The human species is full of folly, but no. Rowers didn't try to invent a way to navigate lakes, failed, and ended up in those paper-thin useless boats. Rowing is a sport, like judo, and Shoshin Shotokan karate is a self-improvement practice with the goals I mentioned, only touching on sport and street-fighting.

Practitioners do claim that their style is effective in real fighting, though they recognize that styles without the layer of traditional Japanese discipline, like Krav Maga, have their own advantages (and disadvantages).

But avoiding a street fight is the best way to win it. The inspirational stories told among Shoshin Shotokan karate practitioners about the lineage of masters, people like Gichin Funakoshi and Hirokazu Kanazawa, tell not how they bloodied a roomful of thugs, but how they scared thugs off with self-confidence, or at most, restrained them with a testicle squeeze.