Plague of Strength

Miss the rest of this series? Here’s some binge-reading for you to do between future sets of potentially home-bound pullups.

Pankratists, Pehlwani, and a Couple Less Ancient Fightsport Oddities

Catch Wrestling

Female Fustigators Part 1

Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery / Early Modern Hybrid Martial Arts 1

Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery 2- Swimming for Cardio, Boxing, Wrestling, and Lifting for Strength

Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery 3- A Hard Motherfucker at Any Age or In Any Fight

The Badass origins of Fencing

There’s really no picking up where this left off, because this series has ended up looking like nothing so much as a Quentin Tarentino film, albeit somewhat less profane. To catch you up to speed, however, we’re sort of moving our way forward through time in region to region, uncovering major martial arts styles and the methods each type of practitioner uses for training. While I realize that not everyone on the planet shares an interest in turning one’s body into a lethal fighting machine, it should tickle enough of your hindbrain to pique your interest a little bit, no matter what strength sport or fight sport you prefer. When this began I had nothing in the way of a cohesive thesis formed in my head- I just thought examining the training methods of people in different fight sports throughout history might be interesting. As this has gotten a bit more involved as I’ve gone, one thing has become clear- there are a couple of distinct families of fight groups I’ve identified that transcends traditional delineations of styles.

Two types of martial arts seem to have spread outward from India- hard style and soft style. And before we begin quibbling over verbiage, I understand that traditionally hard = strong = application of force, and soft = weak = force redirection. Basically, it is the difference between grappling arts and striking arts, from that perspective, but there are also “internal” and “external” arts, which basically means mental and spiritual versus physical arts. My distinction is going to be a bit different, as I see two very distinct families of fighting: the hard, Western-influenced, “scientific,” kickboxing family and the soft, primordial, naturopathic, indigenous family of fighting arts.

I realize that distinction is my own contrivance, but at least for the purposes of this thesis, it holds up. The softer stuff, which ends up looking like nothing so much as a weird goth dance when Devo is playing, is what led to shit like kalaripayattu, silambam, and penjak silat. These softer styles are all said to me related, with krabi-krabong from Thailand being heavily influenced by the hyper-ancient Tamil martial art Varma kalai, which influenced the development of Indian yoga (not the new-wave white chick bullshit), Ayurvedic medicine, kalaripayattu, pressure-point manipulation, and silambam in southeastern India.

When that then spread outwards, it spread the use of those techniques, ritualistic dance, and traditional medicine throughout Southeast and East Asia, and possibly into Africa (I would assume that Kerala, being a major spice port, would have traded with the Kingdom of Congo, where capoeria is said to have arisen). That stuff all got absorbed into the native styles of various places, many of which seem to have been based on animal movements. This brought in the aspect of ritual war dances throughout Asia as a whole, unifying all of the “soft” styles as a generalized family of fighting arts that continued evolving as an almost living thing as it radiated outward from one of the most ancient civilizations on the planet.

Opposite on the spectrum from the ancient Tamil-influenced (pre-Aryan South Indian) primordial styles are the Greek-influenced kickboxing styles. When the Greeks conquered Northern India, they proved that the insanely brutal techniques utilized in pankration could overwhelm even the hardest motherfuckers used to more ritualized (and likely far less often lethal) primordial methods. The Indians picked up the hard style techniques used by the Greeks in pankration to create the basis for all of the muay thai-adjacent kickboxing styles you see today, including karate. Those then spread, via military conquests and cross-border cultural exchange across all of modern Pakistan, India save Kerala (which would tend to indicate kalaripayattu was a fuckload more than just dancefighting at that point), Bangladesh with the Maurya Empire, which then passed the fighting arts to the Pala Empire, whose borders eventually stretched across all of the top third of India to the western deserts and deep into Southeast Asia with the nation-states that would eventually coalesce into the Bengal Sultanate. From there, it spread further, into southern China in one direction and the Pacific archipelagos in the other, landing finally on the shores of Okinawa as one of the most battle-tested fighting arts a species could possibly produce.

That’s right, karate is not only Greek-influenced, it’s in no way Japanese. Instead, karate hails from Okinowa, which you may have known, but Okinowa is actually closer to Taiwan than Japan, and it’s only been Japanese since 1879. In the intervening 140 years, the Japanese have done everything possible to eliminate knowledge of the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was a vassal state of the Chinese for over 400 years, as were the kingdoms that preceded Ryukyu. In an effort to Japan-wash (whatever the Japanese version of whitewash would be) the history all of their imperial holdings, the ethnic Yokoi Japanese took a heavily Chinese-influenced Okinowan martial art and made it ethnically Japanese, complete with a Joker-esque fabricated backstory… and that’s before you consider the fact is was already the world’s most diverse hybrid martial art ever by the time it hit that island.

“A little Siamese boxing here, some Shuao Jiao wrestling there, some stick fighting from the Philippines, some xing/hsing from Taiwan, a touch of buki-gwa from Shanghai… add two essential ingredients known as Time and Open-Minded Culture, then multiply it with the number of foreign visits this small island of trade got during its heyday (know as the era of the Ryukyu Kingdom), you’ll pretty soon get the picture.

“Karate” (sic., the term didn’t exist at the time) was an eclectic mix of what worked and didn’t work in a physical confrontation. With or without weapons… So, naturally, some kind of order had to be created in this chaos. Enter a Chinese gentleman known as Wu Xiangui. An expert of ming he quan (“whooping crane boxing”). Better known by the Japanese reading of his name: Go Kenki. The star of this article.

Before we go any further though, you need to know that many Southern Chinese quan-fa masters influenced the local fighting arts community of Okinawa, ending up in this peaceful island through different means. Some came as officials on big Chinese tribute/trading ships (known as sappushi), some drifted ashore when they got shipwrecked, while others may have fled the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, searching refuge in the peaceful island of Okinawa.”

“Go Kenki was one of the principal advisors to an incredible, underground, Illuminati-like, secret society of Karate masters in Okinawa, known as the Ryukyu Tode-jutsu Kenkyu-kai (lit. Ryukyu Chinese Hand Research Society). A society created with the sole purpose of bringing order to chaos.

“In 1918 a group of Okinawan Karate enthusiasts (including some famous people like Chomo Hanashiro, Chotoku Kyan, Nakasone Genwa, Chojun Miyagi, Kenwa Mabuni, Chojo Oshiro, Maeshiro Choryo, Kentsu Yabu, Juhatsu Kyoda, Moden Yabiku and Chibana Choshin) formed an exclusive research/knowledge exchange group for serious Karate study, since so many old grandmasters of the art had recently passed away (Anko Itosu and Kanryo Higaonna both died in 1915). That’s right. An open-minded, collaborative platform for Karate development.”

“This was the first time that practitioners of different “methods” (Shuri, Naha and Tomari-te) [editor’s note: I linked some style breakdowns for the curious, but I realize almost all of this is superfluous information that likely only interests me]– later known as “styles” – met to train together in an informal setting to discuss and exchange information on the fighting arts. Each time they met, one senior would lead the training and all would benefit from their knowledge (this study group lasted until 1929 when, because of the popularity of Karate, most members all became too busy with their own students to train themselves!) And here, during these formative years, is where most modern-day researchers believe [Whooping Crane kung fu expert] Go Kenki played an integral part in shaping what we today call Karate” (Enkamp).

Having established that karate is not in any way Japanese, it also stands to reason that we might also acknowledge the fact that what you know as karate- the paint-by-numbers, Boy Scout bullshit parents have their kids do so they can get a couple of kid-free hours a couple nights a week is not the shit with which Japanese fighters were busying themselves in the early 20th Century. It couldn’t have been, because the Japanese have had a fierce military tradition that makes the esprit de corps of the US Marines look like a pack of cunty 20-something American broads who respond to everything with a surly and halfhearted “whatever.” The Japanese had fought in armor for centuries, however, and their hand to hand skills were thus mostly limited to grappling, because striking ceramic armor with a closed fist really only results in injuries to the assailant rather than the assailed. They were scrambling for a fighting method with which they could prove their etho-nationalistic elitism (because at this point fight sports were becoming very popular in the rapidly rising Western world, and it was an easy way to lord one’s racial superiority over others), and the hybrid style they created known as karate became what filled the bill.

In short: modern competition/point-fighting “karate” bears as much resemblance to the brutally effective fighting methods at its roots as a miniature French bulldog has in common with its giant molosser ancestors. Except that karate doesn’t even bear that sort of direct lineage.

The roots of Japanese family of martial arts known as karate is a combination of fighting styles bearing little influence from Japan and which come in such broad array of methodologies, intents, and rulesets that discussing karate as a single entity is as stupid as discussing Africa or America as a monolith. That said, this treatment is merely going to cover those with direct applications to fight sports or martial combat, as it doesn’t really require much specific weight training to do performing arts- I don’t anticipate covering the weight training routines of ballerinas at any point, either.

Shotokan, the basis of much of the chop-socky nonsense one traditionally thinks of in reference to karate, is essentially the wallpaper paste of the karate family. The style that made karate popular in Japan, Shotokan is the thing to which all of the pretty stuff sticks, and the thing without which you essentially don’t have karate, in spite of the fact it is and was considered lightweight enough to drive one Mas Oyama into the woods to fight trees, rocks, and waterfalls until he could (allegedly) knock out a bull with a single punch. Though you wouldn’t know it by most accounts- Oyama didn’t form this style on his own, but rather with a partner. That partner, Kenji Kurosaki, was allegedly meaner than a Florida gator on meth and such a hardass that even the yakuza feared him, making him the perfect partner for a man who’d essentially spent his life attempting to become the gnarliest brawler the world had ever seen.

Their partnership in bloodshed lasted about 30 years, during which time the two men continually trained in Thailand and sent other fighters to learn Thai techniques so that they would fare better in the Japanese vs Thai kickboxing fights that had been the rage in the region throughout the 60s. Fought under a variety of rulesets, both with and without gloves, these fights played heavily in the schism between “traditional” karate fighters and more modern ones who adopted more effective foreign techniques (which was actually in keeping with tradition, rather than the opposite). Those fights were what drove kyokushin to become what it did- it was essentially intended to be a “muay thai killer”- but Oyama balked at dropping the trappings of traditionalism, like wearing gloves and punching to the face, that were causing ruleset friction, another schism arose.

Kurosaki, who was both their PR man and one of the first Japanese fighters to publicly challenge a Thai, had attempted to push the style more into Thai-style sportfighting (which while perceived as less hardcore for the lack of protection, had proved less valuable in battling foreign fighters under differing rules. Seeing no point in limiting his growth as a fighter to satisfy a need for excessive traditionalism, Kurosaki set about founding the school to prove his style was harder than Oyama’s- Meijiro Gym. In the Netherlands he found massive success after dropping the restrictive onus of the term “karate” for kickboxing, and he created the style and legacy you see represented in the style of all of the modern Dutch-influenced European kickboxers- Dutch kickboxing is just a renamed no-gi kyokushin offshoot.

It’s important to remember that karate is a lot like pizza- it is an open-source idea on which one can build greatness or utter tragedy, so don’t lump the kyokushinkai and Meijiro/Kurosaki guys in with the goofs focusing on their ki/chi. That would be like tasting a slice of Elio’s frozen pizza burned to death by someone with a love of carcinogenic compounds and declaring that all pizza is dogshit as a result.

As one might expect, the training methods of the traditionalists and the modern kickboxers differ wildly, with the soft-style “traditionalists” sticking primarily to bodyweight stuff and ancient training methods likely adopted from the Chinese and Koreans (many of their masters either were Chinese/Korean or learned their fighting arts in those nations, so they brought with them pre-industrial training methods). A subsequent part or parts will cover the strength training methods employed by these fighters over the years, using “traditional” methods, what should be unsurprisingly modern-and-actually traditional methods, and modern methods, which means that before I go into the early modern Japanese methods I’ll have to cover the ancient Chinese roots of it all. In the meantime, you can bone up on the other influences of, contributors to, and types of kickboxing (and their training methods) in this rad three-parter I dropped a while back:

Kickboxing, Part 1

Kickboxing, Part 2

B-Movie Martial Arts Beasts Sidebar

Sources:

Crudelli, Chris. The Way of the Warrior. New York: DK Publishing, 2008.

Enkamp, Jesse. Go Kenki: the undercover kung-fu pioneer of Okinawan karate.  Karate By Jesse.  12 Feb 2012.  Web.  23 Mar 2020.  https://www.karatebyjesse.com/go-kenki-the-undercover-kung-fu-pioneer-of-okinawan-karate/

Heaney, Scott. The 20 Greatest Kyokushin Karate Fighters of All Time: #12-09. The Martial Way. Web. 18 May 2020. http://the-martial-way.com/the-20-greatest-kyokushin-karate-fighters-of-all-time-12-09/

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