8/31/2012 KOBUDO

KOBUDO  8.31.2012

 

The “Ancient martial art way” of Okinawa has been a large part of the history of karate  for hundreds of years. The two have always been taught together, they are called the two wheels of one cart. 

There are two schools of thought on the start of Kobudo. One is that after the Satsuma samurai captured and took control of Okinawa and put Martial law over the peasants to stop them from having weapons that they developed a fighting system from their farm tools. The second one is that it was developed by the Warrior class of Okinawa, the king’s men and bodyguards who were able to travel to China and bring back weapons and training techniques that the modern day Katas came from.

While the first  sounds very romantic and is a great story it just doesn’t make sense. The peasants had a very hard life working all the time just to stay alive, with barely enough food to take care of their family, it just doesn’t seem possible for them to have the time to train all night in karate and with weapons. The upper class of Okinawa were the ones who had the time, money, and education to practice and train in various martial arts. These men from the history of our Karate were from the noble class. Matsumoto, Sakugawa, Chatan yara, Sueyoshi, Chinen, Tawata, these men were the ones who trained and taught kobujutsu from 200 to 400 years ago, The modern day warriors; Toyama,Yabu Motobu, Mabuni, Taira Shinkan and Funakoshi were descendants of the warrior caste (pichin, Shizoku), and they kept the tradition of training and teaching kobudo.   I believe that this is were our karate and Kobudo came from. 

My question is , could kobudo be the forerunner of karate?  Is this where the old masters drew their ideas from when they were working out their styles of Karate? 

  Was karate formed by copying the movements of weapons?  The BO (staff) would have been very easy to copy , we can do the same strikes, blocks, and combos  empty handed .  The Sai (short sword) would also work empty handed.  

   The katas are very close in techniques, the footwork is interchangeable.  As early as 1326 there was major warfare between the three kingdoms of Okinawa, and this is when martial arts combat was develop and turned into techniques.  In 1393 China sent a large number of families to Okinawa to live, work, and spread the Chinese customs to  Okinawa.  In these families there were martial artists who would teach and train their arts.  So most of the early history of weapons was from  China. 

One of the most famous karate men was a Master Asato (1828-1914). He was a descendant from a Samurai family.  A master of Jigen Ryu swordsmanship, this school  is known for its emphasis on the first strike with no thought of a  second chance  ( Sounds like the way we train).  Master Asato’s way of thinking was ” think of your hands and feet like swords”-to practice like they are swords.  When you think of the way in which we do kata and self-defense we think of our hands as weapons.  The idea of Makiwara training is to turn our hands into weapons.   

I have always felt that  weapon katas came first, how else do we start a fighting system of empty hand, what model would we pull from? 

Some of our katas feel like a weapon kata, by doing the same moment with our hand or foot when  we  swing a Bo.  The different weapons would influence different hand techniques:  the sai would be our knife hand (shuto, Haito) the ton fa would be back-fist (uraken) the BO  would be a jab or low kick or a roundhouse punch, and combos would feel very natural.  

The knowledge that the old masters had from training with weapons helped develop their empty hand style.

So why didn’t kobudo become as poplar as karate?  One of the main emphasis of bringing karate into the 20th century was that  it didn’t need anything just a small place to train, because of the size of the place you could teach a larger number of people in karate then kobudo, maybe money was a factor you didn’t need to buy  weapons.

When I was in Japan training with Master Takazawa I asked him what  I should do to make my karate better and stronger,  he said to practice with the BO, it would help round my karate out by working on distance and footwork, also just swinging it around it would make my wrist and arms stronger.  The Japanese have a long history of fighting arts with weapons, so when Karate came to Japan they naturally used their experience with weapons to help develop karate into a more complete art. 

We can see the influence that kobudo had on karate, while we will never know the truth of which came first or what influenced what, it is still here for us to practice and learn from its long history to improve our karate.


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US Branch of Japan Keishinkan Karate