Internet and other media vs dojo and training

General discussions on Wado Ryu karate and associated martial arts.
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claas
Posts: 186
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:39 pm

Internet and other media vs dojo and training

Post by claas »

From the "kuzushi waza"-thread:

Hi oneya,
oneya wrote:Hi claas, of course you are right, we do need tools for the analysis and as far as I understand that is where wado ohyo kumite comes into the process. Ohyo kumite is the physical testing of the analysis of practitioner's omote kata's intent which ideally takes place in the dojo. What we do here is more like picking over the bones post festum and my concern is that we must make sure that items like 'forum chat' and youtube don't become an alternative to the dojo.
Actually I was more referring to this part that I bolded from yabumi's text:
yabumi wrote:Ohyo No 8 always seemed like the orphan child at the end of the series to me. Often misunderstood and little practised when compared with Nos 1-7, and yet it offered training in kuzushi before we even knew that there was a word for it.
So on this forum we can't do ohyo kumite but we can talk about it. And then words are tools we use for analysis. I agree with what you say oneya. When we train we analyse and here we merely analyse our analysis. :)
Like you, I also think people should understand the difference between training/instruction and the internet. But then again, after doing that, maybe it's good to make the most out of them both. I think these modern times make information more easily available and people will train even less in the future. (Not sure if we have a partial causality here???) But I also think there will be people who pick the fruit from this information overflow and concentrate on their training. They can find other people via the internet, for example. Perhaps this forum will be an important place for this. The future is going to be different but I don't know if this is for the better or for the worse. Maybe it's a good idea to really try to adapt. Sometimes I myself find it difficult but still I'm going to try. Here's a good quote from Hagakure:
It is said that what is called the Spirit of an Age
is something to which one cannot return.
That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an
end.
In the same way, a single year does not have just spring or summer.
A single day, too, is the same.
For this reason, although one would like to change today's world
back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done.
Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.


Some possibilities for media such as videos and books would be that someone on the beginning of his/her journey can very quickly learn the overall patterns. Then later on one can cross-reference and even make guesses about the quality of the instruction. Of course with a good sensei there is nothing to worry about, but this thinking is a little idealistic, since very many people train under instructors whose teaching might be somewhat missleading.

Another thing is that if one learns the overall pattern and the names of the stances from a book or a video, then he/she will learn something from the "next level of knowledge" on the classes or even go hunting for it. Teachings that go beyond names and turning directions. I think this principle could apply to forums also. Of course for the effect to be positive the person has got to be a motivated practitioner. I think we all have met a lot of bookworm-karatekas, but maybe it's not truthful to think that media transform otherwise good karatekas into these. Or at least not all of them. Maybe it is something else in the way the world turns.
Lasse Candé
Helsinki, Finland
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