Karate Nobody

I can’t get too far into this blog without talking about the split with my long time Sensei. It’s been a few years now, but it is the defining event of my martial arts training, at least recently. First, let me provide a bit of context for what this relationship looked like – This was a nearly 30-year relationship, spanning my early childhood through to my adult years. It revolved around one of my truest passions in life (karate), but devolved into something I was no longer comfortable with and that began to truly depress me. The martial arts world is abound with notions of loyalty (to the teacher, not to the student), periods of endurance and testing, and secret or hidden knowledge. I think I fell prey to my hopes and imaginations as much as anything else. I began training when I was 4 years old. In my younger years, this Sensei was really the main instructor. That changed when she took a leave of absence from the dojo after having her first child. This leave coincided with very...

In the dojo I grew up in – and the organization I stayed with for nearly 30 years – the end goal of training was what I came to think of as the Flexible Bunkai Model . (As opposed to the Core Bunkai Model I talked about in an earlier post). In the flexible bunkai model, the student is exposed to many many MANY kata and corresponding bunkai. This dojo trained the 8 classical Goju-ryu kata plus 20 other kata from different Okinawan styles. All the kata were ones the organizations Founder learned on Okinawa – as an example, the syllabus included Sunsu kata, the final Isshin-ryu kata created by Shimabuku because our Founder trained with and was contemporaries of Tatsuo Shimabuku. I think many of the supplementary kata were like this – historical records from the founder of our organization and preserved as a part of that history. In addition to preserving these kata as a history of the organization, I thought many of them were useful and continue to train in them today. Nijushiho, Soc...