Dear Editor,
I read recently of a seven-year-old child attaining a black belt in karate. I began to wonder whether karate is of the same rigorous quality as when it began to spread in Guyana some time around the late sixties.
As a youth then, I joined the Rising Sun Dojo along with other young men. We did contact shotokan karate and it was a pleasant feeling going home with your toes sprained, ankle joints painful because your kicks were not properly blocked, or your arms feeling like rollers being swollen from practising blocks. I can still remember my legs trembling from practising the correct stances. As we advanced in the game, we would take pride in conquering the high snap kicks to the front, side and back.
In those days martial arts or Chinese pictures were the craze. We had our cinema idols in Chen Sing, Wang Yu, Shoji Karada, Bruce Lee, Lo Leigh and others. We never missed the Chinese pictures; we used them to build fighting techniques in our Dojos.
It was Master Funakusgi in the book Beginner to Blackbelt who said that to achieve a black belt in karate would involve between ten and fifteen years of rigorous training. Reaching that status enables you to master your body and mind, sharpens your reflexes and increases your concentration.
We did a bit of yoga and judo without the aid of mats and matresses.
Today, there are shortcuts to achieve so many things which afford the practitioners the opportunity to qualify with pampered protection. Imagine boxing and compare two different eras. Look at cricket when minimal protection was afforded the batsmen back then. So when I read about very young practitioners in karate attaining a black belt, one wonders about such possibilities or impossibilities in this regard.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)