Yes those guys have done a great job as for as exploring what is there and making fit into there style of fighting but what about the traditional aspect do you see it in there everyday movements?
It's always a matter of what you think the core of the traditional aspect is—and that's in a sense really what I think your OP is about, Terry—but I do think that what these guys are doing reflects a true traditional view of the MAs. This is my thinking:
TKD and TSD derive almost entirely from a Japanese adaptation of what was itself a fusion, in 19th century Okinawa, between two 'folk' combat traditions, imported styles, probably family styles, of Chinese boxing, on the one hand and native Okinawan tuite methods (themselves probably rooted in family tradition and experimentation; we've actually had one or two very interesting posts about this side of the Okinawan arts, some time back). No seriously well-documented source I've ever come across takes these 'grassroots' combat systems to have had any purpose but personal self defense. There were people who were recognized as good fighters and skilled practitioners of these arts, in Okinawa; sometimes, if you were lucky, you could get the chance to train with one or two of these masters. We don't really know exactly what the training that guys like Matsumura and Azato themselves underwent when they were learning their skills, but very likely tough physical conditioning was part of it, mastery of a few forms, and a good deal of individual experimentation (as a way of extracting the combat value of those forms) were at the heart of it. You worked on stuff, showed up, your instructor probably posed some problem for you (what are you going to do when I attack you like this?) and so on. For some of the early karateka, Motobu and Chotoku Kyan in particular, pressure-testing was crucial enough to them that they actually went
looking for fights in the seedier parts of town (this is said to have gotten Motobu bounced from Itosu's classes).
Now if you look at the people I mentioned, I think there's an excellent case to be made that
their practices represent the key traditional aspect of the MAs that I've just been talking about, maybe better than any others. Like Matsumura and many of the other early masters, they've seen
plenty of real combat. They don't just learn forms, or perform them; they
study them and try to extract from them their combat content. Geoff Thompson's
The Pavement Arena, has a section on kata where he says,
... for the karateka wishing to pursue knowledge of self-defense, kata are a treasure trove of hidden techniques that can be adapted directly to a street situation.... while kata themselves may not be directly relevant to the street, indirectly they certainly are...
To the practitioner who wishes to use kata as a means of developing their mental powers, I advise that they learn the correct bunkai of each technique within their chosen kata. Visualizing kata entails using the techniques on imaginary opponents. If you do not know what the moves mean or represent this becomes an impossible task.
(pp. 62–63). And Thompson, echoing Abernethy, provides some nice, robust, practical applications of familiar kata movements. Like the BCA types, he's a high-ranking karateka—Consterdine, who was a bouncer and club security guy in Manchester for nearly a decade, is an eighth dan and was Team England international competitor—but grounded in street reality. The important point is that, as he says, 'My own kata search brought me much enlightenment as it showed me that
karate lacks very little if viewed from the correct perspective.
That kind of perspective, the one he's talking about, is, I'd argue, the core of the original TMA tradition that we're all looking for. Small-scale instruction; patient and independent thinking, by both instructors and students, about the techniques and their application: realistic fighting scenarios... to my way of thinking, this is far more traditional than the dojo etiquette and other invented traditions shaped by Japanese militarist culture in the 1920s, of the sort discussed in Stephen Vlastos' excellent study
The Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (1998: University of California Press). A lot of those invented traditions have been taken over whole into a North American culture to which they have no organic connection (I'm not talking about fundamental values such as respect for one's teachers or courtesy towards one's fellow students, but the rituals and forms which are supposedly part and parcel with these attitudes... but that's a separate thread topic, probably). My own take is that in mining the kata for fighting techniques and possibilities which they then apply to their own combat experience, and teach to their more advanced students, the chaps I mentioned are much
closer to the founders of the modern karate-based arts than much of the intervening development, guided as it was by Funakoshi's mass instruction methods, and the compliant sparring-based training which came to dominate karate after him.
And I think that what I'm saying about karate here applies to
all the karate-based arts, including (and, from where we're standing, most importantly) TKD and TSD.
and saying, what does traditional mean. Lets cut back to those days of traditional karate, and see what, from this day and age, stands, and what falls. But I digress, because without change, how will things ever get "sarcasm" better.
