Judo is one of the closest thing to actual combat....where karate is hardly any full contact on a daily basis.
I find myself constantly surprised, SL, at how consistent you are in simply denying all the contrary evidence that's been offered to your many, many repetitions of the bolded statement in the above quote. Whole books on street combat applications of karate, with detailed realistic training routines. DVDs. Explanations from
professional streetfighters, who are also high-ranking Shotokan karatekas and karate instructors, of the combat potential of karate using realistic training protocols. And none of it, not one little bit of it, appears to have made any impression at all.
But for those of you who, in contrast, are willing to examine evidence for or against a particular claim—who are, that is, interested in getting at something like the
truth of whatever claim is involved—please have a look at the Japanese Special Forces training in Shotokan that is exhibited in the video
here. Ask yourself whether the level of intense structured violence built into this training, and its fairly obvious effectiveness, represents something that might count as a clear counterexample to still_learning's claim. Then take into account the fact that this sort of training is fully in line with the British Combat Association's training protocols, and an increasing number of North American dojos (though the latter will not yet have quite caught up to the first two, probably, given the legal problems that that kind of severe training entails). And then go back to still_learning's post and decide for yourselves how most judo training stacks up against the `pit-bull' style karate training exhibited here.
Please note: I am not knocking judo/jiujitsu in the least. Trained appropriately, it can almost certainly be a very effective street art, and it is a fact that many of the throws and grappling techs in jujiutsu are related to similar living techs in Okinawan karate, and latent techs in Shotokan and other Japanese styles (as shown in loving detail in Iain Abernethy's terrific book
Karate's Grappling Methods, exposing the grappling techs that realistic bunkai for Shotokan kata reveal). My point is that, as always, it is how you train your MA that determines its street effectiveness; that there are many places and schools where karate is trained to a high level of street effectiveness, and there are probably many dojos where judo (like karate) is
not trained to that level—and therefore that invidious, and apparently seriously uninformed comparisons between the arts along the lines still_learning makes in the above post are very,
very wide of the mark.
