Martial Arts Magazines.

Featuring some Wado-specific magazine covers.

By my calculations, martial arts magazines will be something you will tell your grandchildren about – if they are even interested.

There’s no doubt that consumer demand for physical magazines has plummeted. In the UK there is only one company left who publishes/prints the entire magazine output across all themes (e.g. Grazia, GQ, The Economist, Private Eye). This single survivor in the industry is praying for a vinyl-style revival for printed material to turn the impossible tide against digital content… it will never happen.

I have raided my own private crypt for this small selection; chosen on the basis of their age and that they feature mostly UK Wado-based Japanese Sensei.

In no particular order:

Otsuka Hironori, founder of Wado karate visited the UK in 1975 and apart from his appearance in September of that year demonstrating at the UUKW Nationals at Crystal Palace (I never get tired of saying that I was there), he did a few smaller seminars around the UK. This magazine cover from the following year shows Otsuka Sensei demonstrating on the late Peter Suzuki Sensei at the seminar in the Midlands.

It’s always fun to look at the price of these magazines. Fifty pence went a long way in those days; for that you could get eight pints of beer, three stone of monkey nuts and a new suit, and still come home with change.

From 1978 (and a price increase of ten pence) comes this front cover, featuring long-time favourite, Kobayashi Sensei, someone once described him as a ‘Nichi Dai Old Boy with a heart’. Many of those people in the south of England who are still creaking around, fondly remember Kobayashi Sensei with a tear in their eye.

Back to 1975. He wasn’t with us for long but Maeda Sensei left a positive mark on the UK scene. Second only in popularity to Fuji Sensei, Maeda was a superb technician and a formidable fighter. I have a catalogue somewhere where clearly Maeda Sensei needed some extra cash, or a new keikogi, and he is modelling their heavyweight hakama and keikogi. I think on this cover for Combat mag the design team went a little overboard on shrinking Maeda’s image into an overly dramatized skyscape – a pity really.

Sugasawa Sensei hardly ever did interviews; to my recollection he only ever did three printed versions and one of those was for me. To see him as a cover star always amuses me. He told me that many times he had been approached and nearly always politely declined. This was from 1986, based on the price of this issue, in that particular year we were being hit hard by inflation.

Sakagami Sensei was never so shy; I have a number of magazines where he is poster boy for UK Wado, but I decided on this oldest version from 1979. Inside, he always gave a good interview, being very open in nature, he loved to chat.

Suzuki Sensei from a Combat cover from 1977. This one is a good one as it’s a very high-quality photo, but a pity about the layout designer’s overenthusiasm with his paste-up. I find myself wondering if the photoshoot was actually on the green near Parliament Square - but what has happened to Suzuki Sensei’s legs?

Finally, this 1980 full-face cover of Shiomitsu Sensei. The design team at Combat did not hold back on filling out the entire space with a single close-up portrait. I think they realised how much power there was in a single focussed image, without the need for karate-like shapes being made to add the drama and dynamics.

I know some past publications archives have been digitised and put online, in the US, Black Belt magazine allows some access to their back catalogue. It might happen that some time in the future someone might decide that martial arts as viewed through the lens of the later 20^th century could possibly have some cultural value, but I am not holding my breath.

I might well do another post featuring these types of covers. But, in the meantime, if anyone wants to direct me towards some I might have missed (Wado-specific) particularly from outside the UK, I am sure a lot of people would be interested.

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