Harry Cook in Fighting Arts. Motobu's son in an interview with Graham Noble, I believe. It is well documented AND remembered by the old masters, that Motobu walked into Funakoshi's dojo and dumped him on his ' harris ' ! It is one of the reasons that several high level people left him and started training with Motobu, Ohtsuka being one of them. The Okinawans, who taught Funikoshi, and many of his Japanese contemperories had only a middling respect for his martial abilities, although his social standing and net working skills were respected. Unlike people like Morio Higoanna and Keinosuke Enoeda who were / are both karate scholars and karate fighters, as was Motobu, whilst Funakoshi senior was a karate scholar and intermmediate karate player, he couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag !!! ( His son Yoshitake however, WAS a phenominal fighter, according to record ). Karate is karate. it can be good and it can be dross. But as a general rule of thumb, look for something with a strong Okinawan influence. Just to digress, I believe in the fifties, the Goju Kai mauled the Shotokan, ( Yamaguchi is credited with introducing Ju Yu Kumite in to karate training as most dojo at the time prohibited or looked down on fighting and emphasized the ' karate do ' aspects ). I have NEVER EVER seen ANY realistic knife defence in ANY karate dojo. I'm happy to come along with with a real 10 inch commando knife and have some sensei show me as long as I'm absolved of any blame when I stick it in you............
I have a tendency to agree with you, but I also feel that the Tanto Dori (knife defences) in Wado are often misunderstood. Let’s be quite clear, the best way to defend yourself against a knife is to leg it. The Wado Tanto Dori are not taught as definitive "stand alone" techniques that are guaranteed to work. But the practice is designed to highlight the difference between a weapon attack and an open hand - Namely distance. It’s also important to remember that like all other Wado pair work, they should be approached correctly as Kata by both Uke and Tori. It is just as much about the attacker learning how to use the knife correctly as it is the defender against it. Otsuka sensei took these techniques from Yoshin Ryu (a very old Koryu Jutsu), and as such it was probable (in the age when these techniques were developed) that both Uke and Tori were armed with Tanto / Kodachi. Today, Tanto dori has its role in the dojo as an exercise in correct distance, timing and movement, whilst also being able to use some good Aiki-Jutsu throws ie Kote-gaeshi etc. All of the above said, back on topic - Just because Wado incorporates these sort of techniques into their training it does not mean that it is any better than any other style. Slightly different yes, but not better. Very cliché but true - its not the Martial Art its the Martial Artist that counts.
Hi Gary, Good post. I am in complete, ( Well almost ), agreement with you from a ' Koryu ' perspective, but disagree with you from a ' realistic ' point of view. Unless trying to preserve a tradition or traditional martial art, martial arts should evolve so as to be efficient or effective in the current enviroment you wish to use them in. BJJ is the perfect example of this. Developed from Koryu jujutsu into a realistic, proven and deadly art, ( By trial and combat ), to operate in it's environment, the mean streets of Brazil. Every MMA practitioner will train in BJJ and incorporate it into his game. And here for me, is where most, ( Not all ), traditional karate falls down. It doesn't evolve or develop and for the most part, it isn't suited to modern day needs, I'm not talking about karateka who subsequently go off and train in combatives. ( There is a good article in this months issue of Combat, by Mick Coup, that I would recommend highly about self protection and the evolution of self protection ! ) If you want to learn SOME knife defence, go and train or do some seminars with world class people who know about knives and knife fighting. You wont find it any traditional karate dojo with any karateka who has only ever trained karate, teaching effective knife defence, period. If they say they do or their literature says they do, then they need sectioning. I guarantee if I hold a knife to your gut and tell you I'm going to stick it in you, your karate will go pear shaped and your gi bottoms will turn brown and red. Cold steel in the hands of a nutter can do that to you.......... On a seminar I attended recently on knife defense I was told thus, against a drunken nutter with a knife who puts you in a situation where you can't run or back off, and you believe you are fighting for your life, and you absolutely have no alternative, you WILL get cut, possibly very badly unless you attack the attack and commit.......you may get stabbed fatally, but the object is to control, grab, immobilize, contain that knifehand no matter what and carry on attacking the aggressor, no matter how badly your are cut...............if you can. All these fancy wrist and arm locks........Ha Ha Ha. However, if a serious knifefighter wants you, you have two hopes....... No hope and Bob Hope !!!
So how does the "current environment" differ from that of say 50 years ago - are you saying people didn't carry knives until recently? They didn't carry knives 50, 100, 200, 500, even 1000 years ago? I've heard this mentioned a lot - "modern day environment" etc. etc. - has fighting really changed that much? And if so, how? What if your "current environment" is just a load of untrained streetfighters? Would Karate be useful then? And if your current environment is amongst lots of highly trained warriors, how have you ended up in such a situation? What is so special about the streets of Brazil that BJJ works there rather than say Muay Thai or suchlike? Do they like rolling around on the ground a lot or something? What about the fact that on the street you are likely to be taking on more than one attacker, making going to the ground rather dangerous? Do you only ever get attacked by a single attacker in Brazil or something? And they have incredibly clean streets with no sharp stones, broken glass etc therefore making going to the ground easy, with no risk of impaling yourself on something on the way down?
I always think that attitude is unduly pessimistic. If you train with knives yourself, then that must shift the balance slightly in your favour. And I don't mean crappy self defence drills, I mean actually fighting with, say, a rubber knife.
Hi Jaae, Combining elements of 3 posts here: Without wishing to seem too tongue in cheek, I teach knife defences. All the defences I teach have been pressure tested full pelt with both attacker and defender in full mobile top to toe body armour. The only ones that made it through the testing process were the ones we could pull off without a scratch 90% of the time (if we got stabbed at all they went). In case you are wondering - these were done with verbal prefight, in tired and disorientating conditions (heat exhaustion in a cold room) and with limited visibility on hard brick and concrete. We don't test to fight knife fighters - we test to fight the knife that is pulled from the sheath or the pocket or the bag and either goes for you or is used to threaten you. Despite all this - and despite me having enough faith in my drills to teach them to other people. If you think I'm going to let anyone try them on me with a real knife in training - forget it. I've faced real knives and I'm perfectly able to get the same adrenaline dump from a rubber one. Getting caught with a rubber one tells me all I need to know - training with real knives is a stupid invitation to Mr Murphy. I'm actually surprised you even made that joke. I got 'cut' by one of my own students the other day in a demo because I was too busy thinking about what I wanted to do next in the seminar rather than focusing all my attention on what I should have been doing. I did own up to it though (audience wasn't in a position to see). Absolutely. There is a place for them - after you've cleared the weapon, controlled the blade and made lots of contact - ie after the real threat is gone. I made a big post about knife defences in the self defence section last month. I should be putting up a fresh knife article on martialartspublishing in the near future. I will concur with you that I've yet to see an easily identifiable as Karate effective knife defence. My own tactics are based upon elements of a particular Kata but they've had a fair amount of non-karate put in and I'd have to talk people through it before they recognised Empi.
The only real "first" defense, aside from the standard "don't bring a hand to a knife fight, or a knife to a gun fight" is when blocking the weapon hand, block with your palms inward so that the contact point of your own hand/arm is the tougher, more sineous part of the hand/arm. Then, as noted, after the clear, either control and pummel, or after the clear, run like a son of a bitch.
Funny you should mention the unrecognisability of empi. I was with my jitsu friend today who showed me empi after telling me it was like my empi. Needless to say, after 10 techniques, all elbow, it's not the kata as I know it!
I don't think to be honest Karate has that much use against knives ( I do Shotokan) - although I agree with jwtitchen - if you isolate some techniques out of it and adapt them, they could be good. Understanding of body shifting etc. maybe. but the moves they actually tell you traditionally against knives I think wouldn't work that well.
Mark - you know I'd be more than happy to visit your club. Get in contact and lets fix a time. I've now ditched all my academic work so my time is divided solely between work in the RAF reserves and teaching self defence. I am happy to go out and teach PDR, DART, kata based self defence and/or the Heian Flow System (which is in part the latter but has been focused (in its published state) as a means of getting Karateka to put kata more firmly in the syllabus). I actually used Empi by surprise in a demo the other day. I'd been teaching empi based drills from teh DART syllabus (9th Kyu stuff now) of one type (and had the Shotokan class witness the precise kata move (Gedan Barai, age zuki etc)) and at the end of the class did a High Gear demo of two versus two arguing over a 'reserved' pool table in a bar. To ensure there was a fight I deliberately didn't back down and my senior student went for me. I flinched and found myself (due to the unplanned angle) in the wrong position to do any of my normal flinch based responses, with his weight an d his arm on top of me - but perfectly primed to do a left arm headlock from Heian Sandan. He reacted to the headlock by trying a right uppercut (his furthest side away from me) and feeling the weight shift I dropped Empi style into a squat - taking him flat on his back with my left arm still round his neck and preventing him from moving his arms up to hit me. Before he'd had a chance to wriggle I'd put five palm strikes hard into his visor. The other two guys hadn't had time to register what had happened and so I was able to roundhouse the other 'bad guy' in the abdomen from my ground position (never thought I'd do a roundhouse in self defence - but then I saw a woman roundhouse a guy in the head in a car while training in New York state in October) - totally out of his line of sight which was focused on the guy directly in front of him. I followed the kick by rising up - taking his neck and dropping him down in the same manner with the same finish. Absolutely unplanned - techniques I'd never employed in that way before - but trust me, when you're getting sworn at and someone attacks you full pelt in front of a seminar crowd - you get the full adrenaline dump because you know that you're going to get knocked out by your student (who is trying to impress) if you get it wrong. Those of you that saw the High Gear demo at Map III - the same guys in suits plus me. They said subsequently that the pressure of performing in front of such a 'perceived critical' audience at the Map demo was one of the reasons why all hell broke loose (how many times did the fight go into the crowd?). They really did have big adrenaline dumps and subsequently affected motor responses due in part to the aggression of 'the bad guy' (whose shouting traumatised the RSPCA lady at the other end of the hall). Back on topic. I don't think I was ever taught knife defences in a regular karate Dojo. I had knife training in Aikido that was over reliant on fine motor skill and a slow distant attack (but I would like to stress that I am sure in some Aiki dojos they do more realistic stuff) and Krav Maga based knife training in Chicago. I've had Rick Clark teach rifle disarms at my Dojo using weapons from my armoury. The rest I've just had to play with until I found something that worked - like alll my Karate really.
Not really, no. What I had in mind was much more 'alive' than Ridiculously Bad Self Defence- type drills normally are. Besides, what else are you going to do? train with real knives?
I may take you up on that John , i'll have a word with my chief instructor when we put the years events together over the next couple of weeks and let you know (i could always lend him my copy of your book to convince him )
Mark - you should remember that doing the drills is far easier than reading the drills. They come across much better once you put them into action. John PS Review of book on amazon would be nice if you can spare 5 min.
JWTwitchen, Thanks for your courteous and intelligent reply. Obviously, you are progressive in your outlook and you obviously understand to ' practice ' ` knife defense, you have to make it is as close to the ' real scenario ' as possible. You also realize the seismic shift in the mind of the ( potential ) ' victim ' and their pyschology, when the threatening blade is no longer rubber, but steel. You have also seemed to have trained in a variety of systems, which is one of the underlying points I was making. As I'm typing this, the news has flashed that another fatal stabbing as occurred in London and we've only just entered 2008. Another underlying point I was making was that Karate practitioners / sensei should be honest with themselves and their students and widen their scope of training and either train with some who are recognized in their field or bring them into the dojo.
Let's change anything for anything. "The instructor who was world class stated that awareness was your primary self protection tool and your psychology was your key survival tool."...is the starting point of good training for self defence, regardless of style. JWT's points about training under stress are the next steps in training for self defence, regardless of style. And your point about seeking out the best in particular fields in order to train with them is something all Instructors should do. This is nothing to do with karate and everything to do with methodology. Mitch
It's just an opinion , it's not worth having a knife fight over. Anyway, I believe knives and carrying them are against the law, ( sic ). I'm aware of JWC's good reputation and I'm sure there are many karate instructors out there, like John, who have cross trained with reputable instructors and they bring this knowledge back into their dojo and teach it responsibly, ( And karate sensei's should educate their students on such matters ). Unfortunately, IMHO they are in the minority. If a karate instructor teaches KD ( Knife Defense ) he should be be honest with his students and name his reference or resource, or whether he has devised the KD strategies and drills himself, but we both know, generally this doesn't happen. The majority, certainly the many I have come into contact with, do not. It's a similar situation, with grappling. Many karateka I speak to, or train with or come into contact with, say they include grappling in their syllabus. When I question with whom they train with, some train with acknowledged coaches, but many say, ' Oh no one, I don't need to, it's all in the Kata '. I'm agreeing with your reply, ( You seem to be agreeing with me, a little... ), but I advocate most profoundly, that to learn knife defense, seek out the best knife practitioners and to learn to grapple, likewise, seek out great coaches, but, you'll never learn either from a karateka who has never stepped out of their comfort zone and practised nothing but karate. I also totally agree with your last sentence, KD has very little to do with karatedo. Karate is great..................for karate. Happy New Year. It would be interesting if all the karateka reading this thread questioned their Sensei as to who taught THEM, KD and grappling....
