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Finlay
Finlay's picture
Fighting fashion

I was looking at a discussion online about the block, kick, punch applications vs more practical application. It was one of the few times I have seen someone defending the block, punch and not fall back on the 'it's art' or some similar argument.

The gentlemen in question argued that the longer range punching and blocking style of fighting that was favoured in those days. Despite the huge gaping flaws in this arguement. It does lead on to maybe an interesting point.

has fighting actually changed much in the past 200 years or so?

in my mind it has stayed largely the same with psyche outs, pushing shoving, gang attacks etc but has anything changed. I think there maybe a few techniques in the forms that are maybe obsolete or need to be a little altered

i would think the main difference may come with environment, we're glassings as common then as they are now for example

so, have attacks or fighting changed with the time?

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Finlay wrote:
The gentlemen in question argued that the longer range punching and blocking style of fighting that was favoured in those days … has fighting actually changed much in the past 200 years or so?

That strikes me as a very poor argument. I agree it’s novel, but it’s still very poor. It’s again a question of “solution” defining problem i.e. “we have a fixed skill set so we will pretend violence is something it’s not in order to justify the state of that skill set”. Of course what should logically happen is “Let’s honestly and objectively look violence as it is, and then ensure our training matches that.”

Wim Demeere discusses another example of this here:

http://www.wimsblog.com/2015/03/ground-fighting-against-a-knife-attack/

The video on the page shows a two-on-one fight where two people are fighting on the floor and the third person repeatedly stabs from a standing position. Wim makes the following observation:

“Let’s kill the Brazilian myth. There’s a myth that has been kept alive ever since Gracie Ju Jitsu became popular. Whenever you mention the dangers of ground fighting in a self-defense context, somebody brings up that in Brazil, people will not intervene when two people fight on the ground. Yeah… We just saw how that worked out…

Some people will read this article and think I’m bashing BJJ or other grappling systems; I’m not. These are excellent styles in certain environments and contexts. But in others, they are not such a great idea. Knowing when and where to use them is critical. As you can see in the video, you might not get a second chance when you mess up.”

It would seem to me that whoever “argued that the longer range punching and blocking style of fighting that was favoured in those days” is making a similar false “cultural argument”.

There has never been a time where people have fought by throwing lunging punches, empty hand on hip, and then stood there so the other guy can have a go! The reason we can be 100% sure of this is because it is a stupid and incredibly ineffective way to fight. It would take an entire nation to be that stupid for it gain widespread use. All it would take is for one guy to think, “Hey! Wait a minute! Instead of kiai-ing, dropping into lower-block position, and then trying to hit him with a single lunge punch from 10 feet away; what I did was wait until he was distracted and then smashed him with close-range rapid fire shots … Tried it! It worked great!” As soon as that happened then everyone would go, “Yes! What that guy said! Let’s all do that now!” There’s just no way would that ever happen and it’s a ridiculous premise.

The only reason people ever trained that way was a disconnection from reality when karate was introduced to Japan and a mistaken “recreation” of that “reality” i.e. “we move this way, but don’t understand why because they never told us and we never asked, so let’s try to hit each other with it and see how that goes … OK, that went pretty crappy so let’s choreograph it so it “works” that way.”

This form of practise was predominately happening in the 1940s and 1950s … we KNOW that people were not fighting differently back then. It’s in living memory all we need do is ask our parents and grandparents.

If we go back further, and try to make the argument that 200 years ago people did fight the way that superficially understood karate was practised in the Japanese university system 60 or 70 years ago, then my first question would be “OK, prove it?” What evidence is there what states whole nations fought in such an impractical way? There’s none … so there is nothing to support the claim … at all.

It is a novel idea. But it’s also an idea that defies all common sense, all reason, all knowledge we do have about the development of karate, and relies upon totally unproven – and easily refuted – notions that whole nations of people were incredibly stupid in making an obviously inefficient and ineffective method culturally dominant for a long period of time; while leaving absolutely no evidence of that happening.

Some things do change such as fashion, technology and laws, and those things can change rapidly. As examples, any technique that relies on the topknot is now not valid because of changes in fashion. Likewise, hair pulling techniques would work better in the 1970s (where long hair was the cultural norm) than they do now (where the majority of males wear they hair far shorter than 40 years ago).

It’s also safe to say that traditional kata don’t have direct methods for things like modern handguns (changes in technology). And that, because of local laws and culture, such methods would have a higher priority in counties such as the USA, Brazil and Mexico (were ownership of handguns and gun crime is more common) than in places like here in the UK and Japan (where both gun crime and the ownership of handguns are very rare).

However, interpersonal criminal violence is largely determined by human psychology and physiology and those things don’t change quickly and result in a common violent expression. Watch the news today and we can see that criminal violence is pretty common across all nations and cultures. There is no reason to assume or assert there has ever been an exception to this; especially to justify what are obviously faulty practise based on a “historical blip of misunderstanding”.

All the best,

Iain

Mark B
Mark B's picture

Iain has covered it all pretty much there. Regarding glassings, I think that comes under the heading "improvised" weapons. I don't believe that's anything new. The weapon will be determined by the environment. In a bar/club a bottle or glass, a building site maybe a house brick, it just depends. Another element that is nothing new is distraction and deception, which again renders the long range training rather impractical.

diadicic
diadicic's picture

If you watch that video you can see clearly at the end, everyone just walks by his lifeless body.  Like no big deal, he's dead.  

Dom

Finlay
Finlay's picture

Thanks Iain for that very in depth answer, I have never actually heard someone make the arguement for long range fighting at least not that particular argument.

Also thanks Mark, now that I think of it in those terms glass, brick, stone etc. It makes sense

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Finlay wrote:
Thanks Iain for that very in depth answer, I have never actually heard someone make the argument for long range fighting at least not that particular argument.

Me nether and I appreciate you raising it. Always good to know the counter-points being raised so we can consider their validity. Once the “other side” start doing the same karate will be back to what it should be :-)

diadicic wrote:
If you watch that video you can see clearly at the end, everyone just walks by his lifeless body.  Like no big deal, he's dead.

There was a discussion on the video here:

http://iainabernethy.co.uk/content/ground-fighting-against-knife-attack

As it shows, you can’t rely on people not to get invoked (i.e. not hurt you) and you can’t rely on them to get involved either (i.e. help you).

All the best,

Iain

Ian H
Ian H's picture

We know that military combat methods have changed greatly, time and again, over history.  Compare the battles of the first world war to those of the second to see massive changes in just a few decades (mostly through technological advances) but at the bottom of the changes is ... evolution of combat technique to seek victory.  If someone else has an advantage, you need to find a way to remove and hopefully even reverse that advantage in your favour.  

Ditto personal fighting.  

Look at how much the fighting techniques have changed ... improved ... in MMA/UFC in just a few decades.  So sure ... I fully assume that fighting styles have changed over time, as we (as a combative species) strive for personal survival and dominance against one another.  

Additionally, it seems likely that societal norms and acceptable levels of violence would vary from time to time.  (At a guess, we are far less violent now, on the whole, than a few centuries before, and far more constrained by societal norms and/or legal consequences and so avoid some of the more extreme forms of personal combat in general, compared to the fighting of ages past.)  I suspect also that in modern times, far fewer people "know how to fight" compared to ages past ... most have never really fought, think "fighting" is what they see in the movies &c, and if they actually HAD to fight, would do a bad impression of an impractical Hollywood spectacle.  

... all of which leads me to say "yes", we have fought "differently" from time to time throughout history.  All the details of that evolution can and should be the subject of rigorous historical investigation. 

"My sensei at the local McDojo really likes three-step sparring, so I guess that's how they fought in Old Okinawa 200 years ago" is, obviously, NOT "rigorous historical investigation".  

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

That’s a good post and I’d agree with those observations. Military combat changes because technology changes i.e. a few centuries ago aerial attacks was all about firing arrows and now we have computer controlled drones you can use from thousands of miles away. For sport we have changes because of rule changes and what people want to see changes. MMA has changed greatly – and undoubtedly for the better in my view – as the rules have developed and sculpted the kind of fight people want to see. Theoretically if the rules were changed today then they’d be fighting differently tomorrow. It’s also true that culture and laws will shape the way people fight domestically to a degree. Go back a few centuries here in the UK and almost everyone of a certain class would carry a sword (now illegal). So we defiantly see changes on all those fronts.

What is much slower to change over time is human physiology and psychology. I am pretty confident that if you were to watch two cavemen in an emotionally charged, unarmed fight, where one is trying to badly injure the other, then it would largely be the same as you’d see today between two modern-day people in a modern street. We are “hard wired” to act in certain ways and things like the effects of adrenaline, bias toward gross motor skills, flinch reactions, weak areas of the human anatomy, and so on will be common to all humans across all cultures and time periods.

Ian H wrote:
"My sensei at the local McDojo really likes three-step sparring, so I guess that's how they fought in Old Okinawa 200 years ago" is, obviously, NOT "rigorous historical investigation". 

Absolutely! :-)

All the best,

Iain