Over the many years I have been training with Koyama Sensei he has told us many stories of the “old days.”  “Old days,” of course, are always relative.  For me, and many of the 50 some year-olds training today the “old days” in Shotokan karate refer to the that period just before the heyday of popularity of martial arts in the United States that came with Bruce Lee and then the Karate Kid movie.

During my “old days” of Shotokan karate women were not allowed to train in the most advanced classes.  There were many reasons for this, most rooted in tradition and a belief that the physical differences between men and women made women too delicate or unsuited to the severity of training that came at the most advanced levels.

Even though I resist any idea that presumes the unsuitedness of women for anything, it is true that in these “old days,” advanced training could be brutal.  We didn’t use gloves or any protective gear in those days, and the ethics of the dojo were often like street gangs that required a “jumping in,” required that you “pay your dues” by getting beat up to one degree or another by the more advanced students.  The process could involve a straight out acknowledgment that you will be hit — and not “tapped,” but hit in a way that can fracture bones and split skin wide open.  The process could also be more subtle, involving a “feeling out” period wherein the senior students tacitly evaluate the junior students testing their courage or determination, the sincerity of their effort and quality of their character.  Someone seen to be lacking in one of these respects could be eliminated from participating by abuse, or disregard.

The ethics of all of this get murky because there can come a point where a junior student needs to be put back into line, and my ability to make it absolutely clear that I can and will do that is a necessary part of my fulfilling my responsibilities as a senior member.  If I am driven to do this by virtue of the best qualities of character, or by an egoistic need to elevate myself by dominating others can be very difficult to determine.

So, let me be clear about the “woman-thing.”  There are not a lot of women who want to put themselves in the situation described above — most of us have too much good sense.  And, to be fair, there are a lot of men who wouldn’t put themselves in that position either because they, too, have too much good sense.  So, when we get to this situation of these “old days,” you have a special breed of person who, for better or worse, seeks out these kind of extreme high stakes activities in which perceptions of respect and dominance rule the dojo and the enforcement of these through the physical training leave do doubt about the difference between junior and senior students.

When Koyama Sensei talks about the “old days” he’s referring to a very different context — he’s referring to the context of his life growing up during World War II and its immediate aftermath.  Koyama Sensei talks about being a young boy when the B-52s were dropping bombs on them, about having very little food and other hardships that came with that time and place.  After the war, when Koyama Sensei was studying karate at the university, some of his teachers were the returning pilots trained to have been kamikaze pilots.  It is difficult for me to really grasp the significance of what it means to have been trained in that way — but it does strike me as similar, perhaps, to the suicide bombers of today.  At any rate, clearly, when Koyama Sensei is talking about the “old days,” he is talking about things that I probably will never be able to really understand — certainly not at the gut level.  Traditional karate-do is what Koyama Sensei teaches us, and the time and place of his growing up presents us with reservoirs of knowledge that may, ultimately, be beyond our ability to understand no matter how faithful we are in our effort to learn.

One illustration that Koyama Sensei uses to differentiate the “old days” from today is how in the “old days” training often involved thousands and thousands of repetitions of a single technique or a single kata.  It is something that he asserts students today would never tolerate, and I am sure that students today could never tolerate the training that he went through as a young karate-ka.

On the other hand, I remember my “old-days” when advancement to the more advanced training (first “B-Team,” then “A-Team — and that was before the television hit by the same name) involved a very explicit weeding out process that didn’t rely as much on the brutality described above, but more on the testing of one’s character and level of determination through endless repetitions.  Technically, class is one hour long, but once we moved to these advanced training it became clear that class was however long the Sensei wanted it to be.  I remember often stepping onto that floor and as we went through the mokuso ceremony thinking, “oh, god, please let me just get through this.”  And then we would start.  Twenty people on the floor, two punching techniques per count, each person counts to 10, then switch sides and repeat.  Next, kicking techniques, four techniques per count, each person counts to 10 then switch sides.  That was the warm up.  From there we would begin working on advanced kumite or sparring.  Whatever drill or sparring sequence we might be doing, we would repeat the same thing over and over again until every person on the floor had repeated it with every other person.  And, it was often in this portion of the training that if someone got sloppy, punishment would come in the form of anything from a light tap to a laying out.  And, of course there were always for real “accidents,” where people unintentionally hit each other.  Because we didn’t use pads of any kind, the training itself always resulted in banged bones —  shins, forearms, elbows, fingers, toes.  It was often at this point in the training, body physically exhausted, in pain, and having no idea what will come next much less when it will end, that one’s character and determination is revealed.  Try being that exhausted, in that much pain, and standing across from someone who you know is capable of knocking the shit out of you, who is looking for the slightest hint of weakness to exploit, then you will understand how I experienced my “old days.”

I don’t feel especially proud of my “old days” in karate.  I was young and had grown up within a very volatile and violent environment, so in some ways this kind of karate training allowed me to transcend that by seeing the violence as a way of developing character and a higher sense of morality.  And, I didn’t see myself as less capable than men, although the difference in size and strength was obvious, and there was no doubt that a man could tolerate a blow that would totally disable me.

So, here’s the point:  by going through the endless repetitions of techniques that exhausted everyone physically, it levels out the risks that come with egoistic people training so that they can feel dominant, “tough,” or powerful at the expense of others.  A man who is bigger and stronger than me (which is pretty much all of them) becomes much less so as I face off with him and see his fatigue and uncertainty.  And at this point men are usually glad to have women training with them because it means they get a little break from sparring with other men so they can relax some.  Silly mistake.  It only took one time for a new member of the team to make that mistake with me.  That was the reality of being a “senior student.”  No formal rank could ever override the absolute knowledge we had of who was “real,” who had “guts,” and who was genuinely interested in more than an egoistic reward for being a “tough guy who knows karate.”

The real upside of all of this, of course, is that the men in the dojo didn’t take it easy on me, and that meant that I could never be free of fear or humility because I knew that there was always a point at which I, too, could succumb to pain and exhaustion, that there had been many times when I wished to have an injury that would allow me to leave the floor “legitimately,” or back out of training without being recognized for my weakness.  That kind of honest confrontation with the self was, in many ways, the “essence” of character development through karate-do as I learned it from my first sensei.

I think that Koyama Sensie is right to say that things are different today and that people would not tolerate types of training that we did years ago and that Koyama Sensei did even longer ago.  But I miss the clarity of knowing my fellow karate-ka’s character by the way we interact with each other during training.  I think we’ve lost some of that today, and it allows people who come in new to karate to think that just because we treat them with respect that they deserve it.  I have a level of skill that would make it relatively easy for me to make the point very clearly during training.  But, I agree with Koyama Sensei when he talks about the “low-class” aspects of karate training that fail to grasp the true purpose of it.

I welcome your comments.

Last night during training, Koyama Sensei discussed the topic of energy, or ki in Japanese. He was talking about the importance of bringing intensity to our performance of techniques. It’s important to put ourselves into our training like we would put ourselves into the words, “I love you” when we utter them to someone we care deeply about. Practicing karate-do is much more than learning technique. It requires that we bring the energy and spirit of who we are into our practice.

Negative energy is often obvious and easy to understand. You say something that makes me angry an my body bristles, my eyes narrow and later you say you felt arrows flying out of my eyes and into you. When we do kata we want that kind of energy emanating from within us. The only difference is that this is not a “negative” energy that comes from me being angry or wanting to hurt you. It is more of an energy generated by our commitment to the proper execution of the technique, the commitment of expressing through my body the meaning of the kata and the techniques that make it up. Thus, one thing karate can offer us is the opportunity to take the negative energies of life and turn them into positives by directing them into the development and beauty and grace through kata training.

Energy is also something I study in the context of culture and communication. In studying energy as it functions in communication and culture it is important to remove the valence — to remove the presumption that energy is either positive or negative. Because energy itself is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. It may be generated by something negative (e.g., fear) or something positive (e.g., love), but either way energy is just energy. The fact that it exists more strongly in some instances or places, and less strongly in others is what we must study to understand what is created by it and what it sustaines. If we classify energy as “good” or “bad” too quickly, we miss the opportunity to understand how energy creates and re-creates the worlds we live within.

When it comes to learning and teaching karate-do, paying attention to energy is absolutely essential. Paying attention to energy—particularly our own—must be as much of our karate practice as is our effort to exert it in a positive and powerful way. Some days I go to the dojo and my mind is preoccupied with the stresses and struggles of my day and my relationships with others both within and outside the dojo. My energy is consumed by these stresses and struggles. Other days I go to the dojo and the struggles and stresses of my day easily recede into the background and the energy I exert finds its expression in the movement of my body, the easy flow of energy and the lifting of spirit that comes when my presence of body to mind allows me to experience myself and those I am sharing that energy with in a more pure and direct way. If I compare these two kinds of days at the dojo, I am tempted to say that the day dominated by stresses and struggles was a “bad energy” day, and the one where I was more freely present to my body and its movement was a “good energy” day. But, this would be a mistake because in doing this I will be led toward presuming that I can and should prevent future “bad energy” days while creating “good energy” days. That’s not a bad thing to do. It’s just that doing so takes me away from the more basic point, which is to pay attention to how energy is present in me and how it moves through me to others in the world.

What do you think?

Koyama Sensei always emphasizes the importance of karate-do as a philosophy. Unlike a sport, the purpose of karate-do is the development of character. How exactly we do this is dependent on many things. Some of these things are dependent upon the individual, and others are not so much.   For example, I make choices about how I practice karate-do, the meaning I make of it, etc. But, I don’t control the kind of instruction I get from my Sensei, nor his understanding of karate-do or his students. Although Master Funakoshi wrote much about his life and his philosophy, it is still up to each of us trying to following his teachings to interpret and apply his life lessons and philosophy to our own lives within the context of our time and our culture. This means that we can’t say that any one of us today knows the “true” or “authentic” philosophy developed by Mr. Funakoshi. But, what we can do is take account of our own understanding and interpretation, and this means that we must be able to reflect on our own experience taking his words and stories and applying them to our own life. I cannot, in this effort, prescribe what is right or wrong either about Funakoshi’s messages itself or another’s interpretation of it. Neither can I judge the value or goodness of others’ efforts in this regard. We can hope to cultivate a community in which we seek to reach the ideals of Funakoshi’s philosophy even though we will never be able to actually know for certain how we have progressed toward these ideals.

What does the practice of karate-do offer? It offers an opportunity to reflect on oneself, one’s life, and perhaps most importantly, one’s relationship to oneself. I’m interested in how karate has created space for self-reflection for others. What’s your story about karate-do and its influence on your thinking about and understanding of yourself, your relationships, and life?