24fightingchickens

Thank you guys. I appreciate the compliments, and I am glad to have been of service to you. Yes, I am a professional writer who has been doing Shotokan for more than 25 years. I now am very interested in how I can apply my management and business training to Karate club operations while providing practical how-to advice for students and instructors to improve how we practice. The instructor training section is my focus right now.

I never suggested otherwise. I do expect people who studied other systems to start over from scratch. Then I let them grade as fast as they can. I don't agree. Dan grades must accept that their youth, speed and strength will fade over time and so should be developing their skills in other areas (assuming we're not talking about a strictly sport based system). If they're not improving in some way then, fair enough, they shouldn't expect to go up the ranks. Skill levels plateau after a couple of decades of training the same thing repeatedly with good coaching. After that, it's *all* downhill. Yet we keep awarding dan ranks to senior instructors despite the fact that they aren't able to do half the things they were able to do when they were 25 or 30 years old. Ranks don't equal skill to me. Kyu ranks are benchmarks for learning and improvement. The first dan rank is the final benchmark. After that, they mutate into representations of learning extra kata and phasing into an instructor. After 3rd dan, mostly they are awarded for having a lot of students or for tenure in the organization - or just as a reward for continuing to toe the line. OK. Do that. That's cool. I don't think it works. But you can make it that if you want. I think if someone earns a shodan, and they take a year off and you take it away from them, you're doing something that is more likely to drive people away than it is to accomplish anything productive. Imagine a college taking away your degree because you can no longer pass the statistics final exam. Can you? I can't. But I get to keep my degree. What's different about a Karate rank than a college degree. It isn't a license. It's a diploma for having taken tests and passing them. Just like a college degree. I personally think it is kind of mean to take someone's achievements away from them just to line everyone up in neat, tidy lines in a dojo. That seems very instructor-needs focused instead of student-needs focused to me. After all, wearing the belt - they aren't hurting anyone. And I doubt any instructor or engages in such a practice would ever be willing to give his rank up and go back to white belt if he was seriously injured in a car accident and had to take a year off. But if you want to do that, hey, give a whirl. People have been doing it for years. I think it usually just creates resentment more than it results in effective learning for the student, but I could be dead wrong. Hey, Mike, no one in this thread is talking about people coming from other systems keeping their ranks.

I would take up Goju-Ryu instead if I could go back in time and if some really good Goju was nearby.

That kind of thing happens all the time. When I lived in Japan, there was a young punk who used to constantly try to take my head off. He was a nidan in Goju-Ryu and had just joined the club. He was trying to establish himself and get ranked back in the dan ranks, and he thought taking down the foreigner would do the job. The first time he bloodied my nose, I let it go. Then it was explained to me by my seniors there that letting it go was a mistake in Japan. I had lost face, and to get it back, I had to take him down. So, the next time we faced off, I winded him, grabbed him by the belt, and tossed him across the room. I didn't break anything on him, but he got bruised up a little. He got the message. Today, he is a yondan. Back here, I've seen students of mine do that before. Usually it is a brown belt and a black belt student sparring with each other. The black belt's ego is on the line, and the brown belt wants to score on him for bragging rights. The brown belt goes too hard, and the black belt is a little over-sensitive. Usually this happens between two very competitive people. I think there is a mild mental illness that Karate experts suffer from sometimes which causes them to believe it is impossible to lose to someone they outrank, and they are willing to escalate the contact levels and intensity to prove that point beyond appropriate levels. So, it sounds like you dealt with it OK. I would make them to practice sparring each other without getting upset and make them face each other again and again until it was clear they were over their original spat. In Japan, this kind of thing is usually handled with violence. If you go after one of the good old boys over there and it looks like you might win, the chances are very, very high that the old boy will pop you in the face really hard or ignore your points and try to take a cheap shot to teach you that it is unacceptable to defeat your seniors. I think that's poor behavior, but it is very common over there.

I think Shotokan is stagnant, and I think the leadership of the major orgs discourage creativity and the higher levels of personal development. I do not think that Shotokan as an instruction set for punching, kicking, etc is "ineffective." It is as effective as the individual doing it is able to make it for the purpose they have for themselves doing it. I feel I have studied a heavy-duty, intensive course on basic techniques and simple yet elegant kata as performance art with a heavy emphasis on point sparring. Where I have made adjustments are to my political entanglements. By ending my desire to obtain more dan ranks from people who would discourage me from expanding my horizons or getting creative, I basically pop the bubble and free myself to explore what I like. The dan ranks are what hold us captive. If you let go of your desire to get one, you can pretty much reach out, as Nakayama wrote in his Best Karate books, to other styles. Look in his Best Karate books on kata. He lists the "free kata" available to experts. He lists Suparinpei, Seipai, Seisan, and other Goju and Shito-Ryu kata that you might possibly be interested in. Nowhere in his writings did he ever limit anyone to a fixed curriculum. He never said that we should only study Shotokan kata. Rather, he said, "This is the new way to teach karate." His book Dynamic Karate was released in Japan as Karate-do Shinkyoutei (A New Way to Teach Karate). I'm just doing exactly what he recommended. I did the 26 Shotokan kata, and now I'm practicing Seipai, Seisan, Shito-Ryu Sochin, Kosokun-Sho, Itosu Bassai-Dai, Matsumura Bassai, and Seienchin, just like he suggested was possible. That's my expression of HA = breaking away. Yours was BJJ etc, and that's cool too. What would be nice is if the Shotokan orgs would understand that at the higher levels, students are not students - they are colleagues. But there is a lot of resistance to that idea both in Japan and here at home. No one wants the likes of me for a colleague. They prefer to think of themselves as masters and me as a permanent student who toes the line appropriately. There are organizations out there that support you exploring other systems and doing interesting things with your Karate. For anyone who might misunderstand, I am not endorsing taking three years of Karate and then finding another martial art, although I am OK with that and support such decisions - everyone should enjoy their very short time on Earth. What I am specifically referring to in this line of thought is someone with 20-30 years of training no longer obeying "the rules" of which kata come first, which kata to teach, and maybe experimenting with creating their own kata. If people can learn medicine well enough in 20 years to become full doctors, then people can learn Karate well enough to become full experts in that same amount of time. Karate is NOT as difficult a topic as medicine.

I see. Then I totally agree with you, because in a perfect world, I would be the undisputed God Emperor of All Things and I wouldn't allow any of that (unless I wanted to do it).

I think one governing body would be a terrible thing! We wouldn't benefit from that at all. Rather, the governing body would have total control and everyone would have to certify with them. Thus, they would never have any motivation to give good service to club instructors or ever improve themselves. What we need is competition among various orgs. The more orgs the better. Competition gives organizations motivation to better themselves, because unless they perform, their members might leave and go elsewhere. Having the option to leave and go elsewhere is the only hand we have right now. Besides, if there were a single org in which all of these personalities had to work together, you'd have 20 lawsuits going on at one time between the board members and the company leaders over finances, elections to board positions, and other politics. Since there would be nowhere to go, the only option for achieving power would be lawsuits and internal power politics. Essentially, you'd be making a government agency. BTW, once the government saw that money coming in, you'd find national governments absorbing that function with the excuse that the power politics had to be stopped, and then you'd be working with the most incompetent group of people on Earth: the people in Washington. So, I'd rather just leave things the way they are and have options.

A great post! What's funny is that I actually prefer the Tekki to the "originals." I agree with you about the two Bassai kata. The really funny thing is Hangetsu. The Shotokan way of doing it isn't actually a new, modernized version. That kata still is practiced by Praying Mantis Gongfu in Southeastern China where it is called Four Gate Hands. It's actually very close to the original. The Seisan of Goju-Ryu is a pretty new creation - brought over to Okinawa in the mid 19th Century during the "2nd wave" when much of the Goju system was learned and developed on Okinawa. The Shorin system is the older of the two. Shorin and Goju actually capture a snapshot of Fukien's martial arts systems during different time periods. As you can see today, the Chinese have abandoned both methods and now move much differently. They have continued evolving, while the Japanese and Okinawans have worked hard to preserve what they knew for the future.

I think the basic focus of Shotokan has diminishing returns over time. The first year, it's great. The next, its good. After five years or so, you're not really getting as much from it. After 20 years, it's not really beneficial at all and you've plateaued, plus you've grown old enough that your learning curve has intersected with your declining potential due to age. Shotokan has spawned a lot of styles. One of the reasons for that, I believe, is because of the Japanese leadership's insistence on ignoring the fundamental principle of Karate known as Shu-Ha-Ri. Shu = Obedience Ha = Breaking away Ri = Leaving It is a Japanese slogan about maturation and growing up. Anyone who learns something new goes through these phases. At first, they obey, because they don't have a clue. Then they start to develop independence and think for themselves. Eventually, they pack their bags and strike out on their own. But in the Japanese Karate world, this process is artificially stifled. They offer advanced dan ranks to people for continuing to toe the line long after those people should have become more independent in their thought process and approach to Karate. So, in the early stages the dan rank system encourages people to continue training and struggling to improve, but later on in the higher ranks and later years of life, it actually encourages the opposite. It encourages people to not think creatively. Think about how Karate came to where it is. It was uncontrolled and the product of independent people. Matsumura didn't do the Karate of Sakugawa. He learned from multiple people and developed his own. As did Itosu, Aragaki, Azato, and other Okinawans. Each one went through this process. Shu, they learned, Ha, they began to change it, and Ri, they started creating their own kata and their own material. Today, instead of doing that, Japanese Karate systems encourage stagnation and reward it. Dan ranks are only awarded for repeating the same "official" content rather than for developing, changing, and creating. So, Karate has stagnated in many ways. The kata are now frozen in time, and they used to be living performances changed by each generation. There are exceptions, of course. Kata are performed in a more dance-like fashion today for competition, and people like Asai Tetsuhiko have created their own kata despite the new custom of never doing so. That last stage, Ri, is part of everyone's training that they miss out on at the 25-30 year mark. At this level, we feel that something is missing, and start reaching out to other systems and teachers, but our dan ranks reward us for coming home and toeing the line. Imo, we would all be better off if there were only 3-4 dan ranks and after that, we "graduated" and no longer earned ranks. There is something silly to me about a 60 year old man caring about getting a higher dan rank anyway.

Well, if it was a newcomer from another school of the same style, he probably would want to at least re-test him for the same rank to collect the certification and test fees again. Also it is a way of confirming the guy can be bossed around a little and will do what you tell him. If it was someone who had already opened a school with students that were paying fees back in to the association, then the chances of demotion go way down. In fact, your chances of having someone deny you a rank are inversely related to the number of annual test and membership fees your club generates. If you have 150 students, you can probably have your 5th dan mailed to you on request even in the Japanese-run associations. Even in a non-profit association, someone has to pay to keep the lights on, and a guy with a bunch of students under him who leave when he leaves has more pull than someone without. If I joined a Goju or Shito school, I'd be willing to tie on a white belt. If I was injured or if I took time off from training and my skills went downhill, I wouldn't be willing to do that in a Shotokan club. If I moved locations and they asked me to retest, I wouldn't agree to do that. I'd be willing to be assessed and watched, but I wouldn't agree to accept a lower rank from them. To me, Recognition of Rank is like you said. It's like having someone accept your degree. Somewhere an instructor ranked this guy and it's not my business to get in the middle of that and judge it inadequate. From another art? Sure. From mine with a few differences? No. I just won't let them have any rank that I have signed until they are doing things the way I want to see them. I don't even ask to see the suffer ticket.

I don't see any reason to take someone's rank away from them, either. I wrote an article called Recognition of Rank a long time ago espousing exactly the position you take above and even using the same line of reasoning. The reasoning behind removing rank seems to be: * I want my students ranks to represent their skills. Which doesn't work once you get old and your own skills go downhill and yet you receive another dan rank. Try convincing your instructor after he is seriously injured in a car accident to give back his rank and start over and see how he likes it. LOL! * I want the test fee money Usually the real reason, which is why I asked about cost But you have to remember that most martial arts instructors are a bit unreasonable, and there is always going to be some sort of compromise required to enjoy martial arts training. Few karate instructors are leading corporate executives with 200+ IQ's who are completely rational about everything they do. Most are blue collar guys or regular folks who just do what their own teacher did and don't really think about how to do things differently. They just assumed that every tradition has a good reason behind it and don't mess with what they believe works.

Much of Shotokan is still practiced by people who are members of organizations who derive their curriculum from Tokyo or who are trying to copy the curriculum in Tokyo in order to be "authentic." The problem is that the people in Tokyo do not see Karate as a fighting art. They see it as an exercise class that also instills some basic Japanese courtesy and values in youngsters. For them, it is basically a kind of exercise class combined with the Boy Scouts without the camping trips. They are more interested in learning how to be brave in the face of danger and recapture some of that dare-devil Samurai spirit than they are in learning anything effective in the street. Japan's crime rate is next to nothing, so most Japanese will never, ever hit anyone as long as they live nor be mugged, robbed, or involved in any sort of interpersonal violence. Thus, they really just don't care about the fighting aspect. It's irrelevant to many of them. They see Karate as physical suffering to learn self-control, discipline, and a great social/exercise activity all in one. In Japan the easiest places to find lessons are rec centers - right alongside yoga, dance, and basket weaving classes - or university clubs which are led by a teacher who did Karate as a youth and thinks it would be good for the kids to sweat and learn to behave. When I taught classes in Japan sometimes, I would often give explanations of techniques in terms of "You could take someone's head off with this, " and often I would find that people would later give me feedback that my style was a little offensive and violent, and could I please tone down the "American How To Be a Criminal" type training and focus less on effectiveness and more on how to compete move efficiently and prettily. So, I believe, except in the case of a few rare extremes in Japan, that the answer to your question is that there is no market in Japan for learning to hurt people or defend yourself. There is a dwindling market (Karate is on a huge decline there - they depend on overseas revenue to run Karate orgs in Japan) for spiritual/character training combined with exercise, competition/sport, and social gatherings. So, given that perspective, they don't have an interest in applications so much. Thus, they don't put it in their curriculum for Shotokan, and because of that, their affiliate clubs in other countries copy them and mostly ignore it except for the mavericks. If you really like applications, I recommend Shito-Ryu or Goju-Ryu. They are more Okinawan in flavor, more complex in some ways, and their training is less "I'm a tank with one cannon" and more "Feed me a wrist and I'm going to wrap you up in knots while I beat your face in." I've been training the Goju-Ryu and Shito-Ryu kata lately. They are very impressive, and by comparison, our Shotokan kata are kind of simplistic and obviously watered down or flashed up depending on the technique. What's interesting is that Goju and Shito folks seem to do fine in tournaments against Shotokan folks despite the fact that Shotokan is supposedly this small, elegant, efficient curriculum almost totally focused on tournament success.

To you. I do get bored doing that unless I am ramping it up with someone with similar experience who is skilled enough to compete hard without injuring me. It is not easy to find such people to spar with regularly. I don't think I agree with this one. Why do you think this is true? coming from a muay thai and judo background, I love infighting - you don't have to be at long range at all. IMO, the fight doesn't even begin until you are at that range. Because we are not discussing judo or muay thai. We are discussing Karate, and in Japanese Karate, sparring is done at long range, and the kata applications are the infighting techniques.

I don't think those guys know or care about the applications. When I trained in Japan for a couple of years, we practiced basics in order to make them efficient and pretty, we practiced sparring to learn how to score a point by punching safe areas (competition), and we practiced kata as pretty performance art. We never once did a single kata application the entire two years I was there. When asking about what a kata movement meant, the response was "Who cares? It just looks good." Keep in mind that Shotokan is the McDojo system of the various styles of real Japanese Karate. The JKA was the first commercial school opened with professional, paid instructors, and regardless of how athletic and talented many of their leaders are, the Karate they practice is almost purely sport Karate with makiwara and kicking bag thrown in for good measure. The other systems - Goju, Shito, Wado, are less so. They still cling to roots predating a consuming focus on tournaments. They perform their kata using Okinawan methods, and it's pretty obvious and easy to see the connection and source in Shorin and Goju systems back on Okinawa and thus back to Fukien, China. But when you look at Shotokan, what you see are two kata from Goju (Unsu, Nijushiho), kata made up by the Shotokan guys (Sochin and Meikyo), and 22 kata which are basically Shorin-Ryu kata with a lot of the movements changed to look almost more like kendo than Okinawan Karate (keeping hips at the same height, all steps have basically one technique with them, everything lined up pretty whether meaningful or not). Keep in mind that I say that as a person who's favorite kata is Shotokan's Sochin, and I've been doing that style for a long, long time. But there is no getting around it. The training I have received which is sourced out from Tokyo focused on technical purity, competition sparring, and competition kata performance exclusive of all other concerns. That's just what Shotokan is. Can it be used for self-defense? Certainly. You're just stuck with the "Whatever they do, hit them" defense strategy developed to an absurdly high level. I think a lot of people get over-focused on the applications, frankly. I find them fascinating from an intellectual perspective. They are fun to figure out and practice. But not superior. Just different stuff. There are plenty of guys trained in competition sparring who couldn't tell you a single application from Heian Shodan that wasn't blocking a punch followed by hitting someone in the stomach who can beat the ever-luvin' tar out of someone trying to hurt them - and have.

Unfortunately, you're right, but none of the folks I know do that. I don' think there is such a thing as a "master's rank." Above the 4th dan or so, in most organizations ranks are purely political. Shihan = teacher in Japanese. It is the kanji used to write the word teacher. You call others "sensei" personally, you refer to yourself as a "kyoushi" verbally, and you write "Shihan" when you are preparing legal documents. 師範 【しはん】 (adj-na,n) instructor; (fencing) teacher; model; (P) 先生 【せんせい】 (n) (1) teacher; master; doctor; (suf) (2) with names of teachers, etc. as an honorific; (P) 教師 【きょうし】 (n) teacher (classroom); (P) Shihan doesn't mean "master." Just teacher or instructor.