Yep.
It’s about as good as you’d probably get in 1974 from a Westerner.
Exhibit A
1964
This looks a
lot better that Tony Dukes. There are many more on Youtube.
I do generally agree with you, however. I suppose the martial arts scene was like a plum pudding; mostly stodge with the occasional spot of sweety goodness.
The students are disciplined and you can see a consistency in their techniques.
Consistently bad, but consistent, yes!
The instructor is certainly no Kanazawa or Enoeda like the JKA sent to the UK, but I do believe he was probably doing his level best with what he had to work with.
There were some teachers who were much better than Dukes in the 70s but his advantage was that nobody had any idea what was ‘good’ or at the least, competent. To witness good Karate you’d have to be lucky in finding a n advert on a newsagent’s board, travel to that club, which may have been some distance away and hope they let you watch. There were places like Liverpool’s Red Triangle Club that had excellent levels of Karate in the 60s and 70s, but few people would venture up north to investigate it, then venture in
Liverpool and it’s dodgiest areas! This is how people like Dillman and his ilk, prospered in the early years, even duping Elvis, Ali and Blackbelt magazine!
But, I think most people can identify
accomplishment when they see it. I know little about gymnastics, ballroom dancing or figure skating, but I recognise skillful performances. In the abomination that is Iaido competition, the judges often have to score performances from obscure schools that they’ve probably never see before (especially in Japan), the idea being they judge based upon perceived accomplishment; skillful cutting, body movements, zanshin etc should be ubiquitous in the performance of swordsmanship.
I’m not certain how old you are,
21
but remember, this (see photos) was what most folks were limited to unless you were fortunate enough to live near someone with extensive real training and a solid institutional support system.
Ha ha, yes indeed! I’m sure I had a paperback version of that book with line drawings, but even then, the Karate within it’s pages bore no resemblance to what I was seeing in my dojo. The Internet does have the odd (sometimes
very odd) positive aspect to it!
Oh you’re very old…I was only 3 years old
(we’re the same age!)
the start of the peak of the Japanese Boom/Craze in the USA, and by accident, fairly exposed to Japanese culture because I was dating a Japanese girl for a year before I ever saw a human being in a karate gi in person.
You were lucky…for the Japanese girl, that is!
There just wasn’t a lot to work with back then and it certainly cannot be compared to the level of instruction that can be more widely found today.
Yes that’s very true. The UK was much later to the martial arts game than the USA, but we were lucky in that the Japanese associations sent many of their finest to teach us early on (perhaps they preferred to come to the UK because we had the Beatles, aRoyal Family
and we didn’t bomb their cities!) plus Brits are, by their nature,
far more cynical and not as accepting of new ideas, viewing them with suspicion, which may have deflected the charlatans a
bit more effectively; we did let Uri Geller seduce us, however
and
Tony Holland; he was always on the box in the 70s! Actually, Tony was
great!
…maybe it was Zen!
