for example. Imagine one group of people; they see an action or something as being a method of being good. Then you have another group that see the same action as something evil. One of the best examples I could give would be the Holocaust, to the Nazi the extermination of the Jews was a ‘good’ method as it helped to make Europe better fit for German people and was a method to deal with their social problem. Whereas the opposing nations to the Nazi saw the Holocaust as an act of evil, as they did not see the rational reasoning for killing Jewish people as the reasoning for the act was not in their social manifesto.  

Modern karate-do has ambivalence, it has become very diverse and extremely wide-spread, new styles have been created brining different techniques and different methods of ‘doing’ karate. For this to happen their must have been a pinning point in the evolution of karate, their must have been an ambivalent moment that took a new path of technique. At one point someone must have said “no I disagree, it should be like this.” and from this it’s spiralled of into something completely new. We can now look into two different styles and see completely different methods of technique. Kyokushin for example use momentum and swinging to create power, whereas in Shotokan we use hip rotation and snap for our source.

Staying with Shotokan, its history has been greatly affected ambivalent decisions, Shotokan was developed from a mixture of two other forms of Okinawa-Te – Naha-te and Shuri-te- in which Funakoshi Shihan picked and mixed elements from both into his karate. It was then his ambivalence that helped to establish a grading system, to say what is right and what is wrong. It was ambivalence that helped to create the famous Heian kata, and what other kata we see in the standard Shotokan format. Each point of great decision that Funakoshi Shihan and his predecessors have made about the method of karate has been guided my some level of ambivalent view.

We can go to an all style karate competition and see another karateka from a different style performing in kumite or kata, and to your own thoughts it looks bizarre and you pick up on the things that you think are wrong. We see things only in our own style, a kind of ethnocentrism of karate schools (we only see from our styles point of view). Whereas someone could watch you perform a kata or kumite and think things about our karate, as they again have their own view. Similarly the Nazi saw it good to exterminate Jewish people, the UK didn’t.

Another strong point in which ambivalence peaks into our karate life is with each individual. At some point in our karate path we find what works for us and what doesn’t, kumite and kata are two good examples of this. We find in kumite that certain techniques and ‘naturalness’ are expressed, this is the karate that is ours and has been born from the natural ambivalence of our subconscious. Kata is another prime example and instead of me explaining there was recently a post by another JKS England karateka who explains this exactly.

 http://bunbudojo.blogspot.com/2011/08/sochin-study-part-one-initial-thoughts.html

There are many more examples in which this can happen in karate, it’s a concept that also applies to the much wider society as well. It’s difficult to understand how society has such a strong affect in our dojos. It’s often said that as soon as you put on your Dogi and tie your belt everyone becomes equal and that the world outside stays outside. However it can be said that the world outside the dojo still has a profound affect upon how we act and progress. Karate cannot be something outside society; it is deeply embedded in society and its forces. Osu. 

Again feel free to comment and also check out some of the other blogs and websites in the 'link' section at the top of the page. 

The Evolution of the Dojo

Karate has and always will be a dangerous martial art to take part in, with this safety can never been 100% guaranteed. Injuries happen as karate develops skills that if used can be extremely dangerous and even fatal. However the environment that we practise these skills is where we see the greatest progression of a karate dojo.

Karate-do training habits a unique environment, with each dojo having a different atmosphere; it is these atmospheres that people have to learn. It is this atmosphere that if not accepting to someone ends or flourishes a karateka. If a dojo atmosphere is tough, dangerous and violent, where people are regularly bleeding and hit it will take a certain sort of person to perceiver to accept the danger and learn from one’s own mistakes. It’s that sort of thought that if you get hit you must block faster, if not you will get hit again. This type of atmosphere is often seen in what has become to be known as a ‘tough dojo’, true to its word it does produce ‘tough’ karateka, with fearless attributes when entering into kumite fighting.

However the relationship between karate and society has changed, the reasons for people starting karate have changed. Karate has entered into the social realm of commodity, in other words people can no longer live a life of just karate without involving some level of revenue. We do see many people that run karate groups like a charity, where they volunteer their time and all them income generated goes back into the group so that it can still run efficiently. As karate acting like a commodity it does have an affect; firstly by gaining revenue and income karate associations and organisations can work more to expand and introduce karate into more societies and areas across the globe. Secondly it can sometimes have an affect upon the way karate is taught, with regards to how students are treated and also the atmosphere in the dojo.  The description above is a very generalised and stereotypical view of what is normally seen as a tough dojo, and to be honest I’ve never personally trained at a dojo that could fit that description.

So where has dojo atmosphere changed?

Well the best way to describe how a dojo now works is to relate it to a school class room. The aim is the same for everyone, to progress and develop knowledge; but the method of how a person does this is down to the teacher’s ability of various teaching techniques. We often see in school these tests that apparently can tell what type of learner a person is, normally resulting in audio based, visual based, or motion based. It’s highly unlikely that you will get one class full of students with the same learning type, so different methods have to be used to explain the same concept, so that everyone from a learning category has on opportunity to learn in their style.

The same can be said for karate, obviously not in the same way but could be said to work with dojo atmosphere. Some people may be in tune to a rough and often dangerous way of learning karate, where if they don’t block or move they get hit hard. Others however may learn more from a seminar type of lesson, others from more relaxed and friendly atmosphere, and others may learn faster when with a partner or with one on one tuition. It is these different methods that karate sensei have to think about when planning a lesson. Can everyone learn from this? Is there another way of putting the point across? What sort of atmosphere do I need to create during the lesson?

However this is the pinning point for any dojo. If they have only one way of doing something, then they will only attract one ‘type’ of person and they will see many students starting then leaving. Therefore we have to look at student a little more like customers, in that we need to work for them so that they can learn properly. Also with this attitude we see many more people starting and achieving great things in karate as they way that we now teach progression is elastic and diverse, giving instructors limitless amounts of ways of teaching karate.

In my eyes, this change in our evolution is only going to benefit karate. Firstly it opens the dojo door to many more people that would not be able to survive learning in certain dojo atmospheres, but that can now have variety and work to their advantages. Secondly it opens the door to a lot more variety of exercise, senseis have to think deeper about what they want to teach and have free choice over the method of doing so. 

If you have any thoughts please leave a comment. Osu

Standardizing The Subjective

Firstly I want to make this clear. I am not going to give my personal opinion about any grading syllabus, or say whether I think it’s a good or bad thing. What I will say, however, is the uses of the grading syllabus and what it has done in the evolution of karate. 

Karate always has and always will be highly subjective, but yet we still see areas in our karate structure which has created a standardised form of our martial art. This is the grading systems.

Before the birth of what we now formally see as Shotokan there was no formal grading system. People practised karate and that was it, no different colour belts, no grading examinations, only personal development. When reading “Karate-Do, My Way of Life” By Gichin Funakoshi Shihan we read about many anecdotes that describe old karate masters challenging each other and people wanting to demonstrate their skills to other karate adepts. Their was no way of knowing what standards someone’s karate is, the only way you could find out was through watching kata demonstrations or even within a battle. However it is important to remember that the social setting that karate held in those days was extremely different to that of today, karate was a hidden art, people did not openly practise it for hundreds of years. Therefore there was no need to a rational way to view karateka.

Where as in our modern times, karate is openly practised all over the world, the social setting that its placed under is now a lot more accepting to the art compared to hundred years ago. There is a need now to be able to rationally categories people into grades. There is a need to have a standard for each grade, to what needs to be achieved in Shotokan karate; there are criteria that one must be able to achieve too reach into the next category. Therefore we need a system that can clearly show how people are progressing in karate, which in Shotokan is our belt and grading systems. The best way to describe what a grade in karate is is to relate it to an education system. Imagine that there are a number of years in a school, to progress to the next year the students have to pass an examination that tests their knowledge that they have learnt in that year and in the years pervious. The whole system has a flow, with people continuously learning, continuously progressing, by gaining new knowledge. The same applies in our grading system in karate. We attend lessons, we learn, we show our understanding and we progress to the next grade/belt.

The reasons for this change are never really looked at. Why did Funakoshi Shihan decide to create this system for a martial art that had no base note? Well for one society, and the popularity of karate, were both changing when Funakoshi Shihan designed a system of grades. More and more people were training and more and more were records and classification required in a lot of daily institutions. And since the initial system it has evolved to what it has in our modern times, it now not only makes sure that students are at a certain standard but also works in many other ways.

So what do we get from the grading system?

By grading we achieve not only a new belt and a certificate, but also achieve a level of social transformation. Any karateka will know that when a chance to grade comes up things begin to get intense; you’re pushed to your limits both physically and with your knowledge of karate. You go over your kata (Forms), your kihon (Basics) and you’re Kumite (sparring) to get every detail right. Then on the day of your grading you become nervous, but your exited the adrenaline makes you shake, you feel that whatever you do is not ‘good’ karate. Then you achieve the next grade, you feel pride and accomplishment and can’t wait to the next lesson where you can show off your new belt. It’s this transition time where the social transformation begins, not in the sense of changing, but instead character building that one achieves by going through this process. We learn to push ourselves to reach the standards set out in the syllabus, and then we have an examination which tests you to perform under tense and pressured situations. Not only do we achieve the belt but also the skills that it takes to get the belt. In many ways these skills are just as important as the grade itself, as they are transferable and can be used in both karate and in everyday life. Skills like confidence and self belief, and the ability to perform in strange conditions, which takes a level of concentration and relaxation.

These skills are the essential point that I’m trying to make here. Back in Funakoshi Shihan’s era these skills were born from one’s karate, but via a completely different way to our modern karate, they had no system to create such situations and learned these skills through different means. However in modern karate we have a system to thank for the transference of skills, it creates a social setting that pushes for these skills to be used. In some ways this could even speed up the ability of these skills, the settings of grading are unique purely because it’s a self motivating experience where one can notice the important of such skills.

The achievement of passing a grade is half karate half spirit. 

Some Thank Yous

It feels a bit early doing this, considering its only my fourth post. But I would just like to say a massive thank you to all the people that have supported me with this blog and for the wonderful comments from others. 

Selby Shotokan Karate blog, has recently posted about this blog and about me personally, with very kind and inspiring words. All I can say is THANK YOU. Our club has only joined the JKS earlier this year, and since then we have meet some fantastic and inspirational people from all over the UK and Ireland. And I promise as soon as i figure out how to put links on here you will be added ;) Osu

Another thank you goes out to my Sensei's Andy and Jackie Jones. Im my eyes two of the best karateka around. They have supported me through a lot over the last couple of years, such as my shodan grading and competitions, always encouraging me and always very supportive.  Osu

Also, I created this blog to make people think, to get them to make their own views. So please if you have a comment about anything I've posted on here, even if you agree or disagree your comments are most valued. As without them we only hear my ideas, and I want to hear yours =) 

I'm already working hard on my next post, which should be up either tonight or tomorrow, so watch this space. 

Thank You again everyone Osu

The purpose of Fighting styles

This is a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago, All the information is based on a article written by Scott Langley Sensei in his kensusei reports. Very thought invoking and extremely interesting. Enjoy. 


When people think of martial arts the automatic assumption is that they belong to eastern cultures (Japan, China, Korea, Etc). However martial arts or indeed fighting styles in general, have a long history spreading across the globe, and have also had a strong influence on the west (Europe and America) as much as they have on the east. 

Within this short paper the aim will be place on the way in which social, political and power changes have evolved international fighting styles. Fighting styles are not just simply affected by great masters that study rare and unique exercises, the arts are affected greatly from the world surrounding them, and the best way to look at this is by looking at the differences between the changes in eastern arts and western arts and the ways that have been evolved. The origin of fighting arts is not important in this analysis, it could even be said that many arts had similar styles. “For example, the British based Knight Templar is reported to have had strong connection with the fighting monks of the Chinese Shaolin Monasteries” (Scott Langley, 2002). Fighting styles did have some level of similarity when it came to style, but they had different social forces that changed and adapted these arts.

It can be seen that eastern fighting styles are seen as dominant over western fighting styles, and indeed they have even become apart of our society, but why has the east dominated, when there were similarities? One possible answer can be said to be with the way that society has gone through early modernity and become more ‘civilised’.

 One main difference is that the UK has had a sustainable government for nearly a thousand years. “It was the first democracy in the world, the first to stop the feudal system, it had the first industrial revolution and it was the first country to franchise its whole population” (Scott Langley, 2002). British society quickly and rapidly produced a level of equality within a hierarchy that gave people both citizenship rights, such as that of voting and the right to a fair democracy. This changed the face of British traditional fighting styles. These styles would have initially been created so that people or groups had the ability to battle. They, like eastern arts, produced great warriors by training and by looking rationally around the way the body works. But as government grew stronger and people gained more rights, when laws and moral codes were created these styles lost their initial purpose, resulting in them withering away. Instead people used ‘formal’ and ‘civilised’ ways to deal with problems and quarrels.

Eastern societies, like Japan, only experienced this sort of social change only recently, with the Meiji Restoration not even two hundred years ago. In these society people were forbidden to carry weapons, only those within a gentry’s class were allowed, so there was still a need for people to protect themselves from deviance from society. This is where martial arts were still used and practised, as they taught people how to protect themselves in and affective way. It can be said that it is due to the traditional culture of fighting styles that have embedded them into the Japanese culture, with many still practising these arts.

But what was produced by these changes?

Well, the British adapted and borrowed aspects from its martial arts and used them to create sports, as there was still a need for competition between groups, regions etc. These sports, similar to British fighting styles, allowed people to still show superior skill and gave the fighting styles new functions. Boxing is the prime example of how traditional fighting styles were adapted “In the 17^th Century the British Aristocrat, the Marques of Queensbury, created the first rules for boxing, most of which are still used today.” (Scott Langley, 2002). From the British passion for competition and the need for sports it can be seen that the majority of team sports were created and flourished within Britain. Rounders evolved into baseball. And American football was adapted from British rugby.

The Japanese have taken this in a different view, within many Japanese styles of sport and indeed within Japanese marital arts the function of sports is not to satisfy a need for competition or pleasure. Instead the Japanese look to sport for character building, to produce well rounded people, in which focus, dedication and determination is embedded into their self image. Japanese Baseball, for example, houses entirely different reasons compared to American Baseball. To the Americans professional base ball can be seen as a job, they train lightly and reward individualism. Whereas in its Japanese counter-part baseball is a lifestyle, like martial arts, where individualism is not tolerated and training is hard, long and rigorous. (Whitting, 1990)

To conclude, societies change into civilisation has had a profound effect upon the way in which fighting styles and martial arts have been viewed. The birth of government and citizenship has found new platforms for people to settle differences, politics has created a place for people to argue and debate. Battle fields and ‘the way of the warrior’ are no longer a key function in our daily lives. That is not to say that marital arts are dead across the world, the traditional fighting styles from across the globe can still be seen in full swing. In the east martial arts still have a key function to there culture and society, due to their long need for fighting styles. Whereas in the west martial arts can be seen within sports such like boxing and wrestling. But it is the differences in our civilisation process that has allowed for these changes. If it were to have happened that the east gained government and citizenship earlier than the west, then British fighting styles may have the same affect that eastern martial arts does today.

All the information in this post comes from:

-Langley, Scott. 2002. “Kenshusei Reports” – Part 5: What is the difference between western and eastern fighting styles?. From www.scott.thejks.com/article_kensusei2 accessed on 21/06/2011

-Whiting, Robert. 1989. “You Gotta Have Wa”. Macmillan, New York.