I think that it is fair to say that the founders and their immediate successors trained very, very hard. But to say that nobody today trains like they did is where the falacy begins. Top level competitive MMA-ists, taekwondoists, boxers, judoka, wrestlers, and karateka most certainly traiin just as hard. That is what makes them top level. So too do football players at the high school level.
The other factor is that old school is not always better. The understanding of the human body, how to train it, how to maintain it, and how to feed it are much better now than they were in the ninteenth and the former half of the twentieth century.
Not every founder was a prodigy. Not every one of a founder's top students were prodigies either. The assumption that they were all prodigies and therefore deserving of the tenth dan they awarded themselves is simply erroneous. They were hard working men who trained hard and were very focused on what they were doing. More importantly, they had the ability to codify a system and train others in said system. Not every athletic prodigy is capable of doing this.
Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge founders of assigning themselves the rank that places them at the head of the system that they created. But dan grade has been around now for about a century, whereas with Kano, it didn't exist in the martial arts until he put it there. Dan grade requirements with regards to time in grade and in some cases, minimum age for certain grades, are relatively standard in most martial arts (certainly not all) that use the kyu-dan system. Standard enough that one doesn't need to be practice Aikido, for example, to know that the the Aikikai probably considers 21 to be too young for a hachidan.
The other issue is that dan grade serves to denote a good number of things which are not always related. Skill level, where one is in training, time in grade, administrative function, and titular. Many systems require you to tbe fourth dan or higher to write a dan cert. This is administrative. One must often be of fourth to sixth dan at a minimum to addressed as "master" and often a minimum of eighth or ninth dan to be addressed as "grandmaster" within an organization. This is titular. At a dojang level, there is usually a physical test with specific requirements that a student must pass in order to receive their first dan. This is skill level and progression in the curriculum.
However, at a dojo level, sometimes an individual with a greater degree of responsibility (say teaching their own classes without supervision) will be promoted more quickly to reflect the responsibilities that they have been given.
We can sit here and armchair the dan grades of people we've never met and judge their worthiness from our lofty keyboards from dusk until dawn if we so choose, but unless we're training with them, all that we can really say for certain is whether or not a promotion at a given age or for a given time in grade is somewhat normative.
Funny thing is, that after armchairing the worthiness of one for a dan grade, we will all turn around in the next thread and say that rank is unimportant and/or meaningless.
Daniel
