Decades ago I thought of the Okinawan Bushi and Ti(tee)

 

I was reading Mark Bishops latest Facebook piece today and I started thinking.

  

Karate which had previously been a closely held  group practice within the Okinawan Bushi , was of course changed for a school activity.

 

Itosu wrote

 

 “In the past masters of karate have enjoyed long lives. Karate aids in developing the bones and muscles. It helps the digestion as well as the circulation. If karate should be introduced beginning in the elementary schools, then we will produce many men each capable of defeating ten assailants. I further believe this can be done by having all students at the Okinawa Teachers College practice Karate. In this way after graduation they can teach at the elementary schools that which they have been taught. I believe this will be a great benefit to our nation and our military. It is my hope you will seriously consider my suggestion.”

 

http://www.traditionalshotokankarate.co.uk/ten_precepts.html

 

A tradition began (or continued?) of crafting kata for beginning students.

There does not seem to have been a need to shape those students for street defense as Okinawa was not a violent place. Rather for the strengthening bodies.

 

The thought was that karate might be used for  self defense was very secondary to the thought that it might build a stronger populace. After all why would people want to train young people to fight in the streets when there was little need to have them do so? Logically knowledge of kata applications was not the goal of the training. If any of them continued their studies it would be under an instructor in a traditional manner, and more than time enough for those studies at that time.

 

Then karate underwent a disporia and moved to Japan. That karate had a self defense purpose was not hidden from those Japanese students, the instructors even shared some of it in their books, but it does not seem that there was a direct linkage made for the student between kata practice and defensive use of karate. 

 

Although is was the pre-war years, University students for the most part were not being trained to become weapons.  Rather by design to produce healthier students for the society. Training them in more than basic applications would be a very poor use of the brief time they had to train at university for 4 years.

 

 

Then when ‘bunkai’ for kata was explained, that became the new buzz word for understanding kata in part. More so after the war, and Japanese karate had developed differently from Okinawa. So they developed their own explanations for those kata tools, which were by design prepared for a different purpose.

 

New times, new answers.