Kempo 'karate'

[krypto]

Sensei8,

I think Toptomcat misread or misunderstood what we posted. As I posted before, I'm all for Kempo and TKD using the word 'karate' to sell their art.

[JohnASE]

I want to say "karate" is a Japanese word and using it to describe a non-Japanese art is wrong... but I can't. I don't think it is just a Japanese word anymore. Like others, I've seen Tae Kwon Do, Tang Soo Do, and even Hapkido schools with "KARATE" signs, but even newpapers and TV news programs use "karate" in much the same way. "Karate" has become generic. If the general population wants to use the word like that, I can get onboard.

Things aren't as clear within the martial arts community though. I'd be concerned about a TKD guy that would answer "Karate!" if another martial artist asked him which style he does. He should know better. Kenpo isn't a Japanese style, but they often call themselves Kenpo Karate. I have no problem with that. I know they're not a form of Japanese karate. Maybe they shouldn't have called themselves "karate" back in the day, but they did, so that's how they're known now. What are we supposed to do, insist that they be called Kenpo Wu Shu?

Blade96, I can understand how your sensei feels. He wants to protect Japanese tradition. If everyone calls themselves "karate", the word loses it's meaning, but the meaning has already changed. Of course, the Japanese language changes all the time, too! I remember one friend from Japan living here went for a visit after being gone for about a decade, and her old friends had new slang. She couldn't understand a lot of what they were saying. The funny thing was many of their new words were converted English words, but they were pronounced differently, so she didn't recognize them at first. She told them "No, that's not how you say it!" But, there, that was how you say it.

[Toptomcat]

I think rather than judging a martial art on a purely nationalistic basis it's quite fair to look into its history. If a majority of the style's technical syllabus comes from karate, its founders had a karate background, and it retains such recognizably karate-like pedagogical elements as the keikogi and kata, I have no trouble calling it 'karate' no matter how far it may have diverged in other respects- politically, geographically, or terminologically. A style is most essentially defined by its technical syllabus and pedagogical method, not its national origin.

If the most essentially defining attribute of karate is that it is Japanese, that means that a group of Japanese people with an exclusively Muay Thai background who open a martial arts school and call it karate have every right to do so. And that's nonsense.

[dantankun]

IMO at one point especially during the 50s and 60s the word karate became a household word and term anyone who trains in martial art is synonimous = karate.

So if kempo say kempo the public does not know what it is and think it is fake so they add karate.

This is prevelant especially for MA that are marketing it self commercially. But for private MA schools they don't use karate they use their own terms.

Many kung fu clubs don't use the word karate but the public always have an impression it is karate it would take the owners and practitioners of kung fu to educate the curious public that it is kung fu not karate.

On the other hand karate if written down in Chinese characters has an identical meaning in Japanese it is "kang chio to" (empty hand way ) It is only when the word "re pen" ( Japan ) is added that it becomes Japanese.

It is like Brazilian Ju Jit Su.

[Blade96]

Blade96, I can understand how your sensei feels. He wants to protect Japanese tradition.

Traditional Shotokanka, that is why, i think.

and what i hear most of is people saying about ma as 'its all kung fu' rather than 'its all karate'

and dont gimmie that 'they must have got it from kung fu panda' lol that movie is still pretty recent

[Toptomcat]

I think a big part of it is that the Japanese can't make a good unarmed martial arts movie to save their lives, though. It's not just 'Panda', it's that there have been an unyielding stream of Chinese martial arts flicks seemingly ever since the first dude in Hong Kong to get ahold of a movie camera. On the Japanese side there's 'The Street Fighter', and then for the rest of Sonny Chiba's movies they have very slick, well-executed choreography with a seizure-prone rhesus monkey behind the camera , and then other than that there's nothing besides maybe Kuro-Obi.