I hope everyone is keeping safe and well during these difficult times. It must not be easy on everyone and my thoughts are with you. Having more time that I normally do since teaching has completely stopped and most normal activities are out of the question, I have turned my attention to this blog and other projects that have been put on hold. One of those is the other ‘Karate-do Nyumon’.
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Hikimori (引きこもり) is a Japanese word usually reserved for young adults who lock themselves away for months or years at a time to avoid the stress of social contact. Although not self-imposed, I’m sure all of us are feeling the stress of being cooped up at home and anxiety about the future. It is certainly a hard time for everyone, and I consider myself fortunate that I am healthy and secure unlike others during this pandemic.
As I mentioned in my previous posts, since I have extra time I have temporarily restarted this blog to add a bit of light reading on Okinawa Karate-do and Kobudo. This week’s post is a translation of a short article entitled “On Karate Dance” that was originally published in “An Ethnography of Amami Oshima” in 1927. It does not reveal any great insights about the history of Karate, but certainly provides a bit of flavour regarding the then fledgling art. Particularly the author equates Karate as a kind of Ryukyu Dance and differentiates from it’s predecessor art of Karate-jutsu. It’s an interesting perspective and one that modern authors still debate (for example, read part 3 of the article “A Thousand Years of Traditional Okinawa Karate”.
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