Modern Violence and Karate

The key to understanding old school karate and their training methods is violence. Not the type of violence that most people are aquainted with, such as movies, television and sporting matches, but social and asocial violence. Violence is what links the past and the present.

The past is filled with such extreme violence that in comparison the conflicts of today look about as dangerous as chamomile tea. Any injury could become infected and lead to death, or cripple you and cause you and your family to starve due to lack of income. The stakes were much higher in the past. They didn't have many of the safety stops that we enjoy in the first world, such as medicine, law and order, and welfare. However, the criteria for surviving in those conditions are very similar to surviving a violent conflict today. Avoidance and ruthless efficiency.

Even old manuals on civil self defense arts mention the importance of avoiding conflict and escape. Along with behavioral rules to be respectful, to mind your manners and to keep your mouth shut. It's not empty character building. It's how you stay out of fights and survive. If you're nice, respectful and courteous to everyone you meet, the conflicts you have with people drop significantly. According to Marc MacYoung, the best indicator that you're about to be attack is you're being an asshole.

The physical part is very similar as well. The opponent should be downed in one move. The longer the conflict goes on the chances of injury and death go way up. Attack and defense must be simultaneous and you must have a handful of moves ingrained so deep that you act automatically.

Reading about modern day violence is what made me understand karate the most. I suggest that if you want to study karate more deeply you look to modern texts on violence, social behavior and crime. It's a bridge to the past.

Keep in mind that this is not an endorsement of karate for self defense. Karate can be used for self defense, but it must be remembered that karate was developed during the 19th century in Okinawa. The moral, ethical and legal ramifications are different for that time period and environment than the time and place we live now. Know your laws.

Rant: Bad Training ( I warned you)

Let me tell you a story.

When I was in the Marine Corps, we were encouraged to not raise our hand at the rifle range for help when we had a malfunction. You'd think it was to encourage you to clear your own weapon malfunctions, which is partly true, but not the reason they encouraged this. The reason was that people had gotten their hands shot off in combat because their weapon malfunctioned. They didn't know what to do, so their brain made them do what they had always done when they had a malfunction and didn't know what to do, they raised their hand. Goodbye fingers, hello having the nickname "Lefty."

I'm going to put this in a little bit of context. The average none infantryman in the Marine Corps, which is basically the entire Marine Corps, spends about one week on the shooting range to qualify with their service weapons and hopefully earn some points toward a promotion. Of that week, most of it is spent waiting, waiting to shoot, raising and lowering targets for other Marines in "the pits" and waiting. You might spend 30 minutes in all on the firing line a day, actually firing your weapon and most of that time is spent waiting. Waiting to shoot or waiting for everyone else to finish shooting. For the entire week it's only 2.5 hours of trigger time, maybe. Of that 2.5 hours, you might have three malfunctions or none. If your rifle is in really bad shape (they don't give the good ones to the desk jockeys), or you've decided to not spend any time cleaning your rifle, you might have a malfunction that makes your rifle completely inoperable and you can't fix it. Basically you might spend two minutes raising your hand, so someone can help you fix your rifle, usually a range coach.

This means that this insignificant amount of time in a fairly none stressful environment can cause you to injure yourself in an environment that has almost nothing in common with it besides being surrounded by other Marines and having a rifle. It takes a few minutes to ingrain this habit and it can cripple you when it counts. What do you think is going to happen when you do thousands of repetitions of a bad habit every month?



I hear all the time people say "this is for fighting not self defense, when we're defending ourselves we do X," but they never practice X. They also say "if you can't find a good school just pick out the good stuff from the ones you can find, or train at most decent school."

This isn't possible. You can't switch gears like that and you can't magically undo all the bad stuff you're practicing in class because you don't like it. If you're putting in the repetitions and the training than your brain doesn't care. It doesn't care what you "know."

Training has to be done carefully, it has to be done correctly and it has to be done in the correct context. Bad training can get you killed, crippled or send you to jail. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, but you shouldn't knowingly or unknowingly ingrain bad habits if you plan on staking your life on something, and you shouldn't tell other people to settle or give up when their life might one day be on the line.

Training, and a Review of Meditations on Violence

Strength training and kata with J followed by a game of Get Up. The game is pretty simple. One person face down on a mat the other person on top of them in any position they want. The idea is that the person on the bottom is in a very compromised position. The goal of the person face down is to get to their feet and escape. The goal of the person on top is to keep the other person from making it to their feet. Pretty simple. It's a drill for body mechanics and escape and not a fighting drill. At it's simplest form, the person on top uses their dead weight and just holds on forcing the other to manipulate them to escape. You can also ramp it up with actual fighting techniques that the person also has to deal with, but the main goal is always escape. It should go without saying that the person on the bottom is allowed to use controlled strikes and techniques to get free, but they shouldn't try and move to the mount or take the person's back for a rear-naked choke. They should fight toward the goal.

J is better at striking than escaping, and I'm better at escaping than striking. She bends my fingers back, gouges, hits sensitive places, but sometimes does this when she doesn't have to. I forget to strike when I can and focus on squirming out of stuff. Probably a bad thing. If the other person is more focused on trying to breath from a spear hand to the neck than he'll probably be less focused on trying to keep a hold of me.


Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller

Holy shit.

I love books like this because they increase my known unknowns. The stuff that you know you don't know. Unlike unknown unknowns, which are the things you don't know you don't know. Those are the things most likely to kill you. Like eating poisonous plants, or picking up deadly creatures, or believing that your knife defense skills work.

Unlike Facing Violence by Mr. Miller that I'm currently reading, it's not an instruction manual, or a road map. It's got a lot of the same information, but not all of the stories. Meditations is all the wet gooey icky shit best expressed through narrative.

"Gather around children, and I'll tell you the story of the first time I saw a man get his spine broken."
 (Not a quote from the book)

In a nutshell, like the sentence on the front of the book, it's about the difference between martial arts and violence. Martial arts for the most part is the fantasy that we play at, violence is what actually happens or the stuff that has happened. He explains the differences, the similarities and what we might do about it. Or as he puts it, the difference between a unicorn and a rhino.

I don't want to get into a lot of the nitty gritty details of the book, because I'm trying to convince you to read it. Just go read it. I bought it for less than $7.00 on my Kindle from Amazon. It's also on Smashwords I believe.

I will say that if this book doesn't scare the shit out of you, and make you think deeply about your training, your goals and your moral and ethical lines than you're either an idiot, or you've seen some really fucked up shit. 

Know the Law!

Nothing disgusts me more than watching some idiot demonstrate a technique that they claim is self defense. It usually goes something like this.

"You look at someone's girlfriend or accidentally splash him with water and the guy comes after you and wants to kill you. You block the first punch, throw him to the ground, break his elbow and then stomp his face in and walk away."

They always create this fantasy that leaves you with no option but to use force and usually lethal force. The above example is lethal force and in most places this situation would be called murder.

Yes that's right, murder.

This isn't television people. It's not a game. It's real life with real consequences. For some reason people believe that if you aren't using a gun than you're not using lethal force. Not true.

You need to know the law, federal, state and local.

Once you know the law, you'll find that many martial arts techniques are more for combat and assassination than self defense.