CHAPTER 3

Karate

The Controlling Fighting Style

The Making of Karate

In the mind of the general public, speaking about martial arts creates an image of ancient techniques secretively passed from generation to generation of masters, a relic of bygone eras that has miraculously survived until our modern age.

Although it is true that the common origins of most fighting systems can be traced eventually to previous, older forms of hand-to-hand combat systemization, that is the same case with any other type of human enterprise, from dancing to pottery. In reality, the majority of the styles of martial arts as we know them nowadays have been codified in their current format fairly recently. The foundational dates for the three most popular Japanese styles, aikido, karate, and judo, can all be accurately pinpointed to the turn of the twentieth century, between the 1880s and the 1920s.

Although the origins of karate are very different from those of judo, there are striking similarities in the way they were introduced to the public at large and how they gained mass appeal. They both had an individual founder who acted as sort of catalyst, collecting a tradition of loosely related fighting styles and refurbishing them into a comprehensive, organized system with a strong educational and moral development component. In the case of karate, that person was Gichin Funakoshi, creator of the Shotokan school, which, although is only one of multiple styles of the art, is widely identified as synonymous with its practice.

Funakoshi was himself surprised by the changes he had brought and wrote in his memories:

It was nearly four decades ago that I embarked upon what I now realize was a highly ambitious program: the introduction to the ­Japanese public at large of that complex Okinawan art, or sport, which is called karate-do “The Way of Karate.” These forty years have been turbulent ones, and the path that I chose for myself turned out to be far from easy; now. Looking back, I am astonished that I attained in the endeavor even the quite modest success that has come my way.¹

The success he achieved was far from modest, however. Same as his contemporary Jigoro Kano did with judo, Funakoshi managed to take an obscure martial art from the archipelago of Okinawa and transform it into a physical discipline followed by millions of students around the world.

Funakoshi was born in the Japanese coastal city of Naha, when it still maintained the name of Shuri, as it did when it was the capital of the old Okinawan kingdom of Ryukyu. Okinawa, or Ryukyu as it had been historically known, is a chain of islands that stretches all the way from the Japanese southwest across the Pacific until it almost reaches Taiwan. For centuries, the archipelago was under Chinese influence, as an independent kingdom first and as a vassal state later, and during this period, it is accepted by martial arts historians that continental styles of Chinese fighting forms made their way to the island and were adopted by the natives. By the seventeenth century, Okinawa had fallen under the Japanese sphere of influence, where it was to remain during the Meiji revolution and both World Wars until nowadays, and other styles, like the samurai wartime practice of jiu jitsu, made their way to the islands.

The dual impact that Chinese and Japanese martial arts had in the archipelago helps explain some of the peculiarities that developed in the Okinawan fighting tradition and modeled karate. A succession of repressive governments gave it an underground nature, which resulted in a secretive and austere style, very different from some of the flowery motions that are common to Chinese Wushu (or kung fu as it is widely known).

By the end of the nineteenth century, several masters were working in merging and systematizing the disparate Okinawan fighting styles, but ­Funakoshi was the one who was placed in the best position to promote the discipline, after moving from Naha to Tokyo in 1922. There, he started to apply a series of modifications, which helped the widespread acceptance of the system; first he changed the name his masters had used to refer to it. In Okinawa, each clan and family had had a different denomination for their particular, custom-made format of karate: Goju-ryu, Shorin-ryu, and so on depending on their distinct traits while the all-compassing word “kara-te” was translated as “China hand” (“China” referring to the historical origins of the practice and “hand” meant unarmed combat) and used as very generic term. By changing the Chinese-written ideogram “China” to “empty,” the phonetic reading remained the same, “karate,” but the meaning changed to “empty hand,” which was both suitable to the new revamped style and more palatable for the increasingly nationalistic Japanese prewar government. ­Funakoshi also adopted the white practice uniform and colored belt system that judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano, had made popular, and with that, the revived karate made its way into university practice halls and sport institutions before jumping to the international stage after the U.S. occupation of Japan of 1945.

Karate and the Search for Kinetic Excellence

As mentioned before, karate is hardly a unified discipline to this day. What we commonly refer to as karate is the Shotokan style, the one originally established by Funakoshi, but there exist dozens of other schools, some much older than Shotokan and some as recent as the very popular full contact Kyokushin-kai style, created in the 1960s.

But all in all, these styles share some common foundations: karate is a fighting style that uses the four limbs as weapons (“hands and feet are spears” read a foundational karate document) and training is aimed at developing power by optimizing the speed and force with which they are used. Kinetic energy is at the base of the practice of karate and it is used to attack, defend, and move.

Training is divided into three formats: drills, forms, and sparring:

1. Drills (kihon).

   These include the basic techniques of striking, blocking, and kicking and follow a highly structured program based in repetition. A number of assigned moves have to be practiced continuously and mastered before the practitioner can progress to the next level.

2. Forms (kata).

   These are a dynamic style of solo practice where basic techniques are chained together into a prearranged pattern.

3. Sparring (kumite).

   This is a free-form bout between two practitioners. Each school and federation follow different rules, but generally, the objective is to score points by hitting the opponent with hands and feet. Grabbing or wrestling is either not allowed or very limited.

Karate uses a wide variety of striking techniques, which are delivered in multiple ways (using palms, fingers, knuckles, elbows, knees, heels, etc.) and directions (forward, sideways, backward, upward, downward), emphasizing the idea that a karate practitioner must be able to hit from any position with virtually any part of the body. Many of these strikes are performed in a counterintuitive manner, whose effectiveness is a result of decades of experimentation, and need to be trained extensively before they can be applied.

For example, the most natural punching motion for human beings is the haymaker strike, an uncontrolled but powerful looping swing, which can be performed naturally without training due to its circular trajectory and generation of a large amount of power in relation with the mass of the arm. It is, however, easy to block and difficult to aim properly, so a more effective punching method is the karate straight blow. Learning to throw strikes in a straight line has two advantages:

• It delivers a much faster punch, the straight line being the shortest distance between two points.
• It allows the thrower of the blow to put the force of the hips and the whole body behind the attack instead of relying only on the strength of the arm.

Similarly, karate’s chief characteristic is the use of kicks. Logic dictates that lifting one foot from the floor during a confrontation has the risk of limiting mobility as well as loosing balance, but with proper training, it gives the ability to multiply the body weapons used for offence from two to four as well as the possible angles of attack. Furthermore, being able to deliver a blow that uses the powerful leg muscles gives the karate practitioner a substantial advantage.

It can be said, therefore, that the practice of karate is the search for kinetic excellence; the ultimate objective of the art is the ability to move in the most effective way, a way that must be fast, powerful, and economic in its energy expenditure.

Karate’s Business Learnings for the Controller

The formal aspects present in the controller mean this is a behavioral style that favors having complete control of his or her work and the circumstances that surround it. But business environments are, by their very nature, mutable; personal and social interactions converge with economic and technological processes, creating a complexity that can be unpredictable. This puts the controller under constant pressure; the fear of losing control can throw the controller into panic, to which he or she responds by resorting to the extreme aspects of his or her behavior and becoming dictatorial.

Karate, as well, suffers when under pressure. It is a very linear style, where attacks happen by making dashes into the opponent’s defenses looking to strike. Although karate practitioners put a great deal of focus on blocks and parries to cover this eventuality, they, the same as the controller, are at their worst when the initiative is taken away.

Karate has developed a system that looks to prevent this by using forms or kata, sets of formalized technique-based movements that are conducted in a sequential motion. Although kata is practiced as a solo form, constant repetition familiarizes the practitioner with the flow of fighting and tries to provide an answer to the different situations he or she may face when sparring. For a controller struggling in a business environment, the concept of kata can be applied almost directly, because it concerns the creation of a repeating routine that deals with problem resolution by setting up a step-by-step process practiced until perfection. This is a solution that calls directly to both the formal and the proactive nature of the controller; crisis-solving rehearsal helps reduce the sense of unpredictability and helps maintain the habit of control.

But achieving proficiency in kata is not just a matter of repeating moves; to truly internalize its benefits, the karate practitioner needs to understand that there is a method in play. This method can be divided into three levels both in karate and in business:

1. The mechanical level.

   At this initial stage, the practitioner starts by blindly repeating a set of knowledge that is given to him or her by his or her instructor. For a karate student, it is an initial kata form; for an intern at a company, it is the mind-numbing task of arranging data spread sets, preparing presentations, and setting up meetings. But in both cases, the objective is the same: to prepare novices to accept the new environment by exposing them to specialized knowledge, to have them learn the rituals and protocols of interaction with other actors, to have them understand the existing hierarchy and their own position on it. At the mechanical level, performance has to be just like that, mechanical. There is no need to understand the why, just the how. Once novices prove they can perform, it is time to move to the next stage.

2. The understanding level.

   Once practitioners demonstrate they can function within the new environment and have learned the basic moves, they can start developing the work that is required from them and learning becomes a conscious act, not a mechanical one. At the understanding level, constant exposure to routine brings awareness of detail; the karate student finds not-so-obvious dimensions in the kata he or she has practiced a thousand times and starts applying that insight when learning more advanced moves, and the reasons a certain block, move, or spin is there become more obvious; thus, the student is able to perform the kata with higher degrees of precision. Similarly, interns discover the reason behind the specific formatting of documents and start applying that insight into new chores; they learn what the ebb and flow is in the relationships with other teams and companies and understand how to anticipate and respond to crisis and business changes. There is pause here to think, to analyze what is being done in order to do it well.

3. The internalization level.

   At this final stage, the actions of the practitioner go back to a certain automatism that is similar to the mechanical level but with a big difference: the rote-learning process is not there anymore; now ­intuition takes its place. The system—the fighting system, the ­business system—has been internalized to such a level that ­subtleness takes over and no pause for thinking is necessary. The fighter fights and drills with movements that have become second nature; the businessperson responds to the demands of daily activity with an effectiveness that is equally based on knowledge and experience.

The controller is a person of method, and the practice of kata is the essence of method. At its core lies the distillation of moves to a systematized format that prepares for the real fight. By applying the kata methodology to a business routine, the controller can prepare for the changes in his or her environment and bring a measure of certainty to an uncertain world.