Learning new things on the net….dont always teach before you study!

Learning new things on the net….dont always teach before you study!

Lately I have been trolling around looking at web sites and I read an article from a fairly well known lad that seems to know what he is talking about and I was so very glad I read further and did a bit of review of one of his articles before implementing the terms he used. Now to be upfront, I don’t speak or write Japanese. I know some Japanese from doing Karate for 30+ years, but to say I speak Japanese would be the same as saying I was a brain surgeon because I took anatomy in school and know a bit about the brain….well bad example but you get the point…I aint no Japanese fluent guy, hell my English is kind of weak at times and…well you get the point.

Anyways the article in question was talking about the Three K’s of Karate…no Not Kata Kumite and Kihon…which would still be the three K’s by the way. No, the author used a play on words by using Kiken, Kitsui and Kitanai as the “old three K’s” but obviously he was not really reviewing his source material. He thought that it meant dirty, hard and Dangerous.

He then went on to talk about how Kiken or Dangerous was basically used because…well the old school training was no friggin joke. The common injuries of students and instructors mounted and became everyday things. Broken nose, twisted fingers, smashed lip….all in a days work out. He was right in that. Hell in the 80’s when I started we used to go to Dingman sensei’s Dojo and you really would fear that you would get really badly hurt some days. And when the masters came up you were pretty much assured you would get your lumps and good.

Next he talks about Kitsui or Hard training. Oh, it was hard. By the time I joined we had “one hour” classes that often lasted two or even three hours some nights. If you had to leave (and it was not recommended) you could bow out at any time after the hour, but Dingman sensei once started a class at five o’clock and I just made it to class…he ended the class at nine o’clock…several parents had called the Dojo and the secretary had assured them it was just that we were still in class! It was HARD back then. The kind of work outs that made you cry and that’s not the kids class! You can imagine the older training, have read stories of students beaten with clubs to train defense and masters knocking out students with punches if they were not blocked properly…hard as in…WHO DOES THAT!

The last K stands for Kitanai…Or Dirty. By dirty the author illustrates that the techniques that did not work in real fighting were tossed aside, I would have to say that it was not like this in my Old day recollections, we were drilled in techniques till they passed inspection with Dingman sensei. I can remember hours of reverse punching till we used our hips properly, hours of front kicking and moving in stance till we had legs on fire and we also would spar and have to use perfect form….but by dirty…well sparring with Sensei often meant getting elbowed in the face, kicked in the groin, thrown to the floor with a foot sweep or getting punched in the forehead so he could get you to lift your hands up and you would then get nailed in the guts! Sparring was more an exercises in toughness than techniques, but you did have to do proper form while “cheating a little” in the tactics department. Old school Karate was supposedly often more a street fight and down and dirty than it was about good form….but I would have to say…probably one with a few instructors.

Here is where the wheels came off the train for me…I looked up Kiken, Kitsui and Kitani for to research it a bit more and I found out that the author had borrowed the terms from a phrase (terms) used to describe hazards in the work place…….No, I am not kidding. AND the translation should read “Dirty, Dangerous and Demeaning or Dirty, Dangerous and Demanding/Difficult”. The term concept that refers to certain kinds of labor often performed by unionized blue collar workers. The term started out in Japan and gained widespread use, particularly regarding labor done by migrant workers. The workers that fit into the category of the 3 K’s tend to perform “undesirable” work and thus the three K’s tend to be a derogatory term used for those people that perform jobs no one else wants, granted it also points tout that they are well paid jobs because the industries need to attract workers.

The term often refers to jobs that uneducated and relatively unskilled workers can find and that the jobs often attract people from regions that have high unemployment rates, harsh poverty and drive migrant workers to find employment in these jobs because of the positions they are coming from. The workers are also susceptible to exploitation and have a hard time maintaining a living wage once they move to the more expensive areas for the work. The work is dangerous, dirty and can pose great threats to the workers both physically and mentally. The workers often lose employment due to injury, general joint depletion and or mental fatigue. Due to watching and living in the poor conditions, watching co-workers get injured and even die, the migrant workers that fall under the 3K’s often suffer mental fatigue and even post traumatic stress disorder…….

The one thing that the author also avoids talking about is that the three K’s have an opposing economical/financial theory that is used called the 5S’s. The Five S’s are Seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. They have little to do with Karate…kind of like the Three K’s but for giggles they stand for… are Seiri: sort, structure or sort out, seiton: Straighten, systemize, systematic arrangement, seiso: Scrub, sanitize, spic and span, seiketsu: Systematize, standardize and shitsuke: standardize, self-discipline. Basically if you have these five components your doing a job that is Upwardly mobile and most people want to do…..yah, I don’t get it either! But Im a body guy not an economist…let alone a Japanese one!

So, what does this all show. Well not as much as the author reads into the terms, but much more in terms of learning a valuable lesson. Often we read a post online and we start using the terms in class, we throw them out their like we are experts and know what the hell we are talking about, we introduce a new concept or we go to town on a new term we learned and often…we have no idea what we are saying. I remember one time I was listening to a Karate instructor and he used the term “Baka” when talking about someone techniques. He was a Canadian guy who probably knew a handful of Japanese words only. I knew what it meant, but I was interested in finding out if he knew….

So, being the confident young black belt I was I asked the instructor if he knew what it meant, well I actually played dumb and asked him what it meant…like I did not know. His answer “oh, I was told it means wrong or bad!” and he was sincere about it. However, Baka does not mean bad or wrong..it means idiot or stupid. So, this instructor was referring to his students as Idiots for a while. I mentioned to a senior that the instructor was using this term and said maybe we should tell him…the senior who was senior to the instructor just laughed and said he would tell him. I never found out if the instructor found out his mistake or not.

The point being that before you start teaching and using foreign terms you should do a bit of research. Its so much easier today to throw a term or word into a search engine and get your instant access to answers about terms that are being used and make up your mind if you want to use them or not. The three K’s that the author used are actually kind of used as a derogatory terminology for unwanted jobs that migrants tend to do. I wont be using them in class anytime soon. Not because I fear that I might have a Japanese economist in our mids that knows the terms were created for “other reasons” but because I personally wont be using terms that could be viewed as derogatory…even if I am just about the only one in the room that knows this.