This is only anecdotal, I was told it years ago but it ties in with the secret pact that Exile was talking about, I have found no basis for it though perhaps other can. I was told that at the end of the last war when Japan was occupied by the Allies many Allied soldiers, Americans in particular became interested in karate. The Japanese instructors made a point of teaching them as little as they could and what they did teach was suitable for, in their eyes, only children. This is why we punch when doing Junzuki with the palm facing down when it should be palm facing to the side, a more lethal punch. It's also why we do kata without knowing why! It seems the Japanese instructors just told the Western students that Japanese students don't question the instructors and all would be revealed at some mysterious future when the student was 'ready' for the magical techniques. Of course with the Western students that time never came but they had gained a fair knowledge and this was what they took back to the States. I'm not so sure about the UK as I believe there were few British troops in Japan at the time.
As I said, I have no basis for proving if this could be true but in light of Exiles post it sounds very feasible.
This is very interesting, Tez, because it ties in with something that Rob Redmond has in one of his essays at his 24FightingChickens Shotokan web site (very heartily recommended, btw!) Redmond isn't professional MA historian, the way Dakin Burdick, Stanley Henning and Harry Cook are, but he's very well informed on Shotokan history and has spent a good deal of time in Japan observing the local MA culture there. What he writes in that essay—can't remember off the top of my head which one it is now, I think it's the one of Funakoshi—is that at the end of the war, karate was one of the prospective targets on the American's list of things to suppress as part of their demilitarization program for Japan. Funakoshi was well aware of this and through his senior students and his own contacts with US military personel, initiated a kind of charm offensive which had the goal of depicting karate as an autere tool for perfecting character in the service of peace—this from a man, as Redmond notes, stated in one of his books (Tote Jutsu) that `War is a method which God gave humans to organize the world'. Now clearly, it wouldn't do any good for this (ultimately successful) effort to save karate from the chopping block to refuse to teach American military personel who wanted to learn karate; that contact with such personel would have been a powerful inducement to allow karate to continue to be taught in Japan. On the other hand, given the the considerable ongoing hostility towards the American occupiers—agents, after all, of a power which had humbled the shame/honor-based `mother country'—it also seems very unlikely that the Japanese would be interested in giving away any more than was absolutely necessary to the Americans, just as the Okinawans were apparently determined to give nothing away to the Japanese. At each stage of the game, the knowledge, technical content and depth of application get progressively more diluted...
Exile I think you will enjoy that book, it's by far my favourite martial arts book. I read it regularly as it takes a long while for me to take in what he writes, especially the equations! Imagine them in kata! He can also show you far better than I Wado Ryu.
I'm looking forward to it very much, Tez—thanks again for the tip!