Which is better, Wild West or Politburo?

Martial arts governing bodies and regulatory political entities.

Stand-up comic Al Murray as his character ‘the great British Landlord’ in his act asks his audience the questions:

“Where would we be if we didn’t have any rules?”

“FRANCE!”

“Where would we be if we had TOO MANY rules?”

“GERMANY!”

Murray taps into something typically English, with his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Example:

So what do you want; no rules, too many rules, or something in-between?

Martial Arts Governing Bodies (or whatever you want to call them).

The history of their development and all the cautionary tales they embody are subjects worth looking into; particularly comparing nation against nation (as much as I can).

We can all learn from each other, with hints at how to do it and how NOT to do it.

Let me say for a start, over the years the UK has been blessed with some of the best martial arts talents and sources outside of Japan, but in that same span of time it has been less than blessed by the various organisations that have been set up to apparently serve the needs of the many thousands of practitioners.

Back in the day the Wild West that these bodies were supposed to be the antidotes to; (cowboy practitioners, a total free-for-all of charlatans, hucksters and nutjobs), became even wilder under the watch of these various governing groups.

In the UK they rose as a result of the tail-off from the Kung-Fu boom, which created a twenty-year aftermath and then a decline that seemed slow, but inevitable. There was a call for some kind of regulation, which had a two-pronged objective; firstly, to feed into the development of competition karate and bring all organisations and styles together, a project that only had partial success as some groups would do everything they could to avoid joining the party, mostly on purist grounds.

The second objective was to eliminate the cowboys; well yes, it put them on the outside of the tent but it had no teeth to close anyone down, or even slightly embarrass them, many of them were shameless anyway.

A while back I was in a position to see what it was like in the ‘boardroom’ (the council) and view things from the inside and it didn’t fill me with optimism. If anything, it helped me to understand why it was like it was, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was a useful experience in understanding the decline. The infighting, the financial dodgy practices, the puffed-up blazer-clad ‘suits’. In short, it was a mess. Don’t get me wrong there were some good people in there who thought they could make a difference, but their well-meaning optimism was a doomed project from the start.

In other countries.

Although I don’t know the full story and many things I have picked up second-hand, there are some useful examples, both positive and negative.

In this example I won’t mention the particular karate style or the country, but, in the early days of karate development a Japanese Sensei arrived to act as a pioneer and establish clubs in a country that had no experience of karate outside of trying to teach themselves from picture books. He was welcomed by enthusiastic students and started to build a significant bridgehead. The first home-grown Dan grades started to happen; international competition success came on the back of this and things were really going places, the Japanese Sensei was celebrated and hailed as a triumph, this was until government regulation started to get involved.

At some point the national government sports body deemed that karate needed to be regulated; which initially seemed like a good thing, but the government sports body wanted the karate people to have government endorsed Dan qualifications. This meant setting up a Dan panel that each member in themselves had to be prepared to stand up in front of their peers to prove they deserved their grade. And here was the rub; even the Japanese Sensei had to stand in front of the panel and prove himself – a panel made up of his own students, people he had brought up from scratch. Well, this was too much. To the Japanese Sensei this was an insult to all the work he had put in, a rift that was irreparable. The result was that he left the country never to return.

What the full truth of the story was I don’t know, I only picked it up on hearsay, but is this perhaps an extreme version of a Politburo model, the complete reverse of the ‘Wild West’ in the UK?

Currently, in some European countries the ‘Politburo models’ have been squeezed into a more amenable user-friendly shape, something less draconian, but even then, there are areas where angels fear to tread.

It’s alright legislating on grounds of health and safety or child protection, nobody is going to argue with that, but the subject of quality control around Dan gradings has always been a sticky one. I watch with fascination how some countries seem to try and square that circle, as in the UK I remember the governing bodies struggling with the most basic of questions, ‘just what is it that defines karate’? They couldn’t even agree amongst themselves!

In the UK there was an attempt to create some kind of benchmark of quality and set up committees that seemed to exclude the expert sources that should have been the first port of call – the Japanese Sensei, the very people who were in the best position to clearly define the standard. Admittedly, there was a certain aloofness coming from the Japanese side of the equation, some would call it self-entitlement, but if you can’t make that kind of assumption based upon what you had been brought in to do, uprooted from your national base as a cultural ambassador, then just what is your status within the whole house of cards? I suspect that the Japanese Sensei just wanted to maintain a respectful distance.

Was the Wild West always negative?

On the whole, the UK’s Wild West was a free-for-all, an anything-goes environment; all that later half-assed regulation was never able to put the genie back in the bottle. To a large degree it is still the same. But, I am going to play Devil’s advocate here; did anything good come out of it?

It is possible that within the hurley-burley of a lack of regulation groups were given a freedom to grow and be creative, without having to worry about interference.

It seemed that there were two strands of activities existing within UK karate and particularly Wado, like two trains that seemed to be running in the same direction and on parallel tracks.

·       One train represented the traditional activities associated with karate training; the steady regular movement of technical karate, working towards refinement and development of approach. The train drivers and staff were resolute and prepared to take the journey forward at a consistent and controlled pace, but there was no doubt that this was a journey of improvement and the style was progressing in a logical and unarguable pace.

·       The other train left the station like a rocket; this was the sport karate train. Yes it picked up and unceremoniously disgorged passengers at an impressive rate, but cohesion was somehow absent and fights broke out, passengers and staff fell out and unscheduled ‘maintenance’ stops had to happen to keep the whole thing on track.

Passengers on both trains were aware of what the other train was doing, some tried to be on both trains, but this didn’t work out well for many of them.

On the second train I am convinced that there were those who looked towards the direction of the track and saw, shining in the distance, the five magic rings of Olympic status… and then bang… they hit the buffers and were literally left to fight amongst themselves.

The Politburo model exists in major and minor versions; but to me what is very noticeable is a gradual but worrying drift towards homogenisation. My theory is that it is a very basic human instinct to institutionalise, to try and create a single standard and insist everyone abides by it.¹

I can think of examples within the martial arts, particularly Japanese systems.

There are some positives to it, but the negatives are truly depressing. One in particular; the stifling of original and creative thinking. I am aware that it is a thorny issue and can act as an excuse for all kinds of craziness, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

In conclusion; I can see the arguments from both sides, perhaps there is a middle ground. Perhaps there is sensible checklist to rein in the excesses of both systems (or non-systems), but for that to exist the people in charge should be visionaries and not dinosaurs, with an instinct towards the common good, not the preservation of their own ego or status. It’s a big ask.

Header image, Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1939, Wiki (image in the public domain).

1. I recently read an article about an archaeologist who is trying to understand the difference between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. His basic theory is that the Sapiens had an instinct towards making everything to a standard pattern; while the more creative Neanderthals allowed for individuality – but, as we all know, it didn’t end well for the Neanderthals. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/10/ludovik-slimak-neanderthal-hunter-reinterprets-our-prehistory