I am a karate man. I count myself among the lucky to have learned their karate in the South African Shotokan system. I started training in the South African Japan Karate Association (SAJKA) on 3 January 1978, a month short of my 18th birthday and fresh out of high school. The peerless Stan Schmidt and Keith Geyer were my direct instructors until March 1995 when I decided to go traveling.
I ended up in Chicago in November 1995 after accepting a teaching position in the sclerotic Teruyuki Okazaki’s International Shotokan Karate Federation, the American branch of the JKA. It lasted a year before the JKA expelled me. You can read about this and other topics in my book, PULLING NO PUNCHES—Karate Myths and Other Stories.
My expulsion was the favour of the millenium because I immediately joined former JKA star Hitoshi Kasuya’s World Shotokan Karate-do Federation (WSKF) and discovered a kind of karate that I hadn’t seen before: innovative rotary and multidirectional movement unlike the boring, predictable, and stale linear stuff prevalent in the JKA and its spin-offs. I spent two decades with the brilliant Kasuya, becoming an expert in his brand of karate.
I lived in France and French-speaking Switzerland between 2009 and 2019, training and teaching throughout Europe with WSKF affiliates until I returned to South Africa in early 2020 just as COVID-19 arrived in France.
Now in my 60s, I remain committed to karate because I believe in its myriad benefits. But I have another reason: though Stan Schmidt is gone and I long ago severed my connection to Keith Geyer, I could not have lived with myself if they, my two great teachers and mentors, had ever learned that I had quit karate.
In my opinion, once you have attained godan and remain physically capable, you cannot waiver in your commitment. You can adjust your training to accommodate the effects of aging, as I have, but you must remain engaged and involved, as I am, contributing in any measure to advancing the Shotokan. That, to my mind, is what Funakoshi meant by his 9th Precept: “It will take your whole life to learn karate.” Put differently, the black belt is an end if you want to achieve it, but a beginning if you want to understand it. Stan Schmidt distilled this into possibly his best philosophical principle:
The way of the empty hand is good
But seldom clearly understood
If you wish to ride on this road to gain
The password, friend, is “train, man, train!”
I generally avoid karate organizations, mired in their obsolete business model, misunderstanding of the sempai–kohai system, depressingly banal 1970s thinking, intolerably dull “seminars,” reckless stupidity, and pathetic supremacists, sycophants, braggarts, narcissists, tyrants, hypocrites, liars, cheats, cowards, heavy drinkers, and hyperinflated and hyperdiluted black belt ranks.
With nothing left to prove, I prefer to remain a karate ronin, training with and teaching those who enjoy unencumbered innovation and a chance to keep their jiyu kumite chops nice and sharp because I, like my teachers Stan and Keith, will always do jiyu kumite until the day I die. Anyone who won’t do jiyu kumite is not a real karateka.