In search of a living karate

Had fun training yesterday with my friend Andrew. After going through my usual warm-up routine, somehow or another we got into doing bunkai. Andrew has some experience with martial arts (I believe it was some style of karate) so he knew about the kata and the basic "blocks" and "punches". So I shared with him some of my recent knowledge gleaned from Iain Abernethy (mostly from his "The Basics of Bunkai" articles) about the "age uke" (rising block), the "shuto-uke" (knife hand block) and a particular sequence of movements from the "Pinan Yondan" kata. And we talked about how a "block" isn't necessarily what it says it is. Same with a "punch" or a "kick". Then I talked to him about how important I thought it was to understand what Patrick McCarthy calls the "contextual premise" of the kata, which is the HAPV (Habitual Acts of Physical Violence). I whipped out my little black book of karate notes in which I wrote down the "36 acts of physical violence" and recited it to him. From there we used one of those acts (single lapel grab) as the basis for executing the "rising block". One particular movement that Andrew said he could never figure out was the gedan uke (lower block). So using some of the principles of body shifting and weight distribution found in the "stances" as well as the function of the "hikite" (pulling hand), we experimented with how the "lower block" might actually be applied (which began to look less like a "block" and more like a set-up for a strike of some kind). I write all of this just to say that I found myself to be genuinely excited about what we were doing. It was actually "fun" to think about possible applications for kata movements. And in realizing that I was having fun (and when I say "fun" I mean to say a genuine excitement in learning, not mindless and haphazard), I realized that a "living karate" lies somewhere within this realm of literal hands on experimentation. I think the modern pedagogical approach to karate results more in"conformity" rather than "proficiency". The rote repetition of "basics" (at least my understanding of it as blocks, punches, kicks), while certainly great for conditioning the body, has more to do with producing a kind of industrial-model "one-size-fits-all" karateka rather than a "free, creative martial artist". I think that has much to do with the introduction of this art to the Japanese in the late 19th and early 20th century; a country that was transitioning from the feudal era into the industrial era. From what I can remember in my readings, the Japanese martial arts establishment at the time looked down upon this raggedy looking martial practice from Okinawa and sort of "forced" them into adopting a more streamlined approach and look. Thus resulting in the belt/ranking system, the white pajama uniforms, and even the mindset towards training (which again I think was more about making sure you conformed to the status quo through martial-sounding things like "discipline of character"). It was that Japanese need for "pounding the nail that sticks up" in order to have harmony in the society. I don't believe it's necessarily good or bad that these things occurred. But I do believe that learning karate in that way is less "fun" and more "dead". There's nothing alive to me about endlessly repeating what everyone else does in the dojo so that you can look like everyone else. There's nothing exciting to me about winning a trophy in a tournament for doing a kata that everyone else knows, except that you did yours "better" (and those standards are arbitrary man). What is exciting to me is the act of acquiring serious martial skills that deal in the realm of "life and death" rather than "winning or losing points". I mean, I think tournaments/competitive events are great and they have their place in the society, but I think the practice of doing modern karate today is like cleaning and polishing and holding reverence for a realistic looking prop gun. That's not to say it's a bad thing; I don't necessarily think people who practice kendo today need to go back to the samurai days and carry an actual sword around with them (while that may make sense in war on a battlefield, I don't think it makes sense in peacetime around the city or neighborhood). What I think makes Okinawan karate so adaptable for today's modern world is that, as far as my understanding goes, it was not created for use on a battlefield to know how to take a person's life. It was created for means of "civilian self-defense" in order to counteract the aggression of someone engaging in habitual acts of physical violence (which had the risk of death of course). Battlefield use and civilian use have very different meanings to me: the former connotes more of an ideological/willful intention to do violence; the latter connotes more of like the violence an animal might employ to get themselves out of a life-threatening situation. This is gonna sound off-topic but stay with me here: I think the industrial-model of societal organization has had the effect of making us "soft" or "non-gritty". There's no balance with the "hard" or "grit". We no longer till the land for vegetables, we buy them in bags at a grocery store. We no longer catch and kill the animal for our food, we buy it wrapped in plastic on a foam tray. While life certainly has been made easier by this model, I think it leaves us humans lacking in "what's real". And I'm certainly not saying I have lots of experience with what's "real" (I'm a middle-class Asian American kid from the suburbs), but I can sense that modern martial artists (myself included) are sort of toying around in the dojo with an idea or assumption of what violence is (I mean it's like you might as well sit at home in a Hawaii Chair™ while playing the 2D version of Karateka). But to acquire skills in something that is real (facing violence) and is guided by profound spiritual principles to help you see the web of interconnection that we all share (thus promoting a profound respect for life) not only seems "fun" to me but necessary in the 21st century. 

Elbow SMASH.
-Hiji Até