On Karate at the Tokyo Olympics
The Tokyo Olympics have come to a close.
There was plenty of controversy, but since this was the first time karate had been included in the Olympics, I was delighted to see traditional karate get so much attention.
Perhaps because they have no other acquaintances who do karate, many people sent me questions and brought the subject up with me.
I continue to train in karate as well, currently holding 4th dan, and I love karate too. I was practising only yesterday.
My replies by chat and email have added up to a fair amount, so I am sharing them here, organised into sections as follows.
- How widespread karate is in Japan: famous in name, rarely seen in practice
Karate has been featured so often in combat sports broadcasts such as K-1, PRIDE and RIZIN that the name is well known, but I think most people have hardly ever actually seen karate competition itself and do not really know what it is.
Probably the biggest reason is that very few schools have a karate club.
Only 4% of junior high schools and 20% of high schools nationwide have a karate club (Japan Sports Agency, 2018).
Compared with baseball, the school sport that draws the most attention in Japan, as symbolised by “Koshien”, with 82% of junior high schools (rubber-ball) and 86% of high schools (hardball), or with kendo, the most popular budo, at 60% of junior high schools and 74% of high schools, you have to say that karate is far from widespread.
As a result, most people with karate experience first encountered it at a local budokan or town dojo, or in a university club or society. In my own case, a friend of a friend was doing karate in a university society, and going along to visit was how I first met karate.
Since sport in Japan is so heavily shaped by school club activities, it is fair to say that karate is, in reality, a fairly minor sport relative to how well known the name is.
And yet karate, having spread around the world, finally became an Olympic sport.
In fact, the headquarters of the World Karate Federation (WKF) is in Madrid. It was karate’s global spread that drove this decision.
Official Olympic recognition was the long-cherished dream of everyone involved in karate, and as someone who watched that effort from the sidelines since my student days, I was deeply moved.
Even before Tokyo was chosen as the host city, both the World Karate Federation and the Japan Karatedo Federation worked extremely hard and lobbied continuously for the Olympics.
I did nothing myself, but this was the culmination of many years of effort by people around me. There was no way I could watch without getting fired up.
- Why did Shimizu lose in the women’s kata?
One question I was asked often was: what was the difference between Japan’s Shimizu and Spain’s Sandra in the women’s kata?
Shimizu was perfect in every respect: the sharpness of her hips, the coordination of her lower body, her momentum, her spirit, her expression.
Sandra, too, showed sharpness and technique so flawless that it seemed impossible to improve on.
Even so, during the preliminary rounds I was watching and thinking: I want Shimizu to win, and she can win!
But when Shimizu performed her final kata, I honestly thought: this might lose…
I am not writing that with hindsight; I really was watching with my heart pounding, thinking she might have lost. Unfortunately she did not win, and took the silver medal.
Both athletes gave the performance of their lives.
So why was Sandra rated more highly?
This is only my own opinion, but I felt that this panel of judges valued “power” and “speed” over the Japanese-style qualities of “tenacity” and “variation in tempo”.
I say this because Kokumai of the United States, in the bronze medal match, also performed a very good kata, but lost.
He looked as though he did not understand why he had lost, but his kata was, in a sense, the kind that is considered very good in Japan and that people train hard to achieve, emphasising tenacity and variation in tempo.
In short, you could say his “tame” (the held pauses before an explosive movement) ran a little long.
By contrast, the kata of the Italian who beat Kokumai to take the bronze was fast and sharp, full of speed.
In the final that followed, Shimizu’s kata placed enormous emphasis on changes of tempo and took very long pauses, so even as she was performing I was thinking this might not be rated so highly…
Kata is judged, and the scores decide the winner, so how you get yourself evaluated matters a great deal.
Sandra’s punches and kicks were more powerful and sharper. If you are going to take long pauses, you have to show even more power, but Sandra’s physique was so outstanding that Shimizu seemed to lose on sheer strength.
Because both performed the same kata, Chatanyara Kushanku, the difference was all the easier to see.
I suspect this panel of judges rated speed and sharpness more highly.
I am sure that was not the only factor, and I hope the national team will analyse it more thoroughly and put the lessons to use from the World Championships later this year onwards.
But truly, what magnificent kata they were.
At the Olympics everyone makes it look easy and perfect, but Shimizu’s Chatanyara Kushanku, for example, is the most difficult kata in Shito-ryu.
Being able to perform it that perfectly is a feat in itself. Both Shimizu and Sandra were truly extraordinary.
Incidentally, Chatanyara Kushanku means the Kushanku (Kosokun) kata as taught by a karate master named Yara who lived in Chatan village in Okinawa. Kushanku is said to have been a diplomat and martial artist who came to the Ryukyu Kingdom from Qing China in the 18th century, and the story goes that he passed the kata on.
- Karate’s “Wimbledon effect”, like the Mongolian wrestlers in sumo
In kata, Japan achieved superb results this time with men’s gold and women’s silver, but in kumite the only medal was Araga’s bronze.
Seeing these results, I imagine many Japanese people felt: “Karate is a Japanese budo, so why doesn’t Japan win more?”
For those who have followed karate for a long time, this was almost exactly the expected result.
Personally I had thought Nishimura might just have a chance… but he suffered a shock last-second reversal with 0.0 seconds on the clock and did not make it through to the medal rounds. His father is Seiji Nishimura, a former World Championship winner, and he grew up with an elite karate education. There must have been the pressure of coming from a karate family, too. It was a truly narrow miss.
The fact is that in kumite, neither the men nor the women had been able to win at world level in recent years.
Even Ayumi Uekusa, who had a great deal of media exposure, has won the World Championships only once, in 2016.
Even Araga, the most famous kumite athlete, has also won the World Championships only once, in that same year, 2016.
Both have won the All Japan Championships many times and are “the leading figures in Japan”, but the reality is that winning on the world stage is hard.
*The World Championships are held every two years.
Araga and Uekusa are both around 30 and may be past their peak, so had the Games been held in 2020 the results might have been somewhat different.
That said, it is a sport in which long limbs and explosive power are an advantage under the rules, so for Japanese athletes to remain near the top even after karate has spread this widely is itself remarkable.
Japan was overwhelmingly strong in kata, but in fact, until Kiyuna came along, there was a long period when the men’s kata title went to athletes from Italy or Venezuela. I think we were fortunate that Kiyuna happened to be around at the time of the Olympics.
In both kata and kumite, the countries with world-class competitors are spread across every region: Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, China and so on.
Karate is fully a global sport, enough that a “Wimbledon effect” has taken hold.
However, in the kata this time, the forced selection of athletes from all five continents and from the Refugee Olympic Team stood out in a bad way. Even someone watching for the first time could probably sense the difference in level between the top and bottom athletes.
In particular, the men’s kata competitor from the Refugee Olympic Team was clearly aware that his ability fell short; he knew from the start that even performing his most difficult kata would not get him into the medal rounds, and I felt a little sorry for him watching.
I think there is great significance in his becoming an Olympian as a refugee athlete.
But I do think it would have been better to select more purely from the top of the rankings… Kata has many strong athletes in Europe and Asia, so presumably that was not considered desirable. There were limits on the number of athletes too, so one cannot complain.
- The difficulty of kumite competition: is there a solution?
Kumite competition seems to have been hard to follow in general.
Without video review, even highly experienced senior black belts sometimes cannot tell whether a technique landed (which is why four corner judges assess from four directions), so for people seeing it for the first time at the Olympics it must have been so fast that they had no idea what was going on.
The same is true of kendo: the All Japan Championships are broadcast on NHK every November, but once the exchanges start, you cannot tell from watching whose men or kote strike was faster.
For those who had never seen karate before, the biggest question this time was probably the decision in the men’s heavyweight kumite final, where a knockout resulted in a loss by disqualification.
The Iranian athlete took a high kick full on from his Saudi Arabian opponent and stayed down.
And just like that, Saudi Arabia lost by disqualification. The outcome was that Iran, knocked out and lying on the floor, won the gold medal.
In fact, this sort of thing has happened before.
As I recall, something similar happened in the captains’ bout of the team final at the 2008 World Championships at the Nippon Budokan, where I was helping out as a student.
If I remember rightly, a high kick landed with full force there too, and the opponent collapsed on the spot. I remember him crumpling like a broken doll.
Under the rules, if you take a heavy blow and stay down for the ten count, the attacker loses by disqualification.
Rules are rules, but whether this is really right is something people in karate hold a wide range of opinions about.
I mean, this is karate. Landing a clean high kick, dropping your opponent, and losing because of it is hard to accept… and it means the one who was hit gains by pretending to be knocked out.
But a bad law is still a law, and it remains in the rules.
Just as with diving in football, the bigger the stage, the more likely it is that athletes will resort to deception to win, however unseemly.
The final in particular, with no bouts to follow, is an environment where it is easy to signal “I’ve taken so much damage I can’t fight any more!”
The reason karate does not use big, thick gloves like boxing is to preserve bare-hand technique, and because full-contact would then be too dangerous, contact is limited to skin touch.
In the past, you had to hit harder to score a point, but to become an Olympic sport, bleeding and dangerous actions had to be avoided as far as possible, so there has been increasingly strict debate about the degree of contact and the penalties for excessive contact.
Recently even local tournaments have revised their rules to discourage hard hitting.
And in the middle of all this, a disqualification in the men’s kumite final. In the preliminaries, too, one athlete took a blow flush on the jaw and had to withdraw after his first bout.
This risks the IOC once again viewing karate’s rules as too dangerous, “sundome” (pulled punches) notwithstanding.
Yet if you load up on protective gear, the techniques are no longer true karate.
Open-hand gloves are too dangerous.
If you went to hard contact, you would have to ban attacks to the face or introduce thick gloves.
In karate’s early days there were experiments with wearing kendo men (face guards) or boxing gloves.
The solution to all this is the current “sundome” system, established after the war.
In practice there is quite a lot of contact; it means not striking through the target, but I think many people misunderstand it as meaning no touching at all.
The underlying philosophy was strongly influenced by kendo: the rules decide the winner by who first delivers a sufficient attack to a valid target.
Incidentally, the World Karate Federation (WKF) sets out the criteria for a valid strike as follows (WKF, 2020).
The wording shows a genuinely sound understanding of the Japanese karate and kendo concept of a valid strike.
a) Good form
b) Sporting attitude
c) Vigorous application
d) Awareness (ZANSHIN)
e) Good timing
f) Correct distance
It is very hard to “kime” (focus and complete) a solid punch or kick that satisfies all the above without excessive contact, in the midst of such fast movement.
That is why every tournament must have a doctor on hand. At any reasonably sized event, even a local one, a hard hit or two is bound to happen.
But… honestly, the high kick in the final did not look to me like such a hard hit. (The kumite athlete who withdrew after his first bout was a textbook hard hit, though.)
He turned up at the medal ceremony looking perfectly fine, and I am left doubting whether it really was a blow that left him concussed and unable to stand. Probably not.
If the rules stay as they are, where the advice could be “don’t throw too many high roundhouse kicks in the final, you’ll lose to a dive”, it will be hard for karate to establish itself as an Olympic sport.
Karate is a combat sport of punching and kicking, so there was always the problem that it would be hard to make it an Olympic sport unless safety could be guaranteed.
On top of that, throws using the upper body above the belt were banned because they resembled judo, which meant that Rafael Aghayev of Azerbaijan, who won silver in the 75kg class, could no longer use his signature technique.
Originally, throws with both hands grabbing were valid in karate too, but these were banned in recent years.
The rules were amended so that you may grab and throw with one hand for a moment (said to be within two seconds or so).
Karate pushed hard to become more of a sport for the sake of the Olympics…
And yet, despite all these rule changes, the outcome showed the reality that karate, for all the talk of “sundome”, is still a combat sport, and that making it safe is difficult.
Some viewers no doubt had questions about the rough exchanges in the closing seconds as well.
- Penalties and fouls so unclear that nobody could follow them
The C1 and C2 fouls were probably hard to understand too.
They stand for Category 1 (excessive contact with a scoring area, etc.) and Category 2 (stepping out of bounds, inactivity, grabbing, etc.), and accumulating four fouls in either category means a loss by disqualification.
In judo, anything short of a truly dangerous act is a “shido” (instruction), and four shido mean a loss by disqualification.
Karate is like having two kinds of shido.
If you are used to it you can follow, but with only a brief explanation on a TV broadcast, you cannot really understand it.
Some people probably also wondered: can four C1 or C2 fouls really pile up in a bout of only three minutes? They cannot. Was there actually any athlete who lost by disqualification through C1 or C2 fouls?
This almost never happens even in ordinary tournaments.
Being allowed three C1 and three C2 fouls, six in a single bout, is not pleasant to watch.
A rule that allows six fouls in a budo that prizes courtesy… I think it is a design flaw.
In this tournament too, I saw several athletes deliberately committing fouls to run down the clock when little time remained, and I suspect first-time viewers were left wondering how this could be allowed.
Either disqualify at three rather than four, or remove the distinction between C1 and C2 altogether and have a single “shido” with disqualification at four, as in judo; otherwise it will remain hard for viewers to follow. I felt this was a real issue.
Incidentally, there were originally no draws in individual kumite: if a bout ended level, the judges gave a decision (known internationally as “Hantei”, understood as a vote).
From the bronze medal matches onwards, however, a tie leads not to a decision but to a one-minute extension.
In such cases, accumulated C1 or C2 fouls could lead to disqualification during the extension, so the rule is not entirely meaningless.
Even so, unlike in judo, there were almost no bouts in which the number of fouls was the decisive factor, so the World Karate Federation will surely be asked to reconsider.
Kendo’s policy is not to pursue Olympic status or a compromised internationalisation; judo, by contrast, has accepted blue judogi and rule changes in pursuit of internationalisation.
Those who watched the NHK Taiga drama “Idaten” may remember the scenes in which Jigoro Kano, Japan’s first IOC member, strives to internationalise judo.
To be accepted into the Olympics, karate went even further than judo in the direction of internationalisation, taking on board opinions from overseas (especially the European countries with influence in the IOC) and revising its rules again and again to make them easier to understand.
The current rules are the result, but there are still many issues to overcome before they will be accepted by viewers around the world.
- Finally, on the future of karate at the Olympics
So much happened… and now it is finally over.
Karate at the Olympics really was something else: the athletes’ determination was on a different level, and it was the most exciting thing.
Karate is a minor sport, so the distance between fans and athletes is small; there are many chances to see the national team members up close, and I have friends and acquaintances involved with the world federation, the JKF and the national team, so I watched an Olympic sport with this degree of personal connection for the first time.
I will never forget the commanding kata of Kiyuna and Shimizu.
I was moved by the thought that this is what true kata looks like.
Araga and Nishimura were truly within a hair’s breadth.
Sago, who earned his place by beating Shinohara, must have been bitterly disappointed too.
The women’s kumite athletes struggled to show their true ability; it reminded me once again how high the world’s wall is for the smaller Japanese competitors.
Karate was not selected for the next Olympics in Paris.
Neither Los Angeles nor Brisbane is a stronghold of karate, so a comeback will not be easy.
Even judo, now a fixture of the Olympics, was first selected for the 1940 Tokyo Games, which were then cancelled; it was readopted in Tokyo in 1964, but dropped for Mexico City in 1968.
It was restored at Munich in 1972, and women’s judo was added at Barcelona in 1992.
The story of women’s judo being held as a demonstration sport at Seoul in 1988 and then adopted for the first time at the Barcelona Olympics is told in detail in YAWARA!, the judo manga that was a huge sensation.
Its heroine, Yawara Inokuma, competes at the Seoul Olympics while at junior college, then at the Barcelona Olympics, and the story ends as she sets her sights on Atlanta.
I very much hope karate can follow the same path.
Still, it is sad that this was a one-off.
There were plenty of issues, but this was karate’s first time.
I sincerely hope that, like judo, karate will be readopted and become a permanent official Olympic sport in the future.
This post was translated from the Japanese original. この記事を日本語で読む