Why Traditional Karate Is Not Effective for Self-Defense

[exile]

My take (using Eyebeams' listing):

1. The One-Strike Kill

All this means is, each move is intended to either end the fight right there (usually via a strike to a vital area, like the throat, or inflicting an incapacitating injury, like a low thrusting side kick to the side of the knee), or to set up such a strike. What's wrong with that strategy?

2. Waiting for The Attack

Eyebeam's comment is exactly right. There's a ton of stuff out there looking over the whole body of Funikoshi's and Egami's writings and the writings of other masters of the early days. You were not expected to wait to take the first strike from someone who was giving every sign of launching an imminent attack.

3. On Stances
Karate, (along with several hard Chinese styles) employs some of the most ineffective stances in martial arts. Deep, low karate stances make you completely immobile; they plant you in one spot, making quick movements extremely difficult.

First of a series of misunderstandings about kata. A low stance isn't something to use in a fight. In a kata, a low stance is a kind of physical highlighting of a weight shift that's part of a fighting move. A deep back stance associated in a kata with a knifehand `block' is likely telling you, move your weight back as you pull the attacker's locked wrist with your or arm with your `chambering' fist to anchor him there while you deliver the disabling strike (posing as a block) to the neck or other exposed areas that your lock has set up. A deep front stance is telling you, project your weight strongly forward as part of the throw that the kata encodes as a block or a punch. If you read stances as markers of weight projection, as vs. static poses, it's a whole different story.

4. Karate as a Way Of Life Again, Eyebeams is right---this is just a red herring.

5. Spirituality and Meditation Right again. In A Book of Five Rings, Musashi Miyamoto is always reminding you to clear your mind of distractions and be conscious only of your enemy's movements, anticipating his actions. This sounds an awful lot like the meditative state that fencers, ski racers and tennis players attempt to reach during competition. Why is Mann quibbling about such an obviously useful practice?

6. Breaking Objects can Break You! So can doing MA, lifting weights, or walking out your door for that matter. But plenty of karateka and TKDist do breaks on a regular basis without suffering injury. There was a really good thread on the TKD forum a couple of years ago---wish I could find it---about the value of breaking as a way of quantifying your ability to generate and apply power. Thought it made a very good case for the practice, if trained under correct supervision...

7. The Kata Crutch I differ from Eyebeam here. If you teach students early on what some of the combat-effective bunkai of the kata or hyungs are, it gives them a much better reason to take them seriously as part of their training than just telling them `you have to do these because that's what we do and you won't pass your next belt test if you don't learn them'. There's a lot of contemporary experimentation with the ura waza of Okinawan, Japanese and Korean karate (aka TKD). Kata are encoded guides to very brutal, hard fighting techniques; they only fail to make sense if you disregard the advice of the very people who gave us the modern kata interpretations, like Itosu, who told us not to follow the children's kick-block-punch bunkai he worked out literally, but to recover the effective violence of the techniques he was deliberately, and explicitly, disguising.

Whatever Mann's point in writing this thing, his views reflect a number of what I think are common misconceptions about karate that lead people to give it far less credit than it deserves as a family of multi-range fighting systems.

 

[JasonASmith]

That' s funny, I have seen some bunkai for a few of the kata that we have been learning, and what I have seen is certainly brutal enough for me...
In regards to stances, I have seen my Sensei(and any of the Yudansha for that matter)
move into, out of, and through those deep stances with ease and grace...I guess that I am blessed with a set of superhumans for teachers...
As for me, I'll stick with my outdated, archaic, and ineffective form of Martial Arts, thanks...

 

[searcher]

This guys erks me to no end. I have seen some "traditionalists" pull of some things that are stiil mind-numbing to this day. He must have overlooked the fact that guys like Oyama, Gracie, and many other leaders in sport-based martial arts all studied traditional systems. They must not have thought them in-effective. Or am I wrong? And just how old does a system have to be to make it "traditional"? Two of the styles he mentioned are almost as old, if not older, then some of the traditional styles.

My suggestion for everyone is to not read this garbage in that it may make you an idiot like this guy. Thanks to all for letting me rant.

 

[exile]

Thanks to all for letting me rant.

Hey Jon---listen, ranting is good, if it's well done!

My suggestion for everyone is to not read this garbage in that it may make you an idiot like this guy.

You've got a point.

I liked especially your comment about Oyama. I know nothing about Mann, other than this essay, but if I had to bet, I wouldn't bet on him in a Mann vs. Oyama matchup under `reality-based' conditions (i.e., no rules whatsoever).

 

[Rook]

My take (using Eyebeams' listing):

1. The One-Strike Kill

All this means is, each move is intended to either end the fight right there (usually via a strike to a vital area, like the throat, or inflicting an incapacitating injury, like a low thrusting side kick to the side of the knee), or to set up such a strike. What's wrong with that strategy?

Some people take one-strike kill as an ideal, like you used here. That makes sense.

I think the authors mean one-strike as opposed to combos or chained sets. There is an spectrum between the one-strike kill theory attributed to karate and the chain-punch overwhelming theory attributed to Wing chun with boxing-style punches somewhere towards the supposedly wing chun side.

I should note that in the genuine traditional karate and wing chun, these things were not the focus. Traditional karate punches from the waist more to build up hip rotation power than to strike like that in all situations, and chain punching is a very small part of wing chun.

Many modern martial artists question the reliability of the supposedly traditional version and tend to opt for solid combos rather than counting on one punch knockouts or flurries that overwhelm people.

2. Waiting for The Attack

Eyebeam's comment is exactly right. There's a ton of stuff out there looking over the whole body of Funikoshi's and Egami's writings and the writings of other masters of the early days. You were not expected to wait to take the first strike from someone who was giving every sign of launching an imminent attack.

Agreed.

3. On Stances

Karate, (along with several hard Chinese styles) employs some of the most ineffective stances in martial arts. Deep, low karate stances make you completely immobile; they plant you in one spot, making quick movements extremely difficult.

First of a series of misunderstandings about kata. A low stance isn't something to use in a fight. In a kata, a low stance is a kind of physical highlighting of a weight shift that's part of a fighting move. A deep back stance associated in a kata with a knifehand `block' is likely telling you, move your weight back as you pull the attacker's locked wrist with your or arm with your `chambering' fist to anchor him there while you deliver the disabling strike (posing as a block) to the neck or other exposed areas that your lock has set up. A deep front stance is telling you, project your weight strongly forward as part of the throw that the kata encodes as a block or a punch. If you read stances as markers of weight projection, as vs. static poses, it's a whole different story.

If only we could convince the current crop of traditionalists of this.... so much ink spilled about the need for this stuff.

4. Karate as a Way Of Life

Again, Eyebeams is right---this is just a red herring.

Agreed.

5. Spirituality and Meditation

Right again. In A Book of Five Rings, Musashi Miyamoto is always reminding you to clear your mind of distractions and be conscious only of your enemy's movements, anticipating his actions. This sounds an awful lot like the meditative state that fencers, ski racers and tennis players attempt to reach during competition. Why is Mann quibbling about such an obviously useful practice?

It often is used to excess. Also, lots of people overestimate its use or can't do it right.

6. Breaking Objects can Break You!

So can doing MA, lifting weights, or walking out your door for that matter. But plenty of karateka and TKDist do breaks on a regular basis without suffering injury. There was a really good thread on the TKD forum a couple of years ago---wish I could find it---about the value of breaking as a way of quantifying your ability to generate and apply power. Thought it made a very good case for the practice, if trained under correct supervision...

I can see the use of breaking objects to teach correct alignment. However, some people make demos of breaking a focus - risking injury for no real reason. The other worry is people convinced that breaking a brick or a piece of wood is the same as breaking a bone or that the breaking demos convey an ability to injure an opponent sucessfully.

7. The Kata Crutch

I differ from Eyebeam here. If you teach students early on what some of the combat-effective bunkai of the kata or hyungs are, it gives them a much better reason to take them seriously as part of their training than just telling them `you have to do these because that's what we do and you won't pass your next belt test if you don't learn them'. There's a lot of contemporary experimentation with the ura waza of Okinawan, Japanese and Korean karate (aka TKD). Kata are encoded guides to very brutal, hard fighting techniques; they only fail to make sense if you disregard the advice of the very people who gave us the modern kata interpretations, like Itosu, who told us not to follow the children's kick-block-punch bunkai he worked out literally, but to recover the effective violence of the techniques he was deliberately, and explicitly, disguising.

There are so many threads on this that I don't think I should discuss the pros and cons here. There are lots of pros and cons for sure.

Whatever Mann's point in writing this thing, his views reflect a number of what I think are common misconceptions about karate that lead people to give it far less credit than it deserves as a family of multi-range fighting systems.

I think it reflects how karate and similar systems are commonly practiced more than how they should be or once were.

 

[exile]

chain punching is a very small part of wing chun.

That's interesting... I had thought it was more fundamental than that. Just goes to show, I guess, that you'd better keep an open mind about systems that you don't yourself practice.

Many modern martial artists question the reliability of the supposedly traditional version and tend to opt for solid combos rather than counting on one punch knockouts or flurries that overwhelm people.

I've always assumed that the 1punch/1kill slogan was really code for, make every move count maximally to end the fight. Don't let it go on, don't do a bunch of blocking and evasion, because the longer it goes on the more likely it is you'll get badly hurt. So what you're saying seems compatible with that idea---whatever you tactics are, your strategy should be, take this guy out ASAP.

If only we could convince the current crop of traditionalists of this.... so much ink spilled about the need for this stuff.

I think it's becoming a more widespread and accepted idea.

It often is used to excess. Also, lots of people overestimate its use or can't do it right.

There does tend to be a lot of mystification about it. But that's not just in MA. I was a downhill ski racer in the 1970s and the racers all thought this was the key to success. It definitely had its place, but people were treating it as though it were magic.

I can see the use of breaking objects to teach correct alignment. However, some people make demos of breaking a focus - risking injury for no real reason. The other worry is people convinced that breaking a brick or a piece of wood is the same as breaking a bone or that the breaking demos convey an ability to injure an opponent sucessfully.

Again, it gets mystified. But I've always taken breaking to be a way to train focus, and a way to kind of quantify you ability to deliver power over a given surface area.

There are so many threads on this that I don't think I should discuss the pros and cons here. There are lots of pros and cons for sure.

Yup!

I think it reflects how karate and similar systems are commonly practiced more than how they should be or once were.

Yes, and as Iain Abernethy, who's probably done the most to promote this approach to the katas in the MA than anyone else in recent times notes, a lot of the complaints about katas are correct, on the standard interpretations of their application.

But here's my gripe: before you sit down and write something like Mann did, you really need to make sure your `worst case' interpretation of the system you're criticizing has the strongest justification among the alternatives. By the time Mann's critique appeared, there was a big, rich literature on combat-effective bunkai for kata that he doesn't seem to have been aware of. It wouldn't have required a superhuman effort on his part to find out about it. Why go to the trouble of badmouthing something, rather than directing people who practice it towards its more effective uses? If someone is going to take as strong a position as Mann does, the burden of proof is really on them to show that their extreme negative take is the only one that the facts support, and Mann comes nowhere near doing that...

 

[Rook]

That's interesting... I had thought it was more fundamental than that. Just goes to show, I guess, that you'd better keep an open mind about systems that you don't yourself practice.

In the commercial schools, chain punching has become the central focus because it is flashy and to a certain extent effective in overwhelming less skilled opponents. However, wing chun actually has alot more stuff, including some deceptively good simultaneous block-strike stuff in their first set and some really interesting and rather complex chin na stuff in their third hand set. Alot of the people who are delving more into the history of the art before the Hong Kong mini-war with the Choy Lay Fat guys are finding that chain punching wasn't used all that much by the advanced guys.

I've always assumed that the 1punch/1kill slogan was really code for, make every move count maximally to end the fight. Don't let it go on, don't do a bunch of blocking and evasion, because the longer it goes on the more likely it is you'll get badly hurt. So what you're saying seems compatible with that idea---whatever you tactics are, your strategy should be, take this guy out ASAP.

I agree. I think the intent was that each of the movements has the potential to end the fight by itself. Some people tend to see this as a reality rather than an end-goal to be striven for (ie "its karate - we always kill with the first punch" - a certain karate sensei who shall not be named).

I think it's becoming a more widespread and accepted idea.

I do too, and I think that bodes well for the future of karate.

There does tend to be a lot of mystification about it. But that's not just in MA. I was a downhill ski racer in the 1970s and the racers all thought this was the key to success. It definitely had its place, but people were treating it as though it were magic.

I think it can be a useful supliment to training and I am only begining to learn it a little bit. However, some people use meditation to the point that it crowds out other training or don't really know how to do it themselves and can't really teach it, and it just becomes minutes of staring at the wall. (Yiquan guys are exempt from this criticism but karate guys aren't.)

Again, it gets mystified. But I've always taken breaking to be a way to train focus, and a way to kind of quantify you ability to deliver power over a given surface area.

Sure. My major complaint is that alot of people go around talking about how their ability to break dried bricks equates with bone-breaking power, which really simply is not the case. Some people have gotten a very false sense of their own lethality by seeing piles of bricks shatter before them.


[quoteYup! [/quote]

Yes, and as Iain Abernethy, who's probably done the most to promote this approach to the katas in the MA than anyone else in recent times notes, a lot of the complaints about katas are correct, on the standard interpretations of their application.

I've read his website and paged through one of his books in a store... he has alot of good ideas and that view of bunkai is starting to make a real comback. If it doesn't get sidetracked too much by either the Dillman crowd or various other pretenders to the throne, or shut down by other traditionalists, it could be very interesting to see how some of those people can fight in a few years.

But here's my gripe: before you sit down and write something like Mann did, you really need to make sure your `worst case' interpretation of the system you're criticizing has the strongest justification among the alternatives. By the time Mann's critique appeared, there was a big, rich literature on combat-effective bunkai for kata that he doesn't seem to have been aware of. It wouldn't have required a superhuman effort on his part to find out about it. Why go to the trouble of badmouthing something, rather than directing people who practice it towards its more effective uses? If someone is going to take as strong a position as Mann does, the burden of proof is really on them to show that their extreme negative take is the only one that the facts support, and Mann comes nowhere near doing that...

I think that Mann is criticising karate as taught. There has been a real brutal debate in traditionalist circles about what counts as valid bunkai and which interpretations are traditional. We have block-punch people, we have people with simple joint locks and armbars, then we have some people with more advanced ideas like Abernathy, and then there are quasi-esoteric nutcases like Dillman and there are some pretty intense discussions of who is teaching real tradition. Mann seems to have just looked at the most common tradition available and concluded it was the one that had the most valid claim to being "traditional" karate. It probably doesn't.

 

[Hand Sword]

It seems that is a problem. It's like the commercialized product is so widespread, and has gone on for so long, that it has become the model from which comparison is being made.

 

[exile]

In the commercial schools, chain punching has become the central focus because it is flashy and to a certain extent effective in overwhelming less skilled opponents. However, wing chun actually has alot more stuff, including some deceptively good simultaneous block-strike stuff in their first set and some really interesting and rather complex chin na stuff in their third hand set. Alot of the people who are delving more into the history of the art before the Hong Kong mini-war with the Choy Lay Fat guys are finding that chain punching wasn't used all that much by the advanced guys.

Ain't it always like that?! The more in-depth you get with the history of these things, the more you realize how much people outside the art (and probably a good many inside, too) are seeing the full technical content via a distorted mirror. We're drowning in information about the MAs, but the catch is, it's often very difficult to know what information is good and what isn't.

ISome people tend to [one strike/one kill] as a reality rather than an end-goal to be striven for (ie "its karate - we always kill with the first punch" - a certain karate sensei who shall not be named).

That's what I thought when I heard the phrase at the very beginning of my training. Took a while and a lot of reading to twig to the original intention.

I think it can be a useful supliment to training and I am only begining to learn it a little bit. However, some people use meditation to the point that it crowds out other training or don't really know how to do it themselves and can't really teach it, and it just becomes minutes of staring at the wall. (Yiquan guys are exempt from this criticism but karate guys aren't.)

When I ski-raced way-back-when, we used visualization and other techniques to go through the course in our heads beforehand, to try to get our bodies pre-programmed to the turning pace and optimal lines through the poles---this was particularly important in slalom. As I recall, we just treated it as another prep technique. Nothing magical... but I also remember a couple of books on meditation and `inner skiing' which got uncomfortably mystical in their language (`the mogul comes up to throw you off balance, but there is no you and the mogul passes encounters emptiness' etc etc.)

Some people have gotten a very false sense of their own lethality by seeing piles of bricks shatter before them.

It's can be nothing more than an ego-massage. But there's another factor too, I suspect: people really don't have any idea what effects their strikes would have in serious all-or-nothing combat. And mostly they're glad, quite rightly, not to have the opportunity to find out. But that question lingers... how hard am I really striking with this knife-hand? So there's a natural temptation to assume that the (usually) somewhat brittle board with handy inherent lines of weakness is some kind of substitute for a strike on an attacker's body... big mistake!

II've read his website and paged through one of his books in a store... he has alot of good ideas and that view of bunkai is starting to make a real comback. If it doesn't get sidetracked too much by either the Dillman crowd or various other pretenders to the throne, or shut down by other traditionalists, it could be very interesting to see how some of those people can fight in a few years.

That's my sense of his work too and others in that new movement. One thing I like about Abernethy is that he's extremely sensible, rational and balanced in his positions: so yes, vital points are good to go for if you can, but don't expect anything magical, and do expect that susceptibility to vital-point strikes is going to vary tremendously from person to person. As Kane & Wildner note in their book, some people don't seem to have any nerve clusters, and in a real fight, with massive adrenaline surges, people don't react to pain the way they're `supposed' to.

I think that Mann is criticising karate as taught. There has been a real brutal debate in traditionalist circles about what counts as valid bunkai and which interpretations are traditional.

Do you have any pointers to that discussion---karate magazines, on-line fora, that sort of thing? I'd like to see who's taking what positions in that debate...

We have block-punch people, we have people with simple joint locks and armbars, then we have some people with more advanced ideas like Abernathy, and then there are quasi-esoteric nutcases like Dillman and there are some pretty intense discussions of who is teaching real tradition. Mann seems to have just looked at the most common tradition available and concluded it was the one that had the most valid claim to being "traditional" karate. It probably doesn't.

Yes, that's one of the two major problems with the piece---it looks like he hasn't done his homework. One of the things about MA history is that it isn't `just' history; it also can have major technical payoffs in understanding what the intent is of the moves you're learning. Criticize away, but make sure you're not attacking a straw man. The other problem is the tone---no qualification, no sense that there might be another side to it---no caution; instead, this aggressive confidence and contempt for karate as a practical fighting art. Given all that, the intensely negative reaction to the essay people registered by people on the thread isn't particularly surprising.

 

[exile]

It seems that is a problem. It's like the commercialized product is so widespread, and has gone on for so long, that it has become the model from which comparison is being made.

The problem is... the economics of martial arts training are so different here than they were in Okinawa a hundred and fifty years ago, Japan eighty years ago and even Korea fifty years ago. The ethic is totally different. The Kwans in Korea didn't have large numbers of students and kid's programs and a you-pays-yer-money-and-takes-yer-choice approach to what was offered. Instead, you had relatively few, very dedicated students, strict discipline, no questions asked for the most part... and noone was making very much money. You can't do that in 21st c. America (or most other places in the west). You have a largely market-driven society where people treat education (including MA training) as ane economic transaction, period. MAs wind up being as commercial as anything else under those conditions...

 

[twendkata71]

Isn't that why all of these Korean,Japanese and some Okinawan instructors immigrated to the US. They found out that they could make money teaching. Wasn't really much for them to leave behind. None of the Korean,Japanese or Okinawan masters that came the the US could make a living teaching their art in their own country. The martial arts industry has made some of them quite confortable financially.
Sorry a bit off topic.

The problem is... the economics of martial arts training are so different here than they were in Okinawa a hundred and fifty years ago, Japan eighty years ago and even Korea fifty years ago. The ethic is totally different. The Kwans in Korea didn't have large numbers of students and kid's programs and a you-pays-yer-money-and-takes-yer-choice approach to what was offered. Instead, you had relatively few, very dedicated students, strict discipline, no questions asked for the most part... and noone was making very much money. You can't do that in 21st c. America (or most other places in the west). You have a largely market-driven society where people treat education (including MA training) as ane economic transaction, period. MAs wind up being as commercial as anything else under those conditions...

 

[exile]

Isn't that why all of these Korean,Japanese and some Okinawan instructors immigrated to the US. They found out that they could make money teaching. Wasn't really much for them to leave behind. None of the Korean,Japanese or Okinawan masters that came the the US could make a living teaching their art in their own country. The martial arts industry has made some of them quite confortable financially.
Sorry a bit off topic.

Yes, absolutely right. For a lot of people in those closed societies, you were going to be poor no matter what you did---there was very little social mobility---it was quasi-feudal there till quite late. The wealth and social openness of the West gave incredible opportunities to people who, with all their great skill and expertise, would have had very little comparatively speaking if they'd stayed. So the commercial side of it is in a sense the price we pay for having, in a lot of places, our choice of MAs to study.

I don't think anyone minds paying for instructions, and paying a lot for good instruction---that seems quite right (even if it makes the old master/apprentics system of traditional Asian training seem like something out of prehistory). What none of us likes is the idea that we might pay top-dollar for something that isn't very good---like paying for a Ferrari and finding that it's a lemon.

 

[twendkata71]

If I am going to train with someone, I do some background checking on that person and get some feedback from others that have trained with that person. No one wants to waste time or money.

 

[exile]

If I am going to train with someone, I do some background checking on that person and get some feedback from others that have trained with that person. No one wants to waste time or money.

Exactly---caveat emptor. Unfortunately, a lot of people going into MA for the first time don't really have a clue as to what the pitfalls are, or even that there areany. It's kind of catch-22: not until you're in the MAs for a while do you find out all the stuff that you really needed to know before you started. If you're buying a dishwasher, you can check Consumer Reports, if you're looking for a mortgage broker, there are ways you can check on their reliability... but if you're looking for a dojang/dojo/whatever, you're really on your own unless you're lucky enough to know someone who (i) really likes his or her school and (ii) has been doing MA long enough to know what's at issue in terms of instructional quality. An experienced MA does know where to look and who to talk to, but there are a lot of very uninformed or underinformed consumers out there buying pigs in pokes...

 

[eyebeams]

Strictly speaking, Ikken hissatsu ("one strike one kill") was a philosophy adapted from kendo, not native to karate.

 

[exile]

Strictly speaking, Ikken hissatsu ("one strike one kill") was a philosophy adapted from kendo, not native to karate.

That's true, no question---the sword art came first, and 1s1k came with it. But it's a logical strategy for any combat system whose general strategy is to control an opponent's movements and body position so as to set up a disabling strike. I take 1s1k to mean just this, that every action by the karateka either has the capacity to disable the opponent, or to force them into a response which will then allow the defender to disable them. This approach dictates, for example, that you have to reexamine the elements in katas which are labelled---and typically interpreted---as blocks. It will usually turn out that the blocking interpretation of the motion is unrealistic, and often makes no sense at all. Interpreting the `block' as a strike, or as a sequence of grappling moves cashed out as a strike, will in contrast often yield a very effective and practical response to an attacker's aggression. The same logic that makes 1s1k a very sensible approach in swordsmanship---the longer you let the fight go on the greater the odds you'll be killed!---applies in realistic combat situations.

There's an interesting article on the 1s1k concept in hand-to-hand fighting systems in the most recent issue of Black Belt, or maybe the one before that. I'm not a big fan of BB, but the analysis of 1s1k in this essay struck me as very plausible...

 

[Brandon Fisher]

If someone wants to equate breaking a brick or patio block with breaking a bone wiht a strike they are missing a key element to this theory. The human body has muscle!! To counter act this place a metro yellow pages phone book on top of the brick or patio block and then try to break it. Makes it a lot more difficult but closer to reality in my opinion. The power has to get through the phone book first just like muscle in the body.

Traditional Karate can be very effective if someone actually takes the time to learn how. This whole thing about it not being is ususally skeptics not taking the time to truly understand the techniques and methods.

 

[Hand Sword]

The problem is... the economics of martial arts training are so different here than they were in Okinawa a hundred and fifty years ago, Japan eighty years ago and even Korea fifty years ago. The ethic is totally different. The Kwans in Korea didn't have large numbers of students and kid's programs and a you-pays-yer-money-and-takes-yer-choice approach to what was offered. Instead, you had relatively few, very dedicated students, strict discipline, no questions asked for the most part... and noone was making very much money. You can't do that in 21st c. America (or most other places in the west). You have a largely market-driven society where people treat education (including MA training) as ane economic transaction, period. MAs wind up being as commercial as anything else under those conditions...

I agree. However, it can't be denied, the M.A's have changed because of this. Early on here, instructors had other jobs, so, they taught in a more pure manner. With the education available, jobs, and finances too, I feel The M.A.'s didn't have to go down the route that they have. There are still pockets of the "old" way. They are in the minority, though. The commercialised form is what most make their comparisons on. They don't know how it used to be. Bottom line, each of us could eventually teach, money doesn't have to be a factor, IMHO.

 

[exile]

I agree. However, it can't be denied, the M.A's have changed because of this. Early on here, instructors had other jobs, so, they taught in a more pure manner. With the education available, jobs, and finances too, I feel The M.A.'s didn't have to go down the route that they have. There are still pockets of the "old" way. They are in the minority, though. The commercialised form is what most make their comparisons on. They don't know how it used to be. Bottom line, each of us could eventually teach, money doesn't have to be a factor, IMHO.

This is dead right. I'm incredibly lucky, my instructor, a KKW-certified fifth dan in TKD, teaches a curriculum that's both deep and broad and which reflects the old Kwan-based fighting style, with its Shotokan roots and grappling components intact---and, not coincidentally, he has a `day' job which pays for his family's needs, while he teaches as a labor of love. As you say, this kind of situation is really part of the `traditional' MAs---the full-time owner/operator/CEO/chief instructor is a product of the times, but not a necessary model nor one we necessarily strive for. This doesn't mean there aren't full time MA entrepreneurs who teach out of love for the full integrity of their arts, but being in that situation puts you under pressure to go the McDoj. route, absolutely, and a lot of people will conform to that pressure.

 

[JBrainard]

Traditional karate should contain aspects the grappling art of Tuite, and Kyusho Jitsu, the study of vital strike points. Sadly, these are all but passed from the art.

Traditional karate - real traditional karate, is a most thorough self defence system. Alas, you would be hard pressed to find it.

I have never heard this. What ryu(s) encompas these aspects of karate?