History Of Jutsu-Kai
To those who are just discovering the enjoyment to be gained by taking part in Karate, or who have been attending classes in a light-hearted way, it may seem strange to see more experienced students lending much weight to the history of their art. If one looks into the background of any activity of significance one will find the more committed participants paying similar attention to the biography of their vocation. Chess players can quote the list of great masters and even their individual Gangs going back over many years, while the study of great generals and their campaigns is an accepted part of the education of anyone taking an interest in warfare. Knowing about the development of our own martial art will give us a feeling of tradition and often a deeper insight into its practice.
It is nowadays almost universally accepted the Karate has its origins in the meditative fitness systems of India. While devoted monks traveled taking their religious beliefs to the outside world, in particular China, they also took with them a range of elementary exercises designed to assist in their religious practices. Under the social pressures of the day these exercises slowly became more systemized and the emphasis was shifted towards the practice of movements relevant to self-defense. In China the first ancestor of Karate the martial art was born.
Over hundreds of years these movements spread throughout China, attracting the interest of many talented people whose names are lost to us now, but with each one adding his own small contribution and eventually giving rise to a number of contrasting systems across the Chinese empire. During this period the practice of these systems was always linked with other fields such as religion or medicine, and it was rare to find an expert practitioner interested solely in a system for its martial content. The land incorporated into the Chinese Empire at this time was so vast that it is difficult to imagine it as one entity. Regions had distinctly different characters due in some part to those other countries nearby which would participate in trade and consequently social interaction with the Chinese. The martial art was, of course, one of the areas experiencing an interchange of ideas, and knowledge developed in China, slowly filtered outwards and was grafted onto the indigenous systems of its neighbors.
Of particular interest to us in Karate is the small island of Okinawa lying off the south coast of China where the people practiced a system known as "To-de". Thanks to the influence of the many visitors and immigrants from China and from Okinawa residents spending time as residents on the mainland the main schools of Okinawan Karate developed. These were known as Shurite, Nahate and Tomarite after the three towns around which they sprang up. As in any useful practical tradition Karate knowledge diffused over Okinawa with the three styles becoming less distinct until eventually they blended into the complimentary schools of Shorin ryu and Shorei fyu. During this period the leaders of the Okinawan schools met and adopted the name of "Karate" for their art. The name came from two words, "Kara" meaning China and "Te" meaning Hand. Along with the word "Jutsu" implying the study of the technical nature of a practical art, the name Karate Jutsu was first applied.
Between the years of 1917 and 1922 significant developments took place when a highly respected teacher Gichen Funakoshi, known to us by his pen name "Shoto", performed a number of public demonstrations in front of, among others, Crown Prince Hirohito, later Emperor of Japan. He gave up his job as a primary school teacher to teach Karate professionally, giving him more time to travel. On a visit to Tokyo he met and became friends with Jigoro Kano who had developed the Grappling art of Jiu-Jutsu into the combative sport of Judo. His first book "Ryukyu Kempo Karate" was published, becoming the art's first widely available technical reference work. All of this influenced him to in his decision to move and live permanently in Japan to develop and teach Karate in his dojo, the "Shotokan". At this time he decided to change the meaning of "Kara" from China to Empty (much the same as in English we have words like 'where' and 'wear' meaning different things but sounding the same). He also substituted the word "Do", a "way", for Jutsu, changing the aim of Karate from a practical system of self-defense to a character building pursuit. Karate Jutsu had become Karate Do and the Japanese era of Karate had begun.
While Karate continued to be practiced as it had been on Okinawa, the pace of its development increased rapidly as new masters matured in Japan. With the varying influences of their own traditional martial arts they formed schools such as Wadoryu, Shitoryu, Gojukai, Shotokai and Kyokushinkai but for many the emphasis was now changing from a martial art to a combative sport. In this guise and with new training methods it was only a matter of time until Karate was introduced to the rest of the world.
Now that Karate is firmly established in Europe it is natural that a regional approach, tailored to those people practicing it, should become adopted. In particular Europeans seem to have accepted Karate in its sporting guise very easily, to the consternation of some oriental masters who see this as a watering down of Karate's traditional aims. There are those Westerners who still fight to keep Karate as a Japanese art, seeing the traditional Japanese attitudes and practices as the factor which makes Karate so unique, and it cannot be denied that some Japanese masters are to be respected totally for their abilities and integrity, (the same being said about many living Okinawan masters). It takes a truly gifted and dedicated man to firstly recognize the necessity to practice Karate in a fashion fitting his birthplace, then to have the insight to understand what to reject of oriental attitudes and what to keep to preserve true Karate spirit. This is why most Karate groups in the west are nothing more than a collection of fellow sportsmen representing their clubs, or like minded people trying to capture the flavor of being a "living samurai"! Karate has always moved forward due to the influences of such men, not afraid to question, reject and change where they felt it necessary. Truly original styles following the teachings of these men are nowadays rare and express the cutting edge of Karate. We have such a man in Shihan Creton, the founder and President of Great Britain's only truly original style to date, "Karate Jutsu Kai".
Shihan Creton's martial arts career started when he began practicing Judo as a boy. While he enjoyed the hard physical approach to the sport he was quickly converted on first seeing Karate and realizing its greater practical potential. His first foray into the field of his new discipline was with the local Shotokan group. While he enjoyed rapid progress due to his single minded approach to training he quickly realized the limitations of his instructor. His complete absorption with anything to do with the martial arts led him to a demonstration by a youthful Bryan Dowler, and recognizing the increased scope in the new style of Kyokushinkai he changed direction. Kyokushinkai Karate continued to absorb him for many years, culminating in his success in the World Open Knockdown tournament. The preparation for this success had cost Shihan Creton many years of back-breaking work down the road of Knockdown competition and away from the areas of his major interest, such as improving the depth of the style's kata and rationalizing its basics and the way they were taught. His suggestions to the group's heirachy on these and like topics were met with a lack of enthusiasm, and he regretfully decided to that the only way to see his ideas bearing fruit was to found a new coherent system from the ground up. Along with Bryan Dowler, whose great political reputation gave the new undertaking a necessary aura of gravity, he launched the British Karate Jutsu Renmei. For a number of years he worked earnestly laying the foundations of a new Karate style incorporating all of the important areas, as he saw them, into a lucid whole. During that time, however, it became increasingly obvious that his own views and those of Shihan Dowler were slowly diverging. This led ultimately to the amicable split of the B.K.J.R. into two separate groups. With his gift of insight Shihan Creton recognized the need in his own group for a sign of ascension from a respected physical system to one incorporating more spiritual values. He decided on the name British Karate Do Karate Jutsu Kai, emphasizing the unbreakable bond between the demanding physical practice and the strict ethical code embodied by Karate in its purest forms. The last chapter to date in the saga of the realization of one man's dream is the interchanging of Kokusai for British as the style becomes international with the setting up of the Danish arm by Shihan Creton.
Karate Jutsu is a style harking back to the original period when Karate was both frighteningly effective for the practitioner if used in defense, and influential in his everyday life. It also looks forward, incorporating newly discovered knowledge relevant to its physical development and practice. Led by the genius of Shihan Creton it will continue to act as the standard bearer in this latest era of Karate's long history.