My Art is the Best! Attack Me, And I'll Prove It!

"There is no first attack in Karate." ~ Funakoshi Gichin




People love to feel special, set apart, superior.  People often love to have something others don't have as well.  Martial skill is no different it seems. Many gallons of ink have been spilled and many trillions of electrons have been inconvenienced arguing over which martial art is best or superior.  This will likely continue until the end of sentient life in the universe.

Many arts are perfectly reliable for the situation for which they were created.  Some are designed for self defense, others for war, and still others have been designed for sport or later modified for sport.

Self defense is a particular type of situation or cluster of situations, which require a particular skill set to successfully defend oneself in such situations.  Some of those skills are shared with the skill sets of other types of situations, such as war or sport, but some are unique to the concept of self defense.

I could go into extreme detail about a variety of examples, but I will here simply divide combat situations into those in which one is the aggressor and those in which one is the defender.  By aggressor, I mean the person who does the approaching and/or initial attack.  I do not mean the person who is or isn't legally innocent in the altercation.

The aggressor requires certain skills which are necessary to safely approach a person while the aggressor defends themselves from the person's attempts to keep the aggressor from attacking them, and then successfully attacking them. Those are not the exact same set of skills necessary to keep an aggressor from successfully approaching and attacking, or recovering the initiative from an aggressor after they have closed the distance and attacked.

Simply put, karate is not designed to be used to attack first.  It is a system that specializes in recovering the initiative after being attacked.  It is a close combat, clinch fighting system that uses grips, trapping, locks and throws to open up the opponent to a strike or strikes, or clinches to stifle the initial attack, followed by grips, locks and throws and follow up incapacitating strikes.  You don't need karate training to preemptively punch an aggressor in the face and then run.  Rather, you need either boxing, muay thai, or sucker punch training (or other art that specializes in first attack) and daily cardio. In other words, there is no first aggression in karate. It's not that preemptive striking has no place in karate, or in self-defense, because the old masters say clearly that it does, but they lived in a different legal landscape than many of us do today, and depending on where you live, there might be no legal way to justify a preemptive strike in court, so training to do so can earn you a criminal record, even if you KNEW in your mind beyond doubt that they were about to attack you.  Some DA's like high conviction rates more than justice. 

And guess what?...

There is no first attack in jujutsu or judo either! If a hypothetical jujutsuka were to claim that jujutsu is superior to karate, and then attempt to prove it by telling the karateka to attack them, well, that puts karate in the role of aggressor while the jujutsuka gets to be in the role of defender, but both of those arts are designed to be the defender, not the aggressor!  This means that the karateka is being asked to assume a role for which they have no training, and then using that outcome as proof that karate is not as effective.

Now, I'm not talking about pitting a karateka who has done nothing but march back and forth across the dojo floor doing 1- 3- and 5-step sparring and kata disconnected from application without even training up the strength of their punches on a makiwara, against a jujutsuka who rolls everyday in training.  I'm talking about old school karate, which trains the clinch-fighting, takedown defenses, and throws which are contained in the kata

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