the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

another martial arts rumination from the archives...

Several years ago, I came home from my martial arts class and said to my roommate, "I just learned the coolest technique.  Let me show you how it works.  Attack me."

She shrugged, grabbed my collar with one hand, and hit me solidly with a right hook.

"Not like that," I said.  You have to attack like this."  I stepped back into the standard left front stance with a low block, then stepped forward with a straight punch to the solar plexus.

She stood looking at me as though I'd just grown another head.  "Why?" she asked finally.

"Because that's the way we practice our defense techniques," I said, equally confused.  What was her problem?  This is THE WAY IT'S DONE.  Well...she couldn't be expected to know, since she wasn't a martial artist herself.

I wish I could say that my roommate's attack, in its blatant reality, woke me up.  Had I been paying attention, I could have spent the next few years training for a real encounter instead of wasting my time and energy learning to defend against what I have come to think of as the Straw Man Attack.

I borrowed this title from the fallacy of the same name. For those unversed in logic, the person who argues against your weak points while ignoring your strong ones is guilty of "attacking the straw man."  He builds something out of nothing--a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak--then beats it to a pulp.  In so doing, he hasn't disproved your argument, nor has he proven his own, but he usually feels as though he has won.  And, sad to say, spectators usually think he has won, as well.

At the time, even though I'd just been confronted with the complete ineffectiveness of what I was learning, I didn't give it a second thought.  Why?  My nearest guess is that my faith in my master and in the traditional methods he taught blinded me.  I wanted to believe that what I had invested so much time, energy and money in was worthwhile, so I simply ignored the overwhelming evidence that it was, indeed, worthless.

Over the years, I've trained in several dojos and visited countless more, and I have not yet seen any students being trained for real situations.  To a man, the instructors teach "defenses" against the Straw Man Attack.  Some errors are the fault of the instructor.  Others are a direct result of the apathy and laziness of students.

Some things a real attacker WON'T do are:

1. Attack from a low, traditional stance.

2. Use a straight punch.

3. Use a knifehand/hammerfist to the top of the head.

4. Punch or kick from such a distance that his fist stops, at full extension, before it hits your body.

5. Punch or kick from such a distance that this fist/foot only taps you.

6. Punch over your head or past your shoulder.

7. Punch, then leave his arm where it stopped.

8. Swing only once.

9. Attack from a distance that renders any kicking defense feasible.

10. Forget that he has a left hand.

11. Grab you, then stand there.

12. Grab you, then release you (on cue) when you begin your counter-technique.

13. Be afraid to touch you.

14. Allow you to keep your balance so you can perform your technique.

Any "attack" that makes even one of these mistakes is a Straw Man.  I can't count the number of "defenses" I have under my belt just in case I'm ever attacked by a slow, uncommitted one-armed man with poor depth perception.

There's an old Monty Python skit called "Self Defense Classes," in which the instructor says, "And today, class, we will learn what to do if you're attacked by a man wielding an apple."  One of the students says, "We did apples yesterday."  So the instructor goes through a list a fruit until he finds one they haven't done yet:  "What to do if you're attacked by a man with a banana." (You pull out your gun and shoot him.)

I expect this skit was inspired by the Straw Man Attack (and it makes another valid point about the inherent overkill of this sort of training:  if a man punches weakly at you once, you are probably not justified in breaking any of his bones).

Now.  Let's take a short quiz.  A boxer is preparing for a title fight.  Does he spend his time and energy (a) blocking and countering straight punches from front stances, (b) learning to dodge roundhouse kicks to the head, (c) jumping rope, shadowboxing while picturing a real opponent, and jabbing, hooking, and uppercutting into a heavy bag?

Let's begin by grounding ourselves firmly in reality.  A few things you can expect on the street are:

1. An unannounced attack from a person who is larger and stronger than you are.

2. A sucker punch, from the rear hand (the power hand) and over the shoulder like a hardball.

3. A grab and yank, often accompanied by a punch--from any direction.

4. A haymaker punch, jab, or uppercut that goes through you, with body weight behind it.

5. A dive or tackle.

6. A shove from any direction.

7. A hair grab accompanied by a punch or knee.

8. A scooping groin shot, as though he's playing soccer and going for the goal.

9. A blinding array of punches until he either goes down or scores.

10. An instant struggle to grab you again, should you escape his first grab.

11. An ongoing effort to keep you off-balance.

12. The momentum of his body bearing down on you, powering himself, his hands, elbows, knees and feet through you.

I've listed only the common sense things that we may reasonably train for.  I've left out the fact that he'll probably have a weapon and bring friends.  First things first.

Any presumed "attack" which poses no threat whatsoever to the intended victim is a Straw Man.  Practice against such an "attack" only gives students a false sense of security.  That is to say, it actually endangers the students. *

I continue to be amazed that almost every martial artist I meet, when confronted with the utter silliness of this "training tool," will struggle to defend it, tooth and nail.  Explanations include muscle memory, developing and combining techniques, and deliberate simplification for training purposes.  ("Because that's the way it's always been done" will not be accepted as a reason.  Blaming any act on tradition is just another way of saying "I don't know," but allows the instructor/master to avoid actually having to admit this.  If he is forced to say, "I don't know," he might feel obliged to find a reasonable answer.  Writing something off to "tradition" allows him to maintain his current state of brain death.)

"Muscle memory" is only useful with the attack for which it was intended (hence, any residual muscle memory from the Straw Man Attack is useless), and if the triggered defense is useable.  When you glance at your wristwatch, you activate muscle memory, but no matter how many times you flick your arm up and look at your wrist, it does you no good unless you're wearing your watch, it has batteries, and you've set it to the correct time.  At least half of the "self-defense" techniques I have learned over the years and which I've seen masters teaching would actually be self-destructive under fire.  You couldn't pay me to try any spinning or flying kick in a real situation, for example, but I see such things being taught on a regular basis.  Yeah…they're beautiful, all right.  But suicidal.  Personally, I don't want any bystanders looking at my corpse and saying, "They cut her down like a dog, but golly…you should have seen her last kick!"

I've visited a dojo a few years ago in which self-defense was practiced as follows:  one student would step forward into a right front stance, execute a right straight punch, and wait.  Then, his "defender" would step forward so that he was close enough to reach his attacker's arm, then block.  I confess that I didn't even bother to ask the master (ahem...grandmaster) what he thought they might learn from this exercise.  I was too busy retching in the corner.

I heard another master explain to his students, "No one will ever actually attack you this way, but it gets your mind in the defense mode, so when somebody does attack, you'll be one step ahead of the situation."  That sounds great (like most standard dojo explanations), but wouldn't it be even better to teach them to defend against an actual attack, so they can start two, maybe three steps ahead of the situation?  I'd prefer to not be in the situation to begin with, so if it's all the same to you, let me be as many steps "ahead" of it as possible.  Thank you.

Perhaps such simplification is good for developing beginner skills.  If your opponent attacks you in a front stance with a straight punch, you can learn how his balance works and what openings are available.  Right?  Well, you learn how his balance works and what openings are available in a front stance with a straight punch, which doesn't help you a damn bit if someone walks up to you, grabs your lapel, and knocks your block off.

A simulated realistic attack would be easier to teach, since you don't have to train students the "proper" way to attack, and it is more beneficial in the long run.  In training beginners, the attacker moves slowly so that they learn about balance, openings, timing, and angles at their own speed, and they learn how to stay relaxed.  As their expertise increases, so does the speed of attack.  When they can defend against a larger opponent moving full speed with a real attack, they have earned the right to walk down dark alleys with confidence.

Funakoshi's Contribution?

A friend of mine who lives to argue with me (and I love him for it) has pointed out that the stylized self-defense practice that is accepted today must be there for a reason, even if we don't know what that reason is yet.

His argument sounds good, but it asks me to just have faith, and I am absolutely incapable of believing anything without reason.  As noted earlier, I have occasionally fallen under the spell of wanting to believe, which is close enough to mindlessness (i.e., faith) to render me deaf, blind and stupid.  In retrospect, it frightens me to know that I was so impervious to logic, and on an important subject, no less (self defense is about life and death, is it not?), so I am now ultra-sensitive to anyone's suggestion that I "just believe."

But concerning his point that somebody added this stylized self-defense practice to the curriculum for a reason, I agree wholeheartedly.  Of course it's there for a reason.  Just like kata.  But what might that reason be?

We already know who added the Straw Man Attack.  It was none other than "the father of modern karate" himself.  According to the karate "classic," Karate:  the art of "empty hand" fighting, "In the 1920's, under the leadership of Gichin Funakoshi, a system of elementary sparring was devised."  Right about the same time as he dumbed down the kata in order to teach them to school children for exercise, I'm guessing.

But why do you suppose he saw fit to throw in this "training technique," without which he and every other master who'd ever lived since the beginning of time had become formidable fighters?

Here's my theory.  Funakoshi understood the true applications of his art.  He said in his autobiography that, in a confrontation, "once karate enters, the issue becomes a matter of life and death."  He spoke of many confrontations in his autobiography, and each time, he spoke of karate as being not dangerous, but deadly.  When he was asked to teach it to school children, he jumped at the chance, since karate had been so good for him, physically and psychologically.  But (he says in his autobiography), "hoping to see karate included in the universal physical education taught in our public schools, I set about revising the kata so as to make them as simple as possible.  Times change, the world changes, and obviously the martial arts must change, too.  The karate that high school students practice today...is a long way indeed from the karate I learned when I was a child in Okinawa....What is most important is that karate, as a form of sport used in physical education, should be simple enough to be practiced without undue difficulty by everybody...."

Note the shift from "life and death" to "sport."  He made these changes in the 1920s, right after the end of "the war to end all wars."  Despite (or because of?) his deadly abilities, Funakoshi was a pacifist. (Incidentally, this is the impression I got from his autobiography; I urge you to read the book Karate-do:  My Way of Life and draw your own conclusions.)  He would go out of his way to avoid any confrontation, and he seemed to live in fear that one of his students might harm others with something that he (Funakoshi) had taught.  Funakoshi repeatedly stressed that use of karate technique is a last resort only.  He believed that deadly and debilitating techniques were outdated with the end of the First World War, but that karate still had a place in society--as a sport.

He wanted the children to benefit the way he had from the art, but he didn't want the responsibility of teaching them dangerous techniques.  Is it possible that his revolutionary "elementary sparring" was only camouflage?  I suggest to you that it is not only possible--it is probable. If it really is an important training tool, why was Funakoshi the first the think of it?  And why was it non-existent until karate made the transition from "survival tool" to "sport"?  If anybody is motivated to get the techniques perfect, it's the guy whose very life hangs in the balance, not the guy trying to reduce his potbelly.

So Funakoshi teaches schoolchildren some "basic applications," right?  If the children had examples of the basic movements in action, they would assume they understood the move, and not look any deeper.  And it worked.  Today, Funakoshi's calisthenics for children (i.e., karate) has a worldwide following and has blossomed into a multi-million dollar industry, and almost every hard artist I meet says in absolute sincerity that the motion we call a low block was designed to deflect blows to the midsection.

P.T. Barnum was right.  There is a sucker born every minute.

Speaking of the low block, I wonder...at what point did our basic movements get their commonly accepted names?  The Chinese arts from which karate was derived had esoteric names, like Dragon Wags Its Tail or Cherry Blossom in the Typhoon.  In a way, the Japanese found a way to hide the true nature of the art better than the Chinese did, simply by pretending to not hide anything at all.  The Chinese names don't presume to tell you how to use the moves; their labels actually encourage you to find your own interpretation.  And there's always a chance you'll hit the jackpot.

But the Japanese made the art "more accessible" by providing more descriptive names for each move, didn't they?  The best place to hide anything is in full view.  Thus, we learn the "low block" and practice it, all the while making the natural assumption that no one would name a move for what it's not. This mislabeling has been so effective that we continue to see this move as a block, even when it is repeatedly demonstrated that such an interpretation is untenable.

Did Funakoshi create and standardize these misleading labels?  Well, he altered several aspects of the art.  By his own admission, he changed the Japanese characters that represent "karate" from those that meant "Chinese hand" to "empty hand."  He changed the names of the forms (some of which, I've heard, originally gave hints for interpretation).  He simplified the forms so that schoolchildren could learn them with little trouble, and in the process, he altered hand positions and movements that might be clues to valid interpretation.  Changing the names of moves to something more descriptive would definitely fall under the "make karate accessible for everyone" ideal.  After all, "outside block" is far easier to remember than "Cat Cleans Its Ears," or whatever the technique was originally called.  He certainly had the most opportunity and reason to change the names, so...there's a good chance that it was him.

Funakoshi's contribution was a mixed blessing, at best.  We Occidentals may have never learned any Oriental martial arts if it weren't for him, but I question how much we're really getting out of the diluted version we have.

(c) pdb, 15 Jun 2000

* The only way to be certain of a fight's outcome is to know your opponent's abilities and your own.  But you cannot know what your opponent will do.  The only thing you can know is yourself.  When your self-defense practice consists of crushing a Straw Man, you think you're more effective than you are.  That is, you don't even know yourself.  Confidence without ability is a recipe for disaster.