I am talking here about how in Wado karate we choose to interpret the Japanese concept of Kihon.
It seems like I have heard this in Dojos FOR EVER… The Sensei says at the beginning of the class, “Right, we’ll start off with basics”.
Initially I didn’t think anything of it, I just unquestioningly did what I was told and saluted the flag. But, over time I didn’t just start to wonder what the Japanese meant by ‘Kihon’ but also what we meant by ‘basic’. Semantically I don’t think we do ourselves any favours by hanging on to that one word to describe something that we always do in the Dojo, after all, we never seem to be encouraged to surpass it, or leave it behind as some ‘basic thing that we used to do when we first started training as a white belt’. In a Dan grading you often rise or fall on your so-called ‘basics’, it’s that important! Is there anyone apart from me who wonders about the absurdity of that?
It makes me think of the kiddies building blocks Lego. At some point the manufacturers of Lego decided to hook in a younger audience and produced a ‘basic’ beginner level building block and called it Duplo (suitable for 1- to 5-year-olds and of a size where a youngster can’t easily swallow the bricks). This was BASIC. The plan was that you progressed on to Lego and never touched your Duplo blocks again… you can see where I am going with this.
As a concept ‘your basics’ in general English usage, as a phrase, is burdened by this kiddie level of doing things, suitable for newbies and ultimately left behind.
In teaching in the Dojo I have tried hard to banish the word ‘basics’ from my own vocabulary and replace it with other more meaningful options – my current favourite is ‘fundamentals’, I have also experimented with ‘foundational techniques’, but it’s a bit too much of a mouthful. But anything ‘foundation’ has to be good; huge sophisticated structures are built on well laid foundations, and, after all, Wado karate is a sophisticated structure of towering dimensions and unfathomable possibilities.
The second grandmaster of Wado Ryu used to favour the analogy of an alphabet when talking about ‘basics’, he would mention the 26 letters which have to be learned and formed correctly and can then lead you on to creating words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc. And, although he never explained it like this, those humble 26 letters have the potential to convey the most refined and complicated of ideas that the human species is capable of producing.
I always liked his use of the alphabet to underline the importance of the fundamentals, and maybe I am reading too much into this, but surely there must have been a kind of irony in his choice of the western alphabet over the Kanji of Japan. I put this down to his internationalist leanings. But, there is something in it. Otsuka Sensei was essentially saying that we ignore fundamentals at our peril, and it’s true; you can show someone the most smooth-running, slick, complex paired kata and without secure fundamentals they will produce a clunky, comedic parody that at all levels would be totally unworkable, a kind of ‘Cargo Cult’ version of Wado. (‘Cargo Cult’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult).
Another aspect of ‘basics’ that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that it was a phrase trotted out by politicians when they had nothing left in the magic sack, you know, “back to basics”. Tory Prime minister John Major grabbed it as a campaign slogan in 1991 and what followed was six years of scandal – I wondered what kind of ‘basics’ he was referring to?
I know it’s only a word and that I risk sounding like the world’s most boring pedant, but really Kihon is the key that unlocks all doors, without strict adherence to it we are flailing in the dark. It’s time to reclaim it and elevate it to the hallowed realms we aspire to.
So, let’s quit with the ‘basics’ and rebuild the status of this very important concept and put the ‘fun’ into ‘fundamental’.