= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Douglas_Knight comments on A Sense That More Is Possible - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (205)
There's a question begging to be made here: what is a good martial art? Is one that brings inner calm and equilibrium in itself? Or one that is effective in keeping aggressions away?
Not that those aren't correlated, but some martial arts excel more in the former and in the environment of feudal Japan. I doubt the exuberance and aesthetics of most of those arts prove effective, however, confronting the dangers of modern cities.
In this sense, something much less choreographic or devoid of ancient philosophy — such as the straightforward and objective Israeli self-defense krav maga — seems to be much more effective.
What is curious here is: a great deal of krav maga training involves lots of restraining, since hitting "for real" would mean fractured necks or destroyed testes. So there's no competition, either.
Can it be that in martial arts there's a somehow inverse correlation between the potential of real-life damage (and therefore effectiveness) and the realism by which the training is executed?
No empty-handed martial arts are extant from feudal Japan. They were illegal then, thus secret.
jujitsu is an empty-handed martial art of the Koryu (or traditional) school. (according to wikipedia) :)
Yes, jiujitsu is an exception. I learned that sometime in the past two years, but failed to update my comment ;-)
The precise statement is that samurai had a monopoly on force and it was illegal for others to learn martial arts. Thus extant feudal Japanese martial arts were for samurai. Sometimes samurai were unarmed, hence jiujitsu, though it assumes both combatants are heavily armored.
What I really meant in my comment was that karate was imported around the end of the shogonate and that judo and aikido were invented around 1900. However, they weren't invented from scratch, but adapted from feudal jiujitsu. They probably have as much claim to that tradition as brand-name jiujitsu. In any event, jiujitsu probably wasn't static or monolithic in 1900, either.