The Weaponless Warriors by Richard Kim

 

 

A few decades ago I discovered the Weaponless Warriors by Richard Kim and was entranced by the older tales from Okinawa. That is had a footnote mentioning Shimabuku Tatsuo also made me interested even more. I never felt it was a ‘true’ historical record, at the same time then it was the closest I had ever seen to such, This of course was way before the internet..

 

Then in the late 1980s and onward I joined the internet generation. So much so I required my black belt candidates to read it as part of their preparation for better understanding Okinawa.

 

One day. I believe on the CyberDojo. I remember the Weaponless Warriors was being discussed.  Then Patrick McCarthy joined in the discussion. He told us he had been a student for a time of Richard Kim. But that the book was problematical. Apparently Kim had just translated a book by Shimabukuo Ezio and not credited he had done so. Most of his book was actually Ezio’s book.

 

Today checking Wikipedia on Richard Kim I found.

 

There has been some controversy surrounding The Weaponless Warriors, published in 1974, as the bulk of the work appears taken, without acknowledgement, directly from Eizo Shimabukuro's 1963 work Old Grandmaster Stories,^[9] which was translated into English for the first time in 2003.

 

When I discovered this I do not support plagiarism for any reason, so I discontinued having my students read the book.