Wastelander

Fraud is definitely a concern, but it is frustrating that many people seem to feel there is a link between popularity and legitimacy. This is something I have seen time and time again in the martial arts world--people who think that if an art is legitimate, it will be popular, and if it is popular, it must be legitimate. I have actually faced that quite a bit with regard to KishimotoDi, personally. All I can do is keep publishing information and putting out video content, and encouraging others to do the same. I don't think you have wasted your time, at all! It is definitely sad to lose a rare art, however. The "not knowing what you don't know" aspect of the knowledge bell curve is pretty common! Yeah, not everyone is a writer, or thinks they have much of value to write, even if they do, but books absolutely help. I'm sure time and resources are barriers to entry, but there are usually options available to learn at least a little bit of what there is to learn about rare systems if you really want to. Uchi-deshi programs are definitely rare these days, and I think most of them are in fairly popular styles. Maybe that will change. Cross-training is absolutely important for a well-rounded martial education, but it's really unfortunate that competition seems to be the only way for a style to gain mainstream popularity. I understand why, but the combat sports communities have done a good job of convincing people that traditional martial arts don't work in modern combat sports, so people with an interest in competitive fighting aren't likely to seek out traditional arts. With regard to KishimotoDi, specifically, it shares 3 of its 4 kata with other Shuri-Te lineage systems, but it is quite distinctly unique in movement and power generation, so the crossover isn't as significant as you will see in modern karate styles.

I'm not aware of any pronunciation guides for karate, specifically, but you can find lists of terminology pretty easily, and then use Google Translate or Jisho.org to look up the words and listen to how the words are pronounced there.

I'm sure that availability plays a role, but at the same time, I would say that Hakutsuru material wasn't very available in the 90s, but people sought it out pretty extensively. Personally, I don't think keeping Tachimura no Passai private for direct students is really a barrier to entry for the system, since the other 3 kata are available to be seen publicly, but I suppose everyone has different ideas about that. I definitely don't expect people who are new to karate will seek out rare systems, because as you say, they don't know anything about karate styles. It's always going to be people with experience who seek out rare systems. I will admit I didn't consider the relocation complication. You're right about that. People definitely do want to be able to transfer their rank and experience when they move, so they don't have to restart. Yeah, I've heard and seen that issue on Okinawa. Most Okinawan youth seem more interested in western activities, like baseball. There have also been seasoned instructors on Okinawa who have said you can find better karate in the west than on Okinawa, these days. It's unfortunate, and will likely result in the loss of knowledge and systems.

Right. I believe that's basically McKenna's point--some people, today, have taken to calling karatedo a "bugei," when it has never historically been considered a bugei. It could have been, had the Japanese known about it, but even then it wouldn't have been called karatedo, but more likely Todi, Ti'gwa, or Ti, with or without the "-jutsu" suffix, depending on when it was imported and by whom. The art we know of as karatedo is and always has been a budo, because that's where the "-do" suffix came from, and the budo culture of Japan was inserted into karate on purpose. Karate-jutsu, Todi, etc., were largely not classified as anything, they just existed as their own entities and everyone knew what you meant when you spoke about them. As to Ezomatsu's point about McKenna's background, I suspect they were just adding context to the source material. I have followed McKenna's work for a very long time, and I have found him to be a thorough and earnest researcher and translator with a strong understanding of karate, its history, and its culture. This experience with him and his work is why I feel I understand the points he was trying to make in this particular article.

Congratulations! I was promoted to 4th Dan, myself, in December of 2023, and that came as a complete surprise, to me

We all know that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of martial arts styles from Okinawa, and there have almost certainly been many which have been lost to time. Today, there are still a few rare styles which I would say are at risk of dying out, and I think this is partially due to a shift in mindset among karateka over time. From what I've gathered, it seems like from the 80s through the early 2000s, karateka were very interested in learning the oldest, most rare styles and material they could find. This includes the Hakutsuru (White Crane) craze that resulted in a bunch of people fraudulently claiming to teach it, and several kata being made-up for profit. Sometime after that, though, it seems as though karateka lost interest in seeking out older, rarer systems and material. I can't help but wonder if the Hakutsuru mess had something to do with that, but I can't say for sure. I am curious to know if anyone else has seen or felt this shift in interest? The reason I ask is, of course, largely driven by the fact that I personally train and teach a very rare style called KishimotoDi, which I generally consider to a system of Shuri-Te, but not karate, as it hasn't undergone the modernization process popularized by people like Itosu and Miyagi. It's a small system, with just 4 kata, and it aligns perfectly with what past masters wrote about the Ti/Todi of the past. It's something that I find incredibly interesting, and valuable to my understanding of karate, and yet it seems that almost no one is willing to even try learning it--they basically say they've never heard of it and ignore any opportunities to learn more about it. Motobu Udundi had a bit of a popularity boom back when Uehara Seikichi began teaching and demonstrating it publicly, but you will be hard-pressed to find people teaching it, today. Even when people have heard of it, they seem to see that it doesn't really resemble karate and decide to ignore it. To'on-Ryu is a sister art to Goju-Ryu, and yet I rarely hear any Goju-Ryu practitioners talk about studying it. Kojo-Ryu essentially died out for a brief period of time, and now there is a bunch of political conflict surrounding it, but it's still an old and rare system, and yet people seem content to let it live in Mark Bishop's books and nowhere else. Have you seen a drop-off in interest when it comes to rare systems and material? What are your thoughts on why this might be happening, or how we can promote these systems and material to help prevent them from dying out?

I didn't get the same impression that you did regarding the terminology. The way I read it, he's very specifically talking about terms used to refer to karate, and the fact that bugei, while it has existed in the Japanese lexicon for a long time and has been used to refer to martial arts, has not historically been used to refer to karate. Instead, karate has been almost exclusively referred to as a budo (bearing in mind that karate, as a term, only really existed after 1905, and wasn't mostly-universally adopted until 1936), with a few exceptions prior to 1936 where it was referred to as karate-jutsu, specifically. I also tend to think that the "apologist" bit is mostly just encouraging people to ignore insults and understand that karate doesn't have to be about fighting. The way he words it suggests that karate has never been about fighting, which I would not say is strictly true, but I would say that during the lifetime of the art under that name that has definitely not been the most important aspect of it for quite some time. A great many Okinawan masters have said, time and time again, that they consider karate to be a budo, and that the most important thing about karate is how it improves character and health. Even Itosu pointed out that it didn't have to be purely for self-defense.

There are very few companies offering embroidery that only shows up on one side of the belt, which is necessary in order to put different embroidery on both the front and back of both ends of the belt. I've never actually seen a belt that was embroidered on both sides like that in real life, but I have seen some examples online. Most were either the exact same embroidery on both sides so that they don't have to worry about which direction they put their belt on, as Bob suggests. Some had Japanese or Korean on one side and the English translation on the other. That's all the examples I can think of. It's very much not a typical practice.

Thank you, everyone, and congratulations to all the other winners!

I haven't tested on Okinawa, but I know plenty of people who have, and their experience mirrors yours. All of my testing has been in the US, and so they have been pretty intense ordeals. Many Americans in my old organization would actually do two tests if they wanted to test on Okinawa; an easy test on Okinawa, and a real test back home after the fact to essentially validate the grade. The Okinawans really don't consider shodan to be a big deal, and many Japanese instructors are the same way. It's not uncommon for kids to join karate clubs in school and have a shodan within 3 or 4 years. More intense testing tends to be reserved for teaching licenses, like a Shihan license or Menkyo Kaiden. The ranks aren't all that important, by comparison. In the West, the importance of these ranks was inflated when soldiers came back from 6-18 month deployments on Japan or Okinawa with shodan, nidan, and sandan ranks (with the expectation they would return regularly for training). Those soldiers set up shop teaching, and they needed a way to keep their students long enough to make those return trips, so they added more belts, or more time required between them, or extra material they could test them on. This also made the soldiers-turned-instructors seem more impressive, because they managed to get these ranks in record time, by comparison. We then entered the "blood and guts era" of Western karate, where being hardcore was the goal. It wasn't until the 80s, I believe, that ranks did a 180 for the purposes of making money, which has caused a strange dichotomy within Western karate when it comes to rank. On the one hand, belt mills and McDojos are common. On the other hand, a lot of the "blood and guts era" instructors still have legacies of more hardcore testing practices in many schools.

My answer is sort of bittersweet, I think. I would like to go back and relive my Shodan phase, for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that my late Sensei was still alive and in good health, and I would love to have all that time to learn from him again. I would ask so many more questions, and workshop so many more things with him. There's also the fact that, for a long time after getting my brown belt, I just figured I would never actually earn my Shodan, both because I didn't really see it as very important and because I didn't think I was good enough.

Welcome back, and thanks for sharing! It looks quite similar to some of my karate material.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

One of the requirements I have for my students going for black belt is to go learn a kata/form from some other style and learn or develop applications for it. I have taught kata to people from other styles on a number of occasions, as well. My only real caveat is that I would prefer them to be at least an intermediate level in their core style so they have a foundation to work with.

I'm not fond of the term "master," at all, because it's such a loaded term in martial arts. In other disciplines, "master" level means that you are an expert, certainly, but in martial arts, people seem to feel like "master" means you have learned all there is to learn and are as good as it is possible to be, and that just isn't the case. That's why I tend to only refer to people as masters of an art until they have reached a truly remarkable level of skill and understanding, and usually have trained up to 8th-10th Dan (legitimately), or passed away. That said, some people do reach a level like that at a much younger age and lower rank. Shimabukuro Eizo of Shobayashi-Ryu, for example, was the youngest person to be promoted to 10th Dan at the age of 34, and his peers at the time all agreed that was a legitimate ranking. My late Sensei was only a 5th Dan when he passed away at the age of 32, but most in the organization agreed he had the skill and understanding of a 7th or 8th Dan already, so if he wasn't already a master, he was well on his way. Kano Jigoro founded Judo at the age of 22, and many would consider him to have had a master's level of skill and understanding to do that.

Personally, I would treat it as an extra test, which is how my late Sensei and his Sensei treated promotions done while visiting the Shorinkan honbu dojo on Okinawa. Basically, if a student wants to test at a camp or while visiting another dojo, they can do that if they're eligible, but only AFTER they've been tested in my dojo first. I know that may sound a bit odd, but my late Sensei and his Sensei had higher standards than most in the organization, and I try to do the same, so a test with other instructors probably wouldn't cover everything that it should.

I'm also not a Shotokan practitioner, but I did get my start in a style that was largely based on Shotokan basics and I've done a fair bit of research on the development of karate. The practice of those sorts of basic drills (along with kumite) was taken from Kendo, where they use a stance very similar to a han-zenkutsu-dachi. When Shotokan co-opted those sorts of drills, they expanded the stance just as they did with all the stances in their kata, which they did do in order to emphasize leg strengthening in the absence of proper hojo undo.

I would clarify that a big reason for the discrepancies in kata curriculum in Shorin-Ryu is because Shorin-Ryu is a fairly generic name chosen to honor the Shaolin Temple, and the branches of Shorin-Ryu don't all share the same lineage. Of the 4 main branches of Shorin-Ryu, only one of them was a senior student of Itosu, and that's Chibana Chosin, who founded the Kobayashi branch. Kyan Chotoku, who founded Shobayashi, trained primarily with Matsumura Sokon and Matsumora Kosaku. Nagamine Shoshin, who founded Matsubayashi, trained primarily with Kyan and Motobu, which does put him in Itosu's lineage, but I wouldn't say he was a student of Itosu. Hohan Soken, who founded Matsumura Seito, supposedly trained with "Nabi" Matsumura, and then picked up some material from Chibana after the moved back to Okinawa, which also ties him to Itosu, but not directly. They all have some crossover with each other, but they all also trained with several other people, besides their primary instructors, so there is no singular line of Shorin-Ryu that can be traced back to a source, whereas all Goju-Ryu comes from Miyagi Chojun, and all Uechi-Ryu comes from Uechi Kanbun.

My first dojo only used the old dipped-foam sparring gear, which you haven't pictured. When I started training with my late Shorin-Ryu Sensei, he allowed many different kinds of sparring gear, so what people used largely depended on their preference and if they were competing or not. Folks who wanted to compete usually bought the dipped-foam gear, because that's what was allowed for most tournaments, but eventually the WKF became popular and a lot of them switched to that gear. Personally, I have been using MMA-style sparring gloves, which are a bit more padded than the competition gloves you have pictured, since 2010, and that is what I have my students buy. They provide enough padding to negate any need for headgear, which I prefer people not use because it increases brain damage, and still allows for all the grappling that we do.

Welcome to the forums!

The training camps I attended with my old organization were just as you describe--everyone trained the same style, but covered different subjects. Admittedly, many of the sessions were just running kata as a group and getting some basic corrections, or practicing the formal partner drills everyone already knew. When I've run events like it, in the past, though, I've been sure to invite instructors from many different styles, that way it's a more diverse experience. Yeah, in my experience there is usually anywhere from one to three "keynote presenters" at events like this. In the camps I went to with my old organization, they were always high-ranking instructors they flew in from Okinawa, sometimes including the head of the style. When I've run similar events, myself, I have always tried to get at least one high-profile instructor to join the line-up, but I haven't been able to afford to fly someone in from Okinawa, so they've always been domestic instructors. Sometimes, I wonder how much that actually matters to people. In my old organization, they made a HUGE deal out of training with the Okinawans, and I'm sure a lot of people really do see them as being inherently better karateka than westerners. Personally, there are more westerners that I think are incredible people to learn from. I imagine there is probably something similar in BJJ with instructors who are from Brazil, as opposed to other places? If it was a gasshuku, chances are high that there were other sessions going on, but if you were brought to help your instructor, it makes sense that you would have spent all of your time with him. You probably wouldn't have been given a program, either, if you were there as an assistant. It's definitely odd that they wouldn't announce the sessions as they went, though, so maybe it was just a seminar for your instructor and they called it a gasshuku? At the gasshuku I just attended, for example, everyone who paid in advance to attend got a program with the list of scheduled sessions, but people who paid at the door didn't get that packet, and they also announced which sessions were coming up next at the end of each session.

Welcome to the forums! Those definitely look like Shureido sai, to me. The big indicators for me are the flat moto, thick yoko, and plain round tsukagashira. There is always the possibility that they aren't Shureido, of course, since there are no markings to definitively confirm it, but they sure look like my late Sensei's sai.

For those unfamiliar, "gasshuku" or "training camps" are a pretty common practice in karate, where folks get together for multiple days (usually a weekend, but some last as long as a week) to train extensively with each other. Usually, there are many classes taught by various instructors covering multiple different subjects over the course of the camp. I'm sure this is done in other martial arts, as well, though I'm not sure how common it is. Personally, I find that these events can be a great experience, for a number of reasons, but they can also be disappointing, which is why I wanted to bring it up. Recently, I've been planning a Gasshuku for my organization that will be next summer, I've been invited to many that have been and are about to occur this summer, and I just attended one this past weekend, so the subject is at the forefront of my thoughts. These events are great opportunities to network and make new friends in the martial arts, because you obviously all know that you have at least one thing in common. You get to workout and cross arms with new people and it's a fun time. The question is--how much do you actually learn? Many of these events are just glorified kata workouts and kihon (basics) practice with big names in your style. It's a chance to get your picture taken with high ranking people and say you trained with them, but how much value are you actually getting? I'm curious, for those who have attended events like this, did you find the actual content of the events valuable? Did you really learn much? What were your favorite sessions or instructors, and what made them valuable to you? What could have been done better? If you haven't been to an event like this, what do you think would make you want to?

My first dojo had one of the Iron Arm tools, and it was nice, but definitely not worth the price. Since then, I've switched to the taketaba (bamboo bundle) and tetsutaba (iron bundle), which are cheap and easy to make, and work very well for solo conditioning. Personally, I found the taketaba to be too light for me, but it's a good introductory tool--simply buy a bunch of thin bamboo and bind them tightly together at one end with twine, and you're good to go. The only issue is that you'll have to periodically re-bind the twine, because it tends to work itself loose. Tetsutaba can be a little more involved to make, but I like them better. Get a short length of pipe and a cap (iron, copper, or PVC, doesn't really matter) to use as a handle, then buy a pack or two of surveying flags and some epoxy. Attach the cap to the pipe, fill it with epoxy, strip the flags so you have a bunch of steel wire and stuff them into the handle. You can put small rubber bands around the wire bundle and move them up and down to adjust the tension/firmness, which is really nice.

I've learned a little basic Japanese, in addition to the Japanese terminology used in karate, plus some Uchinaaguchi. I think it would be really cool to learn Uchinaaguchi and help preserve the language, but it's incredibly hard to find courses on it because Japan nearly killed it, and it would almost never be useful in day-to-day life. Japanese is much more widely used, but not where I live, so until I visit Okinawa, again, I wouldn't have much opportunity to use it. I do think that learning the language of your martial art does provide additional insights into the culture, though!