myth of the 100 man kumite

Over the years  I have seen the myth of the 100/200/300 man Kumite and was in shock when I actually saw people writing about this feet like it was possible. Several factors affect the reality around this event and people need to realize that the test is basically not what they think it is. It brings about ideas of full contact Kyokushin fighters nailing each other as hard as they can for 100 fights or more. This simply is a dumb thing and not at all possible.

First off we need to get a good idea of who invented this and why…then we can look at the actual practice and how it is done.  Mas Oyama, a Korean living in Japan, was born Choi Yeong-Eui in Gimje, Jeollabuk-do Korea.  At an early age he traveled to China and lived on his sisters far. He told a story of how he trained in Chinese martial arts under a local Chinese farmer, but many people have said that this is just part of the marketing that he created to “sell” himself and his style to the masses. Actually Oyama stole many stories from others to help market and sell his name and style over the years. In fact Oyama became the first and best Karate salesman of his time.

Oyama goes on to say that he trained with Funakoshi (Gichin and Gigo) but records indicate he studied at a university and not under the masters themselves. Also a story from Kase Sensei, enforcer for the JKA suggested that Oyama had taken Judo first and was bragging that he was a high level Judoka and Kase, being a 3^rd Dan in judo, mopped the floor with Oyama in a grappling match then beat him in a karate match till the Korean stated he had not tested for his black belt in judo after all. He also did not hold a high level Dan in JKA Karate as some suggest he did. He left to train with a Korean that was training in Goju under Miyagi, but most suggest he never completed his studies and only knew a few Goju Kata and no real deep understanding of the two arts.

What he lacked in actual Karate experience he made up for with two things, his physical ability and his sense of flair and salesmanship. He was a physically imposing man with a huge chest and he weight trained a lot. He also thought of ways to get people’s attention! One way that he started to draw people in was his venturing into the mountains of Japan to live in seclusion and train in Karate all day. He wanted to stay for three years but ended his seclusion after 13 months when his sponsor stopped paying for his meals and he was forces to come home. He did make one more trip to live in the mountains…after advertising it like a mad man to drum up interest. He lived 18 months but not alone, the second time he had visitors to come train with him and pay him money.

Oyamas next trick was to stage a “de-horning” of a bull. That’s right he went to the media and said he was “coming down off a mountain” to show he had mad Karate skills and would be taking the horn off a big bull. The only problem is that the truth of the situation, much like the 100 man Kumite, is much better enjoyed if you don’t look at the details. By details I mean that it was a total set up and the fact that the Japanese bulls are MUCH MUCH smaller than our North American bulls. Think of them as the Mini-me of bovine males. Secondly, Oyama tried the first time and failed.  He tried a second time and failed. He finally figured out after talking to a farm hand that he had to “sheer” the horn before he tried to knock it off. By sheering I mean cut half way through or smack the bulls horn with a hammer till it was loose. He used a hammer people. The bull came out, and if you see the footage, it was so concussed by Oyama that it was staggering, looked like it had not eaten for a month and as Oyama was about to hit the half hanging on horn the bull actually almost falls over! Not exactly as advertised but Oyama got his headlines. Also, it should be noted that later on a mural was put together showing Oyama ripping the horns off a bull, this is about as much bull as we can take, they used a different bull for the mural than the half dead, underfed one that he actually struck and the truth is he did not wrestle the bull, he struck it with a Shuto strike to a half hanging horn.

Oyama went around Japan selling himself as a Martial arts master of Karate and trying to build a huge following. Now I am not bashing him for any of this, actually I see him as being a really smart dude! People saw his movement growing and a mix of racially fueled hatred and jealously started to grow against the Korean. He was showing the one thing that most of the Okinawan based instructors refused to do…be a salesman! And, Oyama was darn good at it! He took pictures of his hulking body after a work out and had it printed in as many magazines and news papers as possible and he taught the Karate he had created in the mountain by mixing Shotokan with Goju and did not bat an eye lash when others pointed out he was not a master of these, he simply called what he was doing something different and found his hook, his savior in the whole thing…full contact Kumite!

Oyama formed his style of full contact sparring after watching kick boxing and its explosion in popularity after world war II. He mimicked and mirrored a lot of the skills shown and the “Karate-ized” them and also found people good at the new skill set he created. The instructors had to be great at hitting people, pads and the like as well as marketing and brining his art across the Japanese country. Shortly after the JKA began sending people out across the world he also started sending students to teach all over the world. He did what many Okinawans were doing as well, he sent out his students, many of them getting on the plane in Japan brown belts and getting off the plane Sandan’s or higher in the country the moved to teach in.  Its again, not wrong and I am not coming down on Oyama and his students, they were just doing what everyone else did. Also, he was kind of tough on foreign students that did this or learned out of books as well.

No on to the 100 man Kumite myth, well its kind of a myth. First the premise of the sparring is that a student will do 2 minute sparring matches with 1 minute rest time between 100 times, supposedly against people that are fresh each time and full contact by both fighters. So that’s what was supposed to happen, and better yet, Oyama said he did 300 man kumite over three days, essentially a 100 man kumite three days in a row. This would have been an amazing feet seeing as only 17-19 people have ever actually competed the 100 man kumite and he was now tripling it. Even his own students say it was not possible.

John Jarvis was one of the original 17 to have competed in the 100 man Kumite. Jarvis completed the 100 man challenge and said that their was NO way that a human could compete and do more than this, not in three days repeating the task each day. The whole idea is that full contact Kumite being done was hard, 100 man kumite breaks so many people and with the advent of full contact arts and sports like MMA and Muay Thai being popular its obvious that 15-25 minutes of fighting is enough to put a person into exhaustion as high end athletes never mind 100 kumite matches.

Many of Oyamas students who first felt that this was a true test or challenge of will started to realize that it was, for the most part, all smoke and mirrors, or glitz and little meat. People like Nakamura, who struggled and helped the organization expand, started to see that Oyama was mostly interested in finding new ways to recruit members, gain money and power, Fame and fortune and they left the organization after a while. Nakamura sites the fact that he was many of the events that were supposed to challenge students as being fixed or rigged so the Japanese would win and thus perpetuate the notion that the Japanese were immortal in Karate and unbeatable and that Kyokushin was the best. Nakamura realized how ridicules it was to suggest someone was immortal and could fight 300 men or even that a 100 man contest was necessary. He rebelled and created his own style that taught a style strangely more in tune with the roots of Kyokushin and farther away from what it became.

People who knew Oyama say that he was a loving man who cared a great deal for his students and would do anything for them. He was hardworking, dedicated and had a flair and passion for his art. None of what I am saying here would take away from that and many of his students. However it must be noted before I go into more of this that the practice of the 100 man kumite was nothing more than a way to present Oyama’s style as harder than any other style in the land. It had little to do with budo and more to do with Bucks!

Now the 100 man challenge, what it boils down to is that normally 20-50 students who are not wanting to really pound on you will line up and start the process off with a good ½ hour of warm up sparing in which about 15 rounds are done. Thee rounds are semi contact or at the least the two fighters end up looking like they held back. The next ½ hour or so looks mighty crazy and the fighting sees a lot of students that are part of the 100 man test drop out due to injuries. The next 4 hours is a mish mash of 2 minutes of increasingly desperate and decreasingly effective Karate. Near the end of the 100 man kumite the whole process looks more like two out of shape boxers hanging on each other and throwing tip tap stuff because they cannot swing anymore.

Now I realize it sounds like I am putting the practice of the 100 man Kumite down..Im not, in fact I think of them much as I think of Marathons. I love running in the summer for 20-30 minutes and its my goal to do a 5K some day, but to be honest, the people who do Marathons are nuts in my mind. The damage they do to their body to run that distance is HUGE and significant. The dedication to the art of Marathon running is a commitment most of us will never make and cannot possibly reach. At the end of that marathon few people have a great gate or count the strides ext, they are just going on pure adrenaline and they are busting their asses to get across that finish line. I think of the 100 man Kumite the same way. 

Real Karate Kumite done over 4-5 hours would be hard on the body, especially when someone is fresh every two minutes and you are still sucking wind and that’s light to no contact Karate add someone nailing you with a baseball bat across the leg, pounding your midsection or kicking you in the arms and head. If I was to take the students out of the equation and add Muay Thai students and I am sure the instructors would not make it. The truth is the human body can only take so much abuse, be it Karate or marathon running.

Look at the beating one can take in a 3 minute full contact match, scrapes, broken bones, crushed ribs, black eyes, getting KO’d by partners, now try and do 2 minute matches 100 times. You can see how silly it is to think that someone is going to go full out for 2 minutes…100 times and be able to finish it…I hope you can see how silly that is. So, why did Oyama choose to say this…marketing my friend. He wanted to have people think that he was superman and taking his style would A)Make you superman or B)have you training with supermen. The truth is he probably did do the 100 man kumite and finished it, but against people going ¼ speed and power against him the whole time to ensure he could complete it. Now did he say that he wanted them to go easy on him, probably not…but he would not have picked people that would kill him after he was tired.

Oyama had a problem however, he had others who tried this and completed the process of the whole 100 man kumite so what was he to do…well say he did 300 man kumite of course. Ever run a marathon…then went out and did another one the next day…and a third on day three?  No, why not?  Well because it would probably kill you. We have established that true “Time in” for a 100 man kumite would be roughly 5 hours. Now, think of how beat up you will be…and how long it would take you to recover from this super human feet…and then remember you don’t have that time…you got to go again the next day and then again the day after that….starting to see my issue.

Football players have days off between big games for a reason, injuries! Now think of a 5 hour football game with no breaks and tackles happening every second for 2 full minutes with only 1 minute break between the blitz from hell…yah, no foot baller would do this…or could and they are pretty much some of the most trained impact athletes around.

I once knew a Kyokushin guy that was in GREAT SHAPE and he was about 22 years old and attempted the 100 man Kumite at his Karate dojo. He trained like a mad man and prepared for the event. He had instructors and students lined up to try and break this “Guinness book” level challenge and pushed himself hard to get physically and mentally ready. He ran TONES to get his cardio up, ate right and did 2 hours of Karate three times a week hoping to get ready for the event. Ryan had been a Nidan in Kyokushin and was on my wrestling team and I can honestly say NO ONE was going to out endurance this guy. He could run for 45 minutes straight at a killer clip with a back pack stacked with about 80 pounds in it, and did this three times a week to get up to the level he needed to. He told me before he attempted the challenge that he could run at a full clip for an hour and then do wind sprints and burpees for another 40 minutes….I don’t know anyone that could do that really, but he was not someone I doubted. His instructor also told me that his Karate was nasty and he could take out pretty much anyone in the club and was a national level fighter that could go to the worlds one day.

A week after the challenge I ran into him at school and asked him how it went. He was hobbling near the Duckworth centers gym and not going in as he normally would. He said, with a great deal of pride he had completed 3 hours of kumite but he could not continue past that.

The first hour of Kumite started and he and his 27 members that were helping him and his instructor, who was also trying it, started out and rotated through every 2 minutes with a 1 minute rest between. The kumite was hard and they hit each other with almost full force, at the end of the first hour his instructor broke three of his ribs and had to bow out because he could not breath, this left Ryan to keep going. The second hour was torture as his partners still came at him at about 80% of the max they could and he was starting to lose steam, his kicks were ALL leg kicks and he nailed the partner in the body with all he could, but the power was starting to drop and he almost got KO’d by a head kick that halted the kumite for a few seconds. The third hour was brutal but at least he could not feel ANYTHING below his ears…he is a funny guy. He said the students were tired to and half of the left due to injury or just could not cycle in because they were not in good shape. NOT IN GOOD SHAPE, so its not like he was facing guys that were able to take him or match his fitness, some of them went one or two rounds with 10 to 30 minutes rest and could not hack it anymore.

He said that the third hour was not as bad as the first or second because no one was going ¼ or more of the power they could and he ended up facing a lot more lower level black belts that simply could not keep up with him even as tired as he was, but his legs were black and blue and his ribs were separated in two spots.  At the end of the third hour a black belt kicked him in the leg and he buckled and could not get back up without help. When he was helped up he was dizzy and could hardly breath, his chest was a mess of blood bruises under the skin and his arms were also black and blue, he had a eye that was swollen shut even as he told me about the injury and his instructor who had quit two hours prior threw in the towel for him.

At school he could barely walk, he said he took ice baths that night to quell the swelling and he was using crutches that his dad had from an ankle injury. It took him a week before he could walk properly and even then he had sore legs all the time, he could not go jogging for two weeks and his breathing was labored for a week after the challenge. I asked him if he would ever do it again and he looked at me and said HONESTLY NO!

Now, imagine doing this three days in a row…and finishing it. I don’t think its possible unless you are doing Tai Chi for five hours three days in a row with a “don’t hit the old man” rule! This the only logical way that this could have been don’t. I took sports Med in university and I saw some HORRIFIC injuries and learned a lot about the athletic body. In my mind it is impossible to do a 100 Man Kumite at full 100% full contact force for 5 hours, even with a 1 minute break in between 2 minute rounds…add that the replacement is fresh and you add to the BS Factor for this being valid in any way shape or form.

Like the Loch ness monster the 100 man kumite is a myth or smoke and mirrors to sell Dojo time and fresh white PJ’s to students.