Traditional vs Modern Karate

Below is a thoughtful piece from the Budo Journeyman blog on Substack, on the topic of traditional vs modern martial arts, specifically karate. 

My thought is that even the most "traditional" martial art was the new guy on the block at one time. 

The full post may be read here. 

‘Traditional’, call it a label of convenience; call it a handy pigeonhole to categorise what is done. You can even use it as a hallmark of quality, if you want. But how helpful is it, and who cares anyway?

Clearly some people care, or they wouldn’t keep using it. Some wear it as a badge of honour. To the detractors and critics it becomes yet another thing to take a swing at, a convenient target, their favourite strawman.

What does ‘traditional’ mean?

A key part of my college training was to look at the early history of advertising; selling through the message and labels were important. We were told that if you wanted to sell something to the Americans you attached the words ‘New Improved’ to it; but if you wanted to sell to the British you were better off using the word, ‘Traditional’. (‘Traditional Marmalade’ gets my vote every time).

I was listening to a political podcast recently in which ex-politician Nick Clegg was asked what it was like working in Silicon Valley (he has a top job with Meta). Clegg said that the interesting thing about the Valley was that everything is focussed on the future; because the industry has no past. He contrasted that with the UK where he was of the opinion that some of the Brits from the hard right were so sucked into a mythical image of Great Britain’s past (one that never existed in the form they assumed) that they seem unable to develop any forward-thinking future ambitions; other than turning it into some kind of warped image of a fictional England.

The past is not only ‘a foreign country’ (as L. P Hartley said) but it’s also inclined to be a toxic swamp.

So why, in martial arts, do we give ‘tradition’ so much kudos?

In the martial arts we make an assumption that it’s because the product was tried and tested, like some historical Darwinian quality control exercise. There is one obvious flaw with that idea; the assumption that the process is continued forward in an unbroken line.

The great crucible that was the hundreds of years of Japanese civil wars is a prime example. For the development of martial skills this wasn’t the steady civilised and disciplined refinements found later in the Edo Period, no this was a total meat grinder. (The battle of Sekigahara in 1600 had an estimated body count of 30,000). It was closer to chaos than it was to organised tradition.

What we know of the surviving Koryu (Old School Budo/Bujutsu), the majority of them were developed and coalesced in the later periods of peace, when they had the luxury of evolving their lineage and traditions, uninterrupted by warfare. This doesn’t lessen their fighting ability (unless the lineage is allowed to drift into decay, as has happened), if anything it gave them scope to really refine the skills and imbue them with a greater humanity – which is always paradoxical in martial arts.

The specific case of karate.

Karate as it is consumed in the West (and in Japan) is a modern thing. Can we attach the word ‘tradition’ to something that is so recent?

In Japan it’s classified as ‘Gendai Budo’, 現代武道 ‘Modern Martial Way’. A line is drawn at 1868; in the years before that it’s ‘Koryu’.

Karate jumped from the rural domain of Okinawan to mainland Japan in the 1920’s and underwent many changes; including elements of militarisation, modernisation and westernisation (consider the influence of the Olympic ideas of Baron De Coubertin which spread across Japan). So, although you might talk about the ‘Olympic tradition’, it would be odd to start referring to ‘Traditional Olympics’ because it would sound so retrograde.