My original plan for todays post was to write about appreciation and showing it to the people in your life who were/are important to you. Recently, Ive had some people say thank you to me for various reasons (weight loss, helping them or just training with me in general) and former students who now live abroad tell me how much they miss me and miss coming to class. I am always very grateful to any student or parent who takes the time to say, thank you. I can tell you, as an instructor, being thanked does a lot to help me stay inspired. So, that is what I WAS going to post today. Instead, Im going to do something I try to make it a point not to do - get on my soapbox. Please bear with me. This will be long-winded, but hopefully worth your time. It is not my intention to insult anyone; however, I have been shown video, shot both locally and nationally, in the last week that has upset and insulted me as a traditional martial artist and driven me to post this today. If you read anything on the origins of what we would today call Traditional Karate, you find that it is chock-full of men who are directly descended from the warrior class which (at one time) was prevalent in Asia. These are men who were raised in a way (The Way - Do, as in Karate Do, Tang Soo Do, Tae Kwon Do, etc.) that was given to dignity and honor. If you search online you can find video of some of these men practicing their art. You will see them training or performing in a uniform many of you will find very similar to the one you wear every time you attend class. There is no music playing (unless someone overlaid some over a video with no sound), there are no costumes, there is no fanfare or glitz..... just good, solid, clean traditional martial arts. Martial art that would make anyone proud to be a part of it. The videos I have been shown recently are NOT like these old videos. They feature students dressed up in costumes and masks (by costumes Im including gaudy, tacky demonstration uniforms), bad music playing in the background, demonstrating things that could only loosely be called dance and technique (bad dance, ineffective technique). There is no dignity or honor in these demonstrations. Karate style martial arts have come to be known as a joke by much of the general public in the United States in large part due to demonstrations like these. Maybe the school owners who do demonstrations this way feel it brings more students into their school. Maybe it does. Maybe it makes them more money. But exactly what is the cost in dignity and honor to ones self, ones school and ones marital art? At what cost are they selling the soul of their art? I have never seen any video of someone like Funakoshi, Mabuni, Yamaguchi, Mas Oyama or Hwang Kee doing a demonstration dressed in anything but the same uniform they trained, taught and sweated in. I cant recall seeing Kanazawa, Nishiyama, H.C. Hwang, Ki Whang Kim, S. Henry Cho or Chun Sik Kim (or any of their students for that matter) belittling themselves doing a demonstration dressed as a Power Ranger or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I highly doubt if you brought Itosu forward to our time he would have the middle school children he was teaching do a bad dance to worse music, throwing in a few punches and kicks to make it look like maybe theyre doing Karate and then have a little girl run around the floor with a stuffed animal while What does the fox say played in the background. These are not martial art demonstrations. They are shows. Bad shows. Shows that might make it into an elementary school talent show...maybe. They are not fun or cute. They are embarrassing and humiliating. If a school is going to do performances of this kind, perhaps they should call what they do Martial Entertainment and not martial art. A martial art demonstration should be just that - an example of what is taught at that school. It should not set out to be entertaining. If the martial art is good and the people in the demonstration are proficient, it cant help but be entertaining. Im not saying there cant be some levity in a demonstration, but levity should not come at the expense of a given martial arts or schools reputation. As I said at the beginning of this post - it is not my intention to insult anyone. However, many schools in this country are hurting the integrity and reputation of Karate style martial arts more than they are helping. To them I would say this - Make your students as good as they can be, demonstrate what you teach and dont do it at the expense of Do (The Way). When planning a demonstration ask yourself, Would the Karate greats approve?. If the answer is no, dont do it. I will never be recorded in any book as one of traditional martial arts greats. I only hope that, if there is a training hall in the afterlife in which all the greats teach and practice, the doors will open for me and I will be accepted as a student. Osu/Tang Soo! - Joe Goss Jr. ...And Im off my soapbox. The Joe Goss Karate Facebook Page will now resume its usual content.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 13:30:28 +0000
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