As someone with a background in STEM, I am attracted to methods that more resemble those of natural sciences, . In other words, borrowing the term used by my friends in humanities, I like to adopt a positivist/objectivist approach, and I prefer to view problems from a general, large-scale perspective and then proceed deductively.
For this reason, I fear that many will find the amount of content directly engaging with Karate, and sometimes even with martial arts, to be quite limited in my section of this blog!
Luckily, the amount of literature from Karate historians available to non-native Japanese speakers is nowadays extremely rich and up to date, with many researchers active both in printed media and on the web1For a short and certainly not complete list, you can look up the works of: Mark Bishop, Christopher M. Clarke, Thomas Feldmann, Patrick McCarthy, Mario McKenna, Motobu Naoki, Andreas Quast, Eric Shahan, Joe Swift, Henning Wittwer. .
Nevertheless, what I mean to include in my limited effort here are elements that I believe are important to the understanding of Karate as a phenomenon, and that have certainly helped me in my understanding as a practitioner of the art.
In this article, I wish to briefly look inside the history of one of the oldest recorded traditions of martial arts in East Asia and its evolution in forms and goals in China and Japan.
Archery has been present in China since ancient times, and while it was used in hunting and war, it seems to have picked up symbolic or spiritual significance early on (Lorge 2012)[1].
At the time of Confucius, between the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., archery was part of the six arts which constituted the base of aristocratic education: rites, music, archery, riding the chariot, calligraphy, and mathematics.
In Chinese history, the time between 450 B.C. and 221 B.C is known as the Warring States period. During this time, the methods of violence got out of the control of aristocrats in a cycle of innovation and change in the ways of waging war.
The number of warriors involved in fighting increased significantly, and the goal of each of the actors in the war became the complete neutralization of the enemy forces.
Professional roles in government and military became more prominent, and fighting in chariots was made obsolete by crossbows, tactics, and the first cavalry units.
The aristocrats didn’t stop doing archery, though.
In the Confucian text, the Record of Ritual (Liji, Book of Rites), central importance was put on deportment instead of accuracy, and this is restated in the Analects of Confucius:
“The Master said: In archery, one does not emphasize piercing the hide of the target, because people’s strengths differ. Such is the ancient Way”.
Here we can see that getting the correct form was considered a sign of internal cultivation.
The Lieh-Tzu / Liezi, a Daoist text written during the same period (Most likely 4th century B.C.), also makes the inverse connection: it states that perfecting the skill of archery can lead to a superior state of mind.
The bow was also the central weapon for the Japanese warriors and aristocrats[2].
During the Heian (794 – 1184) period, the military organization moved from conscription to the use of professional warriors and local strongmen, a group that, for many researchers, later evolved into the bushi class.
There are no written surviving texts describing the early archery traditions of the pre-bushi aristocracy [3]. Nevertheless, in the Kamakura period, the bushi still lacked a collective identity, so warrior class traditions aped the ones of the court (Bennet 2015 [4]), and data on those are available.
The ceremonial archery contests were performed by courtiers and ranked warriors, and the emphasis, also in this case, was on the etiquette and poise of the performer. This focus on etiquette continued in later periods’ traditions, including traditions (ryu-ha) not related to archery[5].
In Garcia (2019)[6], ceremonial etiquette is associated with a “closure mechanism”.
A social group, during a time of fast diffusion of their practice to other groups, creates the means for recognizing what constitutes “genuine practice”, in the effort of keeping this expansion under control. In the two cases above, form is used to distinguish between “those entitled to perform/witness martial arts and their social inferiors”.
As someone who has never practiced any classic form of archery, I should probably classify this as a sociologically interesting case of convergence in the evolution of martial arts, or the two could even have a historical connection.
At the same time, I cannot avoid feeling that there is something more.
Most of the practitioners of those archery traditions never consciously intended to exclude outsiders; they were just recognizing that the way others were doing what on paper was the same task was ‘the wrong way’ or ‘the right way’.
Whether justified by biomechanical reasoning, tradition, or effectiveness in a real-life scenario, technique/form is one of the main points of contention within Karate. This creates divisions both within a single style and between styles, and I am sure many experienced practitioners will recognize the strange sensation of `something wrong’ in a kata or a movement, even before being able to point out the technical details.
In other words, how much of the overfixation on technique is a legitimate concern, and how much is a closure mechanism for Karate?
References
- (2012): Chinese martial arts: From antiquity to the twenty-first century. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- (2018): The historical sociology of Japanese martial arts. Routledge, 2018.
- (1997): The Warrior as Ideal for a New Age. In: The Origins of Japan’s Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerks, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 208–233, 1997.
- (2014): Inventing the way of the samurai: nationalism, internationalism, and bushidō in modern Japan. OUP Oxford, 2014.
- (1998): Armed martial arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and archery. Yale University Press, 1998.
- (2018): The historical sociology of Japanese martial arts. Routledge, 2018.
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