American “Karate,” or Karate-Themed Entertainment for Kids

Today we went to our very first “karate” tournament here in the U.S.  I put “karate” in quotes because, well, it just simply isn’t karate — at least not any karate I ever learned living 20 km north of Okinawa, birthplace of the art.  If I cringed the first time the instructor mentioned how karate came from China, oh, Internet, let me tell you…today the cringing was so overpowering, there was a kind of nerd-induced euphoria that finally settled over me about the 3rd 1980s redneck song playing over the loudspeaker (“Sweet Home Alabama,” “YMCA” and “We will Rock You” were but a few).

The day started with a few karate dances, and I would give a body part to have caught the first one on video.  It was an honest-to-Gosh Napoleon Dynamite moment; a 16-year-old kid did a complete nunchuck dance, ending with a flying kick and a “Ki-ya!”  I was sobbing that I missed getting it on camera.  I couldn’t stop saying “Nunchuk skills…” for the rest of the day, until Marti threatened to smack me.

Here’s a little taste of some of those sweet dances, done by a man wearing, not his gi, but a t-shirt with the arms cut out.  That t-shirt pretty much sums up the fashion of the day:

Then came my next favorite part: “karate” demos by the instructors.  The first was a woman, who tried breaking 5 pieces of wood but only got 4 of them — not her fault, one slipped from the force and fell down without breaking.  I was actually pretty impressed by that.  Then, the next guy came up.  Clearly not wanting to be shown up by a girl (I have to defend her, even though I hid my face behind Marti when she started chanting, “Girlz Rule, Boyz Drool” before hitting the wood), the guy decided to break a section of cinderblock.  I’m not sure if he’d made it happen before and nerves got him, or if he thought the adrenalin would make it happen or what, exactly, but that cinderblock went home intact:

Just so y’all know, Ben is never allowed to read this post until he’s 20, because he would be so hurt.  Let me tell you: Ben loved every minute of this. From the “karate” dances by middle-aged men with beer guts to the loud music, this was an event created by, and for, little boys.  Everyone gets a trophy, just by showing up, and everyone gets an award for every competition (Ben was in four).  The trophies are large and gaudy with an excess of shiny surfaces, flying eagles and dragon designs.  In fact, dragon designs were definitely a theme at this tournament.  Plus, if you get two small trophies — you can trade up for one big one!  Trading up enough trophies gets you a “championship.”  It’s awesome.

I will neglect to mention the (national) organization that runs these tournaments, but as Marti said, it was definitely “karate-themed kids’ entertainment,” or perhaps it would be better to say “martial-arts themed kids’ entertainment” although one guy did a dance with a floppy plastic pirate sword that I couldn’t quite place.  Southeast Asian, perhaps?  I loved his rendition of the history of martial arts in China, which, according to him, were not revived until “the 1980s, when the People’s Republic took over.”  Um, I’m sorry?  I think you meant the Civil War when Mao Zedong took over…in 1949?  Or perhaps the revolution of the 1930s that turned China into a communist country?  Hard to say.  So much history to completely revise, so little time…

Some of you have heard me gripe about this particular “karate” Ben’s been practicing; I had him in a perfectly respectable Judo dojo that was as Japanese as it gets in the U.S., with mentors/teachers and classes of 3-4 kids who trained for the skill itself and not for the tournament, and what does Ben say?  “It’s boring, and it’s hard,” he says to me.  Oh, and that he didn’t want to do it anymore.  So I put away his traditional undyed gi and bought him a black gi for this group. 

Did I mention that he loves it?  There is a lot of kicking and punching but no discipline that I can see — most instructors seem to lack true balance and art — and everyone just trains for the tournaments.  And all I can think is, Sweet Lord above us, those black gis look like the gis the bad guys wore in Karate Kid (I totally saw a kid that looked just like Ralph Macchio there, giving me weird vibes).  Anyway, here’s Ben, reveling in the afterglow of winning giant trophies — 1st place for fastest punch, 2nd place for the escape drill (self-defense, not actually karate), a gold medal for strongest punch (not sure what that means?  Pretty good?) and a silver medal (silver medal = yeah, ok, thanks for showing up) for “Walk in danger,” which I would rename, “Dance pretty with nunchuks like your instructors would.”
Anyway, I had planned to just get through this semester and not return to this particular brand of “karate,” but I absolutely must go to one more tournament to get the Napoleon Dynamite kid on video.  I told Marti I’m taking the good video recorder — can’t miss this one.

Ben, of course, will be thrilled to keep going.  This “karate” thing, it is just really hard for me to deal with: here I am, spending good money on something I think is, well, ridiculous.  My hope is that he’ll learn the basics, or at least stay interested in karate, and we can get him into a real dojo later.  I hope.  Plus, I don’t want to *cough* do *cough* what my parents *cough* did, which was to ignore the stuff I liked to do in favor of what they liked.  *sigh*

Who knew it would be this hard?