The Makiwara Post – What is Karate?

What is Karate?

There seems to be a lot of confusion among the general public about what karate is. Is it a martial art or is it a sport? Technically, it is neither.

The very definition of the word “martial art” eliminates karate from being classified as being a martial art. By definition, a martial art is a fighting system which was specifically developed for battlefield application, such as kenjutsu, the Japanese art of sword fighting.

Karate was also never intended to be a sport. Sport karate only developed during the late 1950’s

through the efforts of young Japanese men who were eager to test their karate skills against each other. Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan karate, never supported the idea of sport karate, stating that it was not the true Way of karate to cultivate a competitive spirit amongst its practitioners. Competitiveness, he stated, feeds the ego and this is not desirable for the development of true karate spirit.

Karate was not developed as a sport and neither was it developed to be used on the battlefield.

So then, what is karate? Karate was, and still is, a very effective civilian self-protection system which developed on the island of Okinawa for civilians to be used in everyday altercations against an untrained opponent.

During the early 1900’s Anko Itosu introduced karate into the Okinawan school curriculum as part of the Physical Education program for primary schools. This trend was later also followed by the Department of Education on mainland Japan.

It is important to keep in mind that the introduction of karate into the school systems was not aimed at teaching children effective self-protection techniques but rather it was used as a physical fitness tool to help develop a future generation with strong, healthy bodies and discipline which could be drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army.

The introduction of karate into the school system lead to the development of what many traditional karate practitioners today call “kids karate” or “school karate” while referring to the old style of karate training as “village karate”. This “school karate”, as we can clearly see, was nothing more than a watered down version of the original “village karate” which was used as a fitness program for children, not as a self-protection system. However, despite the sudden popularity of this “new” karate, there were still many karate instructors on Okinawa who kept the traditional “village karate” alive.

Through the efforts of people like Gichin Funakoshi (Shotokan), Kenwa Mabuni (Shito-Ryu), Chojun Miyagi (Goju-Ryu) and several other, this new form of karate spread from Okinawa first to mainland Japan and from there to the rest of the world and is today practiced by millions of people all over the world.

Today, karate is what you make of it. It could be an exciting sport, a means of developing a strong, healthy body and discipline or it could be an effective self-protection system. Whatever your reason for training, do it with commitment and vigour!