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Returning to Creativity in Karate November 11, 2005
Rob Redmond
If you were raised on Okinawa, and your parents had a friend who was a master of the martial arts, they might ask him to teach you his methods so that you would grow up strong and secure in yourself, especially if you were from the noble class. When you first began studying, you would have been taught the basics, and your teacher and perhaps one or more of his friends might have offered you instruction while you were coming along from novice to intermediate levels. At some point, your instructor might suggest that you seek out this other master or that one so that you could learn about their methods and their particular specialties. Your instruction would become a bit eclectic, and your teachers would eventually either approve or disapprove of the direction you were taking, but the direction you took would be your own.
Eventually, you would strike out on your own, and perhaps, if you had the right kind of job and the money for it, you might find yourself on a boat to Fuzhou City, China to do business. And while there, you might seek out additional instruction in Chinese systems from local instructors there that were recommended to you. This might heavily affect your methods of practice and further broaden your horizons. Are you still doing what your teacher taught you? It would depend on what you adopted and what you rejected from all of the things you were shown.
At some point you might find yourself significantly advanced enough to begin experimenting and creating your own combat methods. You might create your own kata, your own techniques, experiment with stances, or rearrange the way you chose to teach particular things. You would now have total ownership of the martial art that you practiced and be fully responsible for it.
Should we only learn to play the existing classical music?If I can make an analogy to music, you would have started out learning to place the scales, strike chords, and position your hands properly. In time, you would learn some simple and easy tunes. As you progressed, you would learn more and more complex songs. You might even take your instrument and use it to play songs from other styles of music instead of sticking to the classical style you were shown. Eventually, most musicians compose their own tunes, share them with each other, and come up with new music which is wonderful to listen to. This is the process that has powered humanity’s understanding of music to develop new instruments, technologies, and styles which have led to such a dramatic diversity of music to listen to that appeals to all tastes.
Today, karate is not practice or taught this way. Instead, students are asked to obey the rules from the beginning, and even when they are in the highest levels of possible skill, they are still asked to follow the same rules. Some even pride themselves on “preserving karate’s highest tradition,” meaning that they see themselves not as inventors, developers, researchers, thinkers, philosophers, or artists, but rather as human storage devices in which something valuable is preserved intact for all time.
The irony of this, of course, is that karate’s highest tradition is change and development. Karate is mutated dramatically over the years. Most of the artifacts of our practice today come down to us from relatively recent times. The belt system was adopted from Judo in the 1920’s, and was last revised last Wednesday. The uniforms are also from Judo, and were adopted in the 1920’s. Many of our most popular kata, such as Sochin and Unsu, were taken from the Shito-Ryu style of karate in the late 1930’s and the period following World War II. Our famous books which define how the art should be taught date back no farther than the 1960’s, and the first book on the topic back to 1920.
Can a musician not be classically trained and still compose new music in the classical style?If we look at videos of tournaments from the 1960’s and compare them to the videos of our most recent events, we see large, dramatic changes in how they are conducted and the techniques used. Compare all of this to films of the first experts in the 1950’s sparring each other experimentally, and you find that even in the ten years following the time those films were made, karate changed dramatically. Change was rampant in karate. Then, at some point, the changes became more subtle and the methods we used, instead of being principles that anyone could learn and apply for his own use, became codified as sacred and immutable. The culture of change was replaced with a culture of conformity, and the previously esteemed karate experimenter is today considered almost as if a blasphemer and laughed at for simple things such as teaching karate without using Japanese terminology or practicing without wearing a karate uniform.
This is one of Japan’s contributions, if I can call it that, to the karate that they imported from Okinawa and made their own. The Japanese took what used to be a changing art of fighting which was not merely refined but overhauled from one generation to the next and institutionalized it using their cultural preference for conformity. My observation is that the Japanese are very fond of conformity, and they endow their processes and institutions with artifacts which encourage conformity. More important to a karate association in Japan than good karate is “the same karate” performed as well as possible.
The Japanese, rather than question an existing practice or invent a new one, will pride themselves in their application of a principle they call “kaizen”, the evolutionary refinement and improvement in a practice through gradual, subtle steps that avoids major change. This allows the Japanese to take a radio and reduce it in size every year until it is so small that it can barely be operated by human hands. However, this focus on importing ideas and then refining them has left the Japanese with limited preference for coming up with their own ideas or chucking ideas out the window when they are obviously not working as well as another idea could.
Does the composition of new classical music that is of poor quality diminish the playing of classical music or the people trained to play it?Karate practices suffer from this emphasis on refining in the name of conformity to a huge degree. The Japanese have taken what used to be a nearly endless supply of karate kata on Okinawa, each a collection of the preferences of individuals, and they have reduced that enormous body of knowledge down to a subset of its original size, named it Shotokan, and have boxed it up and offered it to their students as a prepackaged kit that it is considered unacceptable to part out or mix and match with other kits. Take a look at the kata list that appears in Funakoshi’s first book, Ryukyu Karate Kenpo. In that book, he names many more kata than the 26 that are performed today. Then take a look at the last translation of his book Karate-do Kyohan. There the list is reduced from more than 30 to merely 15 kata, and there are many statements throughout about how these are all of the kata that are needed. That statement, originally intended to comfort those hoping to master karate by learning many different kata, has become a dogmatic belief for some which means that studying more than those 15 kata should practically be prohibited. This is all part of the Japanese tendency toward reductionism, sparse elegance, and conformity.
The vague and infinite body of kata created on Okinawa and modified there after being learned in China has become a limited list. And the Japanese have gone a step farther by ordering the list such that the kata appear in order of difficulty or sophistication. This list is considered the set of approved kata that associations will teach their students. If it is not on the list, it isn’t Shotokan. If it is on the list, then it must be OK because it is approved.
This list of kata is enforced by karate associations through their examination content and their tournament requirements. Students of karate are rewarded through rank promotions for learning and regurgitating only a particular subset of the available karate kata, and only in a particular order. The same rules exist in Shotokan tournaments, where kata competitions require the players to know particular kata and to be able to perform them as expected on demand.
Has not classical music been enhanced and improved by the addition of new classical style pieces? The work of John Williams?This sort of limited subset of requirements might be useful for novices, but not for the very advanced. As we advance from our first day of class day by day until we are very knowledgeable and experts in our own right, at some point we no longer benefit from this sort of intrusive parenting and limiting of the subject matter. We would benefit more from freely exploring what we prefer to learn from others more. So, why do karate associations continue, even in the very high ranks, to deny members the ability to perform kata in tournaments and on tests that are not on the institutionalized list? Because it is important to them that everyone look the same.
“If everyone does their own thing, then how will the karate association possibly work?” I have been asked by members of such institutions emanating from Japan. Well, take a look at just about every karate association outside of Japan and you will have your answer. The single style organizations are far smaller in scope and capability than the many multi-style organizations out there. They manage to operate just fine. I see no reason why a karate association could not operate normally with a population of members who have diverse methods.
The implementation of creativity back into the karate curriculum is not too difficult. Simply encourage students who have achieved black belt level to begin attempting to create their own kata as well as learn kata that others have created. I do not suggest that we stop learning karate kata that come down to us from the past. What I would like to see is the harnessing of all of the tens of thousands of karate experts out there who are currently doing almost nothing creative and have them contribute to the human body of knowledge of karate.
What other field of study tries to preserve things the way they are by ignoring historical discoveries and discouraging creativity?In almost any other field of study, people either study documents and investigate to get a more accurate picture of the past, or they experiment, invent, and express themselves freely in brainstorming to build new knowledge in the future. Shotokan’s culture seems to me to include neither of these principles of expanding the body of knowledge. Instead, we memorize our techniques, memorize our kata, and learn a very, very narrow and limited form of sparring, and then we just repeat it over and over again into eternity hoping to come to some insightful, experience-based furthering of our understanding of how to get another micron of performance out of our bodies. This is extremely labor intensive, time consuming, and frankly, having done it for decades, I can report that I think it is boring.
For at much lower cost and with much higher benefits we could begin to create to material from which we could learn, but in order to do that, we must be comfortable with “graduating” our karate students. This is absolute heresy in the karate community, where it is politically correct to stay students who feel the samurai loyalty to our sensei as if he were a daimyo sitting in a castle able to order us to slit our own stomachs open. But I believe that our success lies in doing what every other field of study on Earth does: allow students to reach a level that is “enough” and graduate them so that they will now own their knowledge and begin putting it to use instead of growing old and dying while in graduate school for the rest of their lives.
In an article called The Jefferson Karate Club, I offered a way to structure a karate club such that the students of karate are separated away from the experts, and the experts are then free to participate in an open club in which there is no defined leader and knowledge is exchanged honestly and in a rotational fashion. I believe this club structure facilitates the use of creativity at the black belt level.
What if we had decided back in 1960 that only existing music should ever be learned or played, and nothing from before 1930 should be considered valid music either? It would be a permanent Lawrence Welk Show.In an article called Practical Karate Tests, I presented an alternative to the current karate examination process, and I endorsed adopting the requirements system used by the Boy Scouts for handing out ranks for karate. The student of karate would fulfill requirements on their own time-table, and thus would find themselves in ownership of their training from the very beginning, rather than dependent on their sensei to tell them when they were ready to test. I believe this too would help facilitate a creative environment for students, as requirements for learning and regurgitating old kata could sit right next to requirements for learning kata from other systems or creating combinations, mini-kata, or full-fledged kata of their own.
So, it is not as if this cannot be done, or it has not been thought out. I have provided workable systems that I pulled from programs that are as successful as any program has ever been. The Jefferson Karate Club copies the structure just about any fraternity or other non-profit group of friends doing a hobby together, and the use of requirements has already been done by the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and many other organizations successfully since before karate arrived in Japan. The creating of kata, combinations, or new techniques – or learning those from other styles – is nothing new, either. It was originally how karate was done before Japan got her hands on it and militarized, systemized, and institutionalized all of the artifacts and processes to the point that karate became “sacred” and something to be preserved, as if a historical society, rather than improved and developed.
What is especially ironic is that despite the historical preservation society model that karate students operate in today, Shotokan leaders are terribly resistant to new facts gleaned by historians who study the past. Despite having learned innumerable myths are totally untrue, the Shotokan adherents yell, “Heresy!” when confronted with them and refuse to learn from the past as much as they deny that creativity could be put to good use.
The current crop of Western karate experts are aging and will one day die. Will they pass without leaving behind their creations that we might remember what they learned or celebrate their efforts?In another article, I will detail how this creativity could be phased in with both the Jefferson Karate Club and requirements based rank advancement. If you are interested in only placing some creativity in your own current structure, it is simple enough to do. Add to the green belt level tests the task of performing simple combinations that the instructor calls out quite by surprise, rather than simply performing well-known combinations of techniques. Make it more difficult at brown belt, and much more difficult at black belt. Add to the brown belt levels the creation of new combinations, and at the black belt levels, the regular performance and explanation of new kata.
Some might raise the concern that new kata will be created that, for lack of a better word, stink. That’s right! That is exactly what will happen. But there will be no requirement that anyone learn these new kata after they are created, nor any requirement that the person who makes them retain them in memory for any length of time. If a new kata is good, then it will be popular. If it is not any good, then let the market decide and the kata will disappear or remain in obscurity. But if ten thousand men create new kata on their own, a few of those are going to be truly outstanding, and may even become more popular than the current 26 kata we limit ourselves to, or the 75 or so Okinawan kata that are currently known and practiced in Japanese karate circles.
The house will not come tumbling down. Karate will not turn into a crack house filled with prostitutes who only care about karate performed to dance music in shiny outfits. We can train our students much as we do today without the feared consequences of snowballs rolling downhill, gathering up more snow, and then flattening the village below as the nation panics. The karate nation will be unaffected except in a positive way, I believe, unless you prefer that everyone only perfect what we already have, and that we never change or develop anything for the future.
It seems rather silly that we create thousands of Western experts of karate, and yet none of them are doing much of anything to contribute to karate. Yet so few Okinawans managed to produce so much material that we practice today. Let us leverage the power of our culture’s interest in creativity, and let us acknowledge experts, even if they do seem junior to us, as equals in the field so that they can operate on the merits of their ability not only to perform or hang around a long time, but to invent, create, research, and produce new material for all of us to enjoy...
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