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Hanging a Shingle

I haven’t posted recently on this page, not because I’ve forgotten about it, but because I’ve been directing my efforts towards opening a dojo of my own. The dojo went “live” last November and I had the great good fortune of getting a student almost immediately. As in my previous time teaching, somehow my first student is also the best student – in terms of dedication and seriousness in their approach to training. It is very strange that I struck gold in the same way twice, but I’m certainly not complaining. In any case, it was a very personal decision for me to teach my martial art and I wanted to capture some of my thinking in going down this path. It’s not something I take lightly, as I’ve said in other posts - it doesn’t take much training to become dangerous and I feel the teacher bears responsibility here. While the training hopefully tempers the worst impulses in a student, there is a middle period there where the student is… uncontrolled , let’s say. Ultimately though I decid...
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Recent posts

Just a nobody...

Hello hello. Seems fitting to start with an entry about myself and what this blog is for. I’ve been training in the martial arts (specifically one art) for 30 years starting from the time I was a very young child. It’s been a constant in my life and remains one of my passions. But within the karate world I’m not really anyone special. I’m not part of an organization. I’m not a champion competitor. I don’t own a dojo and I’m not in demand on the seminar circuit. I’ve never written a book or made a DVD of my fighting methods. I don’t have my own line of karate gi. No ancient scrolls either. A trip to Okinawa is still just a line on my bucket list. I’ve risen to the rank of Sandan, 3 rd degree black belt, which is… if not a low rank, not a particularly high one. I’ve had some great experiences dabbling in other martial arts, and intend to keep doing so, but my through-line has been Okinawan Goju-ryu Karate-Do. It is the art that made me, the one that fits me best, and where I move ...
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Knowledge as a Tool of Control

I think there is a valid argument in holding back knowledge from a student, especially in the context of the martial arts. There are advanced techniques – some of which may hurt the student (looking at you nunchaku ) and some of which the student could use to seriously hurt others – that require a certain maturity in the student. I’ve written before about the short and brutal Core Bunkai , most of which end with twisting the neck to wrenching the head. Those techniques are serious and I would reserve them for a serious student that has the right mentality about them. I’ll also point out that many Okinawan styles rely on closing and grabbing, something which requires a high level of skill in and of itself regardless of any follow-on techniques. There’s a good chance a novice wouldn’t even be able to apply certain advanced techniques successfully even if they did “learn” them. So controlling some knowledge is part of being a Sensei, as is determining when a student is ready for more. T...
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What Happened to Karate?

 There’s been a lot of online discussion lately about what has happened to karate, always from the perspective of degeneration. Clearly, karate has become diminished and lost something since its Golden Age, right? ( I haven’t seen it specified, but I think this Golden Age is either the 1960’s-1970’s when karate was taking the West by storm or possibly the 1860’s-1870’s when it was a pure backyards-and-graveyards art for self-protection from thugs and pirates.) Today everyone thinks karate is for children. No one thinks it is deadly or powerful anymore. Thanks Daniel LaRusso! If you can’t tell, I’m on the opposite side here. I think karate training today is the best it has ever been. We are living in the karate Golden Age right now! The art has grown, it has been refined, but still has preserved its spirit. Even more importantly, I think students and teachers are more empowered in their training today than they ever have been. Of course there are problems. I don’t think every ...
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Karate Lessons - Strategic Thinking, Calculated Risks

One of the more startling things I took away from my second-to-last conversation with my old Sensei – one of the things that made it the second-to-last conversation (see The Schism ) – was when she asked me how I was incorporating karate into my life outside the dojo. It is a good question, but what startled me was that my sensei even had to ask it. It showed how far apart we had become in our practice and how little involvement they had in my day-to-day. Let me start with inside the dojo – we were a few years into COVID at the time of this conversation so my training was entirely in my home dojo, a space that she had seen pictures of and could see it was quite spacious. I was reviewing kata and bunkai every night after my kids went to bed in preparation for my sandan exam so karate was pretty front-and-center in my life at that time.  However, karate was still a major part of my life in the years before COVID. I had joined a local Goju-ryu dojo that trained once a week for a ...
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Deciphering Bunkai Across Styles

 I’ve spent a lot of time training kata and studying bunkai. It is really at the center of my training, at least mentally or intellectually. When I think about karate, I’m usually thinking about bunkai. The dojo I came up in had many many kata, something like 30 kata all told. As I discussed in my post of the Flexible Bunkai Model , I think there were several reasons for this and I’ve continued to train a number of those kata beyond the 8 classical Goju-ryu forms. However, what I’ve stopped trying to do is decipher bunkai for those kenkyu or research kata. I’m sure I could slap together something obvious (and have had to do that before for testing), but I don’t believe it would be close to the Core Bunkai I would want, the ones the kata was built around. For Goju-ryu, I think I have enough of a map to find those Core Bunkai. For example, Goju-ryu bunkai will usually have you move off the line of attack, get in close to control the attacker, and finish with a strike to or t...
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Training Yourself to Endure

While karate-ka love to talk about spirit , no one ever seems to define it. Indomitable spirit is one aspect of it, usually in the context of a ferocious warrior-like spirit. Gentleness and benevolence also come up from time to time too, as in the Bushi or gentleman warrior. For me the spiritual side of training is more grounded than those two extremes. I'm not trying to be  an ideal, I'm trying to be , ideally. I believe that life is difficult. In different ways, and certainly not equally distributed, but everyone will face hardship and have burdens to carry in their lifetime. For me, karate teaches us how to endure this hardship and make peace with the struggle. Obviously in the dojo we push ourselves past our previous performance as we get stronger and more skilled. One reason I’ve always loved pushups is because they work the most important muscle in karate – the never-give-up muscle. But the real lessons in spirit come when you look beyond just the physical demands o...
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