Credibility -v- Celebrity...

There are no 'original' kata...not now anyway!

I sometimes wonder what it is about karateka, and kobudoka too for that matter, that make them want to know everything, including who invented each kata and exactly how they did them. My understanding is that karate and kobudo are in a state of constant flux, at least in a physical sense. Show me a guy who knows what the likes of Miyagi sensei and others were thinking during their lifetime, and I'll show you an idiot with delusions of grandeur.

Why do folk today want to keep looking backwards anyway...is that all you've got, things that other people did years ago? Where is your sense of life, where is your sense of obligation to keep your art alive and healthy, why do you look to the past all the time to justify what you're doing right now? Funakoshi sensei's famous quote about looking to the past to know the future, is no excuse to stifle personal growth.

Kumite training....and not a point in sight

If you want to know what your future karate might look like then look at the way others investigated, innovated, and consolidated the art they were introduced to. Why stop at a bunch of Okinawan's who were alive in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why not go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia? Perhaps because most folks 'doing' karate these days wouldn't find that esoteric enough.

There is a well established disconnect within the modern interpretations of Okinawa's fighting arts, a level of dysfunction that has caused a great deal of confusion between 'credibility' and 'celebrity', the first almost always in short supply when the second is present. And yet...there are so many who pay little attention to the acquisition of skill in their desire to gain notoriety. This is not new of course, it is merely one of those things that looking to the past all the time has yet to erase from karate's future.

I wonder who's fault that would be..?