Trends and Fads in the Martial arts

When I started getting interested in the Martail arts it was the late seventies and the fads were all about Bruce Lee and had a lot of that “funk” to it, like doing Karate…with killer mutton chops daddy o’. Okay it was not that bad, but it was focused a lot on the old Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee stuff that we saw in movies. Speaking of the movies, most of the martial arts movies that were available before the 50’s were Japanese or Chinese only and no subtitles, so because Karate and Martial arts in general was not very popular we did not see a tone of them in the pop culture stuff yet. It was in the 70’s that Martial arts movies took off and we started seeing “Trends” or “Fads” Show up and it started to affect our culture and the way we interconnected with pop culture and the general population.

                This meandering and ever changing focus on the martial arts has lead to some major spikes, changes and distractions in the Martial arts over the years. While stalwart groups like the JKA and other major Martial arts groups tended not to change at all and stuck to their traditional roots, others have formed and shone brightly before the inevitable burning out of their popularity. Current trends suggest that this is occurring again as it has repeatedly in the past. I want to illustrate the current and put it up to the older fads to show how things changed over the years and to predict the inevitable as coming back again in the next while.

                I have been in the martial arts now for about 4 decades, I have trained mostly in Karate but dipped my toes in other areas, had interest in other arts and take classes in a few more. But the truth is that I used to let fads and fancy dictate a lot of what I did, now I realize that the foundation of training is tradition, you can not pay lip service to it, you need to be doing it to gain the benefits. However, Fads and Trends interest me to no end so…. here we go!

50’s-70’s- Kung Fu Fighting!

                Prior to the 50’s Martial arts in North America were spars and basically consisted of some Judo and Kung fu taught by Asian families to people of their own culture and a rare non-asian. If you were ever told by a non-Asian that they knew a martial art or started in the 40’s or 50’s you were 99% facing a fraudster who was trying to lie to you. Robert Trais was the first to open a club in North America after serving in the Navy.  His history is kind of mercy and I would say that his lineage is very questionable but it was the first KARATE style martial art in North America. The popularity of training was not wide spread and it would take years for any kind of martial art to start growing and spreading in the west. I am not going to get into the reasons because this blog article is about trends.

Not everyone was Kung fu Fighting in the 70’s despite what you may have been told…..however if you went to go see a movie about that “Kratty stuff” chances are you were watching a Kung fu movie and Karate, if present….was poorly presented. Bruce Lee was uber popular and had his mist on a big fad in training. However, strangely his system of training was new and not very popular at this point. It never was a world killer but Kung fu in general was not practiced a great deal. Before the wave of Kung fu movies his the 70’s the most popular NOT BOXING martial art was Judo.  People saw it a bit in some movies with people like James Cagney and Peter Sellers had a bit of Judo in a few of them and made this exotic art a house hold name. The term Judo Chop may be attributed to Sellers Pink Panther films and Cagneys use of Judo and boxing in a few of his movies.

                Karate first came to North America in the form of post war immigration and some bigger named instructors like Tsutomu Ohshima came over to the states to teach in the 60’s and created localized booms in Karate. A student of Funakoshi, Oshima was part of a small wave of early settlers that brought traditional Karate to North America. Other styles came around the same time to the shores of North America but were changing with the trends that followed very quickly. Kempo Karate being one of them. Japanese Kenpo Karate came to North America under the influence of James Mitose, Mitose was a Hawaiian Japanese who studied Kenpo when he was visiting Japan. What came out of the Mitose style of Kenpo became one of the first real “Fads” in Martial arts but its still practiced, as are its off shoots today.

                The “Karate” changed as the trends influence it. Originally a pure Shorei Ryu Kempo style became influenced by Kung fu and local fighting arts and swayed and changed as trends came into play over the years. The Style grew and became so vastly different in some cases that the styles that grew out of Mitose’s style can now only be called “Influenced” styles that only remotely look like the original system. This is the nature of trend based or fad based changes to martial arts…which we will see again and again in the future of Marital arts as we go on. The roots of the style were very basic compared to the fancy flowing and often totally useless changes that some of the systems put into play to separate themselves from the root system. Also ranking went NUTS with 15^th level masters popping up on the regular. This also lead to a lot of frauds who had a few weeks of training in a few different arts then pushing marketing saying they were 12^th degree black belts or 10^th degree black belts in (name art) along with their own system. It got really bad near the beginning of the 80’s as we saw them in magazines and performing at tournaments.

                Karate however, the traditional stuff, was starting to take off. An actor named Carlos Ray Norris or Chuck Norris made a big impression with a small part in the way of the Dragon, a Bruce Lee film and his roll of “Colt” started a huge career in martial arts films that has pushed him to be one of the most recognized martial artists in pop culture today. Norris was one of the first actual TRENDS or FADS or POP CULTURE INFLUENCERS to drive people specifically to Karate clubs. Lee started people looking around, but Norris had people looking to buy white PJ’s and show up to grunt in class.  His Korean based system was actually a Korean version of Shotokan Karate and had a lot of the same characteristics. His movie career has produced spikes in Karate training over the years however as time went on trends and fads that helped also hurt Karate in north America, but as you will see the core, fundamental and traditional Karate systems seemed to bounce back well as those that tried to ride the popular waves crashed out and burned.               

                Near the end of the 1970’s Martial arts were more an adult, teen thing to do. And young adults started going to clubs to learn Judo, Aikido, Karate and Kung fu. More traditional Japanese arts like Kendo and Kyodo were practiced but it was rare and out of the norm for them to be part of the pop culture. If you asked someone what Aikido, Kendo or Kyodo were you probably would not get a valid answer…..Karate, Kung Fu and Judo however you would probably get a valid answer.

                Now the 50-70’s had a tone of frauds that actually influenced the martial arts in North America. They are kind of fun to read about but the only one I am going to point out is John Timothy Keehan, or as he was “professionally know” COUNT JUAN RAPAEL DANTE!  Dante was a Maratil arts fraud that ran his clubs ext in the 60’s and 70’s in Chicago. Count Dante actually had a black belt under Robert Trais in Karate but that was only the start for him. He then started to work teaching a full contact style of martial arts he dubbed Dan-Te.. The story of Count Dante is super fun to read about, his exploits outside of Magazines make him a interesting guy, but its his performances with black uniform on and flamboyant movements that made him an influencer. His “street focused” art was the starting point for many of the arts that assert street ready or self-protective focused training clubs that would bounce up later.  

80’s

                The 80’s started out and belonged to the NINJA. The black clad assassins were spurred on by movies, books, clubs and just about every pop culture equivalent to the trendiest current trend! You could get Ninjas on your tee shirts, stickers, movies, and they were no TV and in music lyrics. However because of the Ninja craze you got two massive movements that occurred. The first was the fringy strange Ninja clubs that popped up in which 99% were frauds like, Ashida Kim.  Kim, Born Radford W Davis, is probably one of the most recognizable frauds to come out of the Ninja craze. A student of the 70’s  weirdo/fraud Count Dante, Ashida Kim published tones of books and self help style training books that promised to give you the skills of a Ninja. All of the books were panned by those that trained in “true” Ninpo arts in Japan and their students in north America.

                Not making any assessment as to the validity of Ninjitsu, it was made even more popular by Legit trained people like Stephen Hayes who spent a decade in Japan learning from Hasaaki Hatsumi in what we will call “Real Ninjitsu”. The popular presentation of Ninjitsu at the time was one of flash and really played up the mystical side, Hayes tried to bring Ninjitsu back down to earth and presented his Bujinkan style as being much more like Karate or Judo and less mystical art. This helped him create a small pocket of popularity for his real world style of the art but he let the fraudsters and the movies create the popular wave that Corralled the population of mostly young men into the ninja clubs.

                The Ninja Craze brought herds of people into the Karate Dojo’s as well. Those that were not interested in being the nutty neighbor twirling a set of nun chucks and flicking ninja stars around, but still wanted to learn some physical martial arts, found their ways into the Karate clubs! The trend had people like Kanazawa Sensei and others pick up Kobudo weapons and start teaching them a bit or at least using them as marketing tools to attract the ninja interested people. This trend only lasted for a few years however as the movies made highlighting Ninjas began to fade so did the trend.

                In the meantime, people like Chuck Norris and Bill Wallace began growing a new sport that would take off and create a new trend. Kick boxing was formed. Not the east Asian version called Muay Thai that would still take years to come to the States but “Kick Boxing”.  The sport grew out of the traditional point systems of Karate and developed as the practitioners wanted a more contact oriented system or sport.  For a long time the Point Karate systems and tournaments became the face of Karate and Marital arts, and silently a different art started to enter these tournaments and do very well, just prior to the kickboxing craze. Up to this point most martial arts tournaments saw more hand strikes and basic kicking than before, it was stiffer and not the systems that were seen in Asia, then Tae Kwon Do broke through. 

First Tae Kwon Do came to the front of the new trends after the Ninja Craze died and before the Kick boxing trend hit. They were smart, savey and entered the full contact Kickboxing and point fighting tournaments with their kick heavy training and then they started hosting these events and every Dojo from one end of the country to the other started doing more kicks and fancy hand moves to garner more points at the tournaments. The training started to loosen up and things like boxing training started being popular, everyone was jumping rope and running, and competitions drove popularity. Joe Lewis was a Shorin Ryu black belt and he made a huge splash in North America as did guys like Benny Urquidez. Urquidez came up learning Kenpo and Shotokan and changed his approach to training when the kick boxing craze came out. The more kick heavy style was very popular and started both the kick boxing craze and the Tae Kwon do craze.

                One of the other crazes that hit the Martial arts scene was colorful Dogi or uniforms. The traditional white Gi’s fell away to red, blue….red white and blue…green and even satin uniforms. Traditionalists wore white Dogi and the “Modern and hip” Karate “Players” wore fancy more personalized uniforms. My personal favorite was the all black Dogi that chuck Norris wore, and I have to admit to owning several black pairs of pants myself for home training.

As the 80’s wound down the popularity of more traditional arts started to again build up. The kick boxing rage quieted, and the more traditional separation of Korean and Japanese arts grew.  The pockets of kickboxing popularity still existed but it was not as hot as it was in the middle of the decade. However Karate had changed to keep up with this trend and members would cross over and train for kick boxing after gaining higher ranks in traditional arts. The kick boxing that was supposed to bolster traditional arts fizzled out leaving a lot of the clubs that had changed empty, but the traditional arts still pushed forwards. A lot of the kick boxers actually moved back to teaching martial arts as a martial art and not a sport at that time simply to survive.

90’s

                If the 80’s belonged to the Ninja then the 90’s started out as the movie stars decade, but ended very differently. The 90’s saw several big names hit the sceen with people like Van Damme, Chan and Segal driving the action minded to the movies. Van Damme had been a European Dancer/Karate black belt who came to the states to make his name. He marketed himself well and pushed the truth to the breaking point but landed rolls in a few small movies then in 1988 he landed a roll in what would make him a house hold name amongst action fans. He landed a roll in Blood sport, a fictional account of a “kumite” that was written by Martial arts fraudster Frank Dux.  Dux as it turned out was a hell of a story teller and wrote the story that would drive Van Damme’s career forwards.  

                Jean Cloud entered the 90’s on a high note and between 1990-99 he acted in 17 movies, most of which were B level but some were actually fantastic action movies that put his name on the map. Van Damme and his movies brought a moderate number of students to the clubs. The focus on him being exciting and very action oriented meant that those that came in and saw the down to earth martial arts often did not stay, but my instructor noted that with in a month of his, often direct to “DVD” movies, hitting the screen we saw a influx of students.

                Another movie actually brought more students to the clubs than any others in the 90’s Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles. The TMNT craze did something that marked a major change in Martial arts clubs as well….it got the kids involved! Before the TMNT movie most of the new members were in their teen age years or adults. Rarely did you get a kid entering the club, I may have been an exception, and training was always serious and traditional. Now the Turtles appealed to kids and instructors, largely in the TKD clubs, began catering to kids. Kids classes were the newest phase, and we got to see silly things like TMNT designs on Dogi’s or fun logos of turtles, tigers and other cartoons showing up on the backs of uniforms from coast to cost, and the average age of a club often fell from 20 to 9! The “Trend” became a torrent of new students and often became the life blood of many of the traditional clubs that now were moving from the garage and back yard to a brick and mortar club set up or landing in Community clubs. 

                The advent of Kids Karate however had some very special ramifications that were good for traditional Karate. It was a gateway for acceptability of martial arts into society.  Prior to this the clubs were still seen as fringy and in the 80’s if you belonged to and practiced at a martial arts club you were part of a fringe element. 1 in 1000 people may have trained in ANY martial arts in the 70’s and in the 80’s it was 1 in 600-700, so it was still rare to have Karate clubs in traditional sports facilities like community clubs. Most clubs were in Army Navy Legion basements, Church basements, garages and store fronts, while rare, were more common than sport facility clubs.

                One other actor hit the screen that also caused a stir in the martial arts community. Steven Segal came out with Hard to Kill, Marked for Death and a total of 12 movies in the 90’s. He was a unique entity in the martial arts because he came from a grappling back ground not a striking art back ground. Segal was an Aikidoka who had trained in Japan and then came to the states to make his mark in the movies. He did that alright. The ultimate marketing guy he made up a crazy background that included lies about being a CIA black ops agent and other BS stuff, but it entertained people. With Segal came a influx of Aikido classes and because their was a limited number of actual Aikido instructors in most places….students came to the Karate, Judo and Tae Kwon Do clubs when they could not find the gentle art of Aikido.

                Segal turned out to be a moderately interesting actor with luke warm skills, but his marketing appealed to the same group as the Ninja craze did and you found a great number of very passionate nutters trying to use Aikido on the streets and entering Karate clubs to learn wearing black dresses (NO I don’t mean Hakama). You also saw very informed and serious students finding great Aikido instruction and growing the art as well as those that did not find Aikido and ended up in Karate or other arts Dojo’s.

Segal himself, as I said, was a bit of a fraud. However, he was not the worst of them. A big Glut of frauds and hucksters rose up to create a idea that most martial arts classes were garbage that promised to teach you the death touch or other junk. Open any Karate magazine and you would see people like George Dillman, who started out as a legit, traditional Karate person under Seiyu Oyata in RyuKyu Kempo Karate. Oyata himself was a bit of a sketchy guy with a questionable back ground, but Dillman took the cake when it came to frauds. First off Dillman started off teaching people and training in traditional Karate, but seeing a buck could be earned he began marketing by taking pictures with famous folks like Muhammed Ali, never mind that he taught a camp at the Muhammed Ali training camp near Dear Lake Pennsylvania and NEVER taught Ali himself. Actually, some suggest that Ali taught him some boxing. Dilman progressed and his ideas became more and more controversial. He pushed an idea of the no touch knock out along with some very unscientific homeopathic and dangerous practices.

Almost in a response to the reemergence of the “Mystical arts” BS and the watering down of marital arts by TKD and Karate instructors looking to boost their membership by adding a kiddie class devoid of any real Karate…then came a tournament headed by a now famous martial arts family, the Gracie family. They were a Brazilian family or Clan of family members who trained in a style of “Judo” called Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, or BJJ for short. The tournament marked a shifting in the Martial arts community yet again and a divergence or change in ideology as well. The BJJ folks were ground fighters, and prior to the tournament most people held that if you went to the ground you were DEAD meat. The UFC came Roaring onto the scene with a promise to find out what the best martial art was, infact it kind of proved the opposite of its intent. Royce Gracie was the first Gracie to participate in the UFC with the intent of showing that BJJ was the best.  He won the first UFC but after a while BJJ guys and Gracie fighters would lose to strikers and big time to wrestlers.

The introduction of the UFC created a MMA or Mix martial arts craze that swept through the martial arts community at about the same break neck pace as the BJJ craze did but for different reasons. The BJJ Craze was about useable ground fighting that most of the other arts did not really address. In Karate if you are swept and go to the floor your attacker, if a Karate guy, stood over you and waited for you to get up…now you could jump on your opponent and work to break a limb or choke them out. The Judo guys knew that this was essentially repackaging of Newaza or ground fighting with a greater focus on that aspect of training. You would see TKD clubs offering BJJ classes and kickboxing schools suddenly rolling out mats. However it was a bit less common than the MMA craze because the BJJ styles came with a great deal of Machismo and often if you claimed to be a BJJ black belt and could not back it up they would come to your club and prove you were a fraud.

The MMA trend was much easier to use for business. Now a TKD or Kickboxer could offer classes in MMA and roll around with out ticking off the BJJ guys and having to explain to their students why they were getting choked out by someone and told that they were frauds. They did not have to say they were “Such and such” Rank, they could just say they were coaching you. Lots of frauds popped up on the MMA scene however, they said they were fighters with great records then they would gets squashed in the ring. MMA created a wave of people coming to the Dojo’s though because the fighters would always reference their traditional training and back ground. I know of a lot of clubs that benefitted when Lyoto Machida entered the UFC for sure.

The 90’s were not with out frauds too, mostly those that claimed rank in BJJ or who said they were MMA fighters who were not but the majority of the movement in Martial arts near the end of the 90’s was towards No holds barred fighting and BJJ.  A little known art from South East Asia also made its way into the lime light, muay thai. With the popularity of MMA the striking arts came out of the wood work, especially if they worked well in sport or competition style martial arts. It was not long before muay thai was also in movies with Tony Ja and others as well.  But the end of the decade belonged to MMA and BJJ.

 

00’s

                Something funny happened in the 00’s.  The Martial arts community embraced three things, sport, Kiddie classes and BJJ.  MMA was still their, but it was now much like Foot ball and other sports, you did not always go and “Train MMA” as much as you worked out in Martial arts, unless you wanted to be a fighter then you would go and train in MMA. BJJ however took off and became a major player in the martial arts community.  Fakes, frauds and other crazy things still plagued the art but it started a cult like following of students, much like Yoga did around the same time. BJJ began to pop up in almost every city, but something else made an even bigger impact in martial arts…the Olympics.

                The Olympics were always a big influence on sport and many of the arts tried to put their competition food forward in the Oly’s but only Judo was accepted up to the 2000 Olympics in Soul. Tae Kwon Do however made its venture into the Oly’s at that time and gave the art a HUGE boost across the planet.  Before this TKD had marketed itself as Korean Karate and Korean Kung Fu to try and draw in members to their clubs. They were seen as the little brother of Karate and not a real challenge in the market place. But with their entry into the Olympics they proved they had a great plan for growth and for development into the popularity arena.

Tae Kwon do, at the same time, began really polishing their marketing towards kids and younger members. They did the same thing that Golf had done with Tiger Woods and Hockey had done for years and years. They pushed that if you trained hard you too could go to the Olympics. The truth is that only a small number of participants get to that level and less of them still get to compete in the Olympics. But it filled the clubs with interested students and instructors were seen driving expensive cars in the states because of the cult like devotion they got from students, all wanting their chance to compete in the Olympics. Tae Kwon Do had finally come into its own and did not have to hide behind other arts to bring people in.

Movies and TV portrayed martial arts as being very dynamic and TKD was that art.  The Chinese arts pushed out movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden dragon and Ip Man, while the Matrix, Transporter and other north American movies settled into keep the momentum of martial arts action going, often serving up mystical side dishes to keep the creative imagination going.

The end of the 2000’s saw Traditional arts maintaining a moderate level of students and saw a great deal of the trends and fads take the less serious and the easily distracted from the flock of potential students. It was a okay decade for the groups even though over all membership was down. This was mostly because of tighter economies and not just lack of interest in the arts. If you were an action hero you also probably were more about stunts, this also dropped interest. The big wave fads never really paid off for most of the arts, TKD aside, the trend in the 00’s was to more accepted mainstream activities. The one area we saw grow a great deal however was kids in the arts. Which is okay, but most people see their participation as not much more than daycare for the kids or babysitting. Not a huge number of the kids saw black belt before leaving the fold and joining the next big thing for them.

 

10’s

                As we moved into this last decade some very interesting fads came about. First off we saw the advent of “Family Karate” when we first started this crazy ten years and we then saw “Sport Karate” come into its own about the middle of the decade.  This meant that WKF, a formerly fringy kind of group, started to build and grow out of Europe and take on the US and Canadian markets. The Sport Karate “thing” had been a small fringe element that was once seen as more annoying and confusing than a threat by traditionalists.  The WKF was a mixing of the styles of Karate to compete together and promote Olympic Karate.  Prior to the WKF the only faction that seemed to have any head way in the Olympics was Shotokan style groups like the JKA and other associated groups, but now the WKF began to push for an Olympic venue, and honestly ticked off the Olympic committee with its band of gorilla style antics.

                The WKF started out as the EKU or European Karate union under Jacques Delacourt who was the first president and a Shotokan student of the JKA.  He changed it to the IKU or international Karate union in the 1970’s to grow the organization and then that morphed into the WUKO or World Union of Karate Do Organization as the IKU merged or partnered with the JKF out of Japan. WUKO tried to pull in other groups like the ITKF under Nishiyama but he refused to align with them for political and technical reasons and the WUKO lost the favor of the IOC.  Because of this WUKO changed its name to the WKF and sought out support from groups outside of the Shotokan world. After some time the group set its rules to support a much less traditional and more sport oriented system and again went to the IOC to seek approval and participation in the IOC.  Support amongst traditional groups in all styles has been very limited. The rules and the sport of Karate seemed to sway greatly towards the Shito groups, which put off the Goju groups and the Shotokan groups and thus the IOC’s limited approval did lead to the inclusion of Sport Karate into the 2020 Olympics, but because the Karate world in general is not behind the WKF system the IOC has determined this to be a one and done.

                The WKF ended up creating this kind of sport Karate hybrid that merged Tae Kwon Do with Karate with a game of Tag to create a “more exciting” and more palatable system to attract the uneducated masses who thought that Karate was dull and boring. The problem is….generally local Karate is dull and boring!  The local level stuff is and never was meant to attract crowds, it was meant to create high level Karate-ka for national level Karate events and to help give local students something to work towards. Local level Karate students and he officials basically are their to help create a new level for practice, the national level events were meant to create fighters like Tanaka, Yahara, Kagawa and others who would push the dream of younger Karate people towards high level competition and keep the Ippon as king. Now we have this patty cake / Tip Tap/ Tag version of Karate that looks more like Tae Kwon Do than anything. The rules are even meant to encourage more Jodan Geri movements to make it more interesting for the crowds, who cares if that stuff works in real life.

                Watching these events, the punching techniques all come like jabs with no control and no focus, the kicking is fast, but all geared to head kicks. I once showed a video of high level WKF fighters and high level TKD fighters to a group of friends at work and they said it was the same sport, I then showed it to my students and asked, “Which is Karate” and only 3 of 9 students could comfortably guess. I then showed the same students older JKA events and some other high level WKF events and BOTH groups could pick out the Traditional vs the Sport. I also showed the group a high level WKF Kata performance and then Osaka Sensei doing the same Kata…..the uneducated group said they were different forms, the Karate students though that the world champ looked like a beginner or lower level competitor compared to Osaka’s version.

                The Point being that the WKF and its version of sport Karate style is a fad, it’s a trend that should hopefully go away shortly. However, those that have been sucked into this fad will also dry up and blow away when this fad is gone. Its not the evolution of sport Karate. Thankfully the world of the Martial arts is heavily traditional, the tradition is the foundation of its existence and the sport aspect is about 5% of its real focus. We do tournaments to judge our progress and we enjoy competition as a means to an end, but any real practitioner realizes that the sport of Karate is limited, that mixing styles in sport does not work as it is evidently not fair to at least one of the art forms. To merge the system means to create a new system for short term, till its realized that even in merging styles, one of them is losing out! 

                I have not a clue what the next fad will be!  We have had self defense styles come to the forefront, Ki oriented mystical systems, sport styles like MMA and WKF and we have had every brand of Asian martial art come forwards for its bite at the pie. I could talk for pages about the fads, the trends, the latest whims and systems that have popped up.  The pop culture icons that have been created and the innate eccentricities that came to the fore front. Innovations, evolutions, Mania, amusements, Vogue and whimsy all have influenced the Marital arts casual practitioner. Those that stuck with it, the stalwarts the rocks of tradition tend to outpace, out live and out maintain their standards long after the latest distractions have given way to the next.  The one thing that I can say is if you want to be someone that is around longer in the arts, someone that builds a life style based on Karate you should focus on tradition and keep the highest standards and traditions.