No First Attack In Karate

Shutterstock / Iaroslav Neliubov

A recent discussion on a practical karate forum that I'm on prompted me to ask myself a question, namely, are the ways in which I have been taught to strike in karate, or to attack in general, flawed?

The discussion itself revolved around poor habits that are ingrained into students using traditional teaching tools such as one-, three-, and five-step sparring.  I certainly agree with the sentiments expressed, which were that those method do indeed ingrain poor response habits because they teach a distance, timing and power generation that are not realistic as concerns self-defense situations as they occur in daily life.

Having come to this conclusion, many in the forum have devised alternative drills and teaching/training methods which they feel more accurately reflect the reality of self-defense situations, which I love to see, and I have created some for myself too, as well as adopted some of these methods from others.  But some of these drills have caused me to ponder tactics and purpose as they relate to some specific techniques which have been adopted into these contemporary drills.

This brings me to my point for this post. Boxing punches with their guards are for first attack, so are they necessary for karate's philosophy of fighting? 

I feel like the kata of my style (Shotokan) are a bit more "hammer fist" oriented because of all the shuto uke, gedan barai, age uke and soto uke, but it still contains palm strikes in places, such as nukite, the middle sequence in Jitte kata, the end of Hangetsu kata, etc. 

In fact, in my opinion, my kata teach me that actual punches with the knuckles to the front of the face (like in modern boxing) should be a rare thing. Most head strikes seem to me to be knife hands to the neck, hammer fists or side palms to the jaw or, if punches, then to the back of the jaw, often in conjunction with an arm lock. All other punches in kata are torso strikes, or else they are actually throws, neck cranks, etc.

This makes sense for a "self defense" oriented style, used by civilians who do not have the time to toughen their knuckles or can't risk their hand dexterity by doing so, and even for a battlefield art, where straight punches to armored or simply hard parts of the body would do more to damage your hand than the enemy.

This is why I'm actually a bit skeptical of using boxing as an assumed good fit with karate tactics, because by the time karate kata techniques can be employed (and kata IS the essence of karate), you are too close for jabs and crosses. If you have time and space to square up to them boxing style, or see your opponent do so, then you likely have time and space to run. If you are attempting to defend another who is being attacked, then the attacker is preoccupied with the person they are attacking and hence you have no need to boxing-stance square up then either. There are other styles (such as BJJ) that have no problem closing the gap without boxing strikes. Karate is no different. That's why every kata begins with either a flinch response against a strike, or a reaction to being grabbed. Karate is not unarmed consensual dueling.

Here is a link to a video discussing palm strikes vs hammer fists by Master Wong, who is generally a Wing Chun practitioner, but the concepts apply to the strikes contained with the kata of karate.

https://youtu.be/KZt8Rg7Av84