I was speaking with a friend recently, who advised me, “you study too many styles, you practice too much stuff”. My initial response to him was that karate is karate and styles are a modern notion. His next response was “How can you become good at one style or the other, if you practice more than one thing?” My immediate response to this was that I have continually trained and teach one style, but that I supplement that study by training in other things, hoping to better understand karate in general. Suffice it to say that a lengthy discussion ensued and we parted company agreeing to disagree.
Now, I understand that the study of one style is a lifetime pursuit. With that being said, I feel that karate is karate, each style is simply the interpretation of that styles founder, or should I say that the styles founder trained under his teacher, or teachers and codified what he learned into his own dojo, that later spawned a style (in most cases). There are only so many techniques that make up the basics of karate in general, those techniques are further divided by stylistic methodology, making minor differences such as the angle of the rotation for a punch or whether you step in a straight line or in a half moon pattern.
For me, I started training in my father’s dojo, after two years, my father began sharing space with his friend and the dojo had both gojuryu and kobayashi (shorin) ryu. Now my father decided that I would attend both classes to further my education. Later my father moved his dojo and again, I trained in the one style. A few more years go by and my father decides that it is time for me to go train at the dojo of his teacher, while at the same time continuing my training at his dojo. In the mid eighties my mother re-marries and moves to Arizona, my father feels that this is a good time for me to train in other styles, so while in Arizona I practice Shuriryu, Uechiryu and more shorinryu, this coupled with visits back home to train in gojuryu. By 1989, I am back home and training at my father’s dojo again. In 1990, my father says to me, I am going to bring in some jujutsu teachers for you to learn from, he also tells me that I need to go out and study with other teachers on my own and come back and show him what I learned.
So you can see that from an early age, I was subjected to more than one style of karate, and more than one art. Every time I wanted to go train somewhere, I asked permission and went, after a while, my father said, what did I tell you, go learn from others and bring it back to the dojo, you don’t need to ask me, I told you to go. So this is what I continue to do, go seek out people and train. I for one see more similarities then I do differences, I teach Okinawan Gojuryu, but my goal is to go out and learn from others, so that I may better understand budo in general.
