Karate in Brazil

Even though it may sound strange, karate is popular in Brazil, maybe it is not shown in sports television but there are many participants. Brazil officially harbors eight of the eleven official styles of karate, only behind Japan, which has all official eleven and a few other Asian countries. The probable reason for this, or at least a part of the reason why Brazil has so much karate is because Sensei Buio, who is the founder of three styles here in Brazil was very close to some of the Karate founders in Japan. He imported Karate here and thought a great deal of student, including my teacher and I. He is the one who examines my training and judges if I am worthy of getting a new belt. He was also very close with the founder of Wado-kai, the style which I practice. This is probably the most important reason why karate is taken seriously in Brazil, not like other countries. There are many good examples of this, particularly in my Dojo, two black belts already moved to the United States and within one year each of them had won the North American Karate Championship. This is very important, at least for my training, to have a serious martial art teacher, it defiantly enhanced my performance and influenced me to take it more seriously.

Karate in the Olympics

As sad as it may seem, golf was voted more likely to join the Olympics than karate. The Olympics already includes many different fights such as taekuondo and judo and they did already invite karate but they refused. The real problem with karate in the Olympics is that people don’t want to see katás, only fights. As I mentioned before, karate is a deep and philosophical martial art, the Karate representatives did not acknowledge going to the Olympics without a kata tournament (which is the most important and the one which is most contemplated in any karate tournaments). This brought up a very controversial issue because who should be really responsible to judge if karate is or not worthy of joining the Olympics only as kumite (fights)? Going even further, how can we judge which karate-style should be performed as katas, could all styles be performed? Or only the official ones? Who decides what is karate and what isn't? What are the rules since some styles allow hitting and others dont? Personally, I take karate seriously enough to think that it is best not to be in the Olympics than to show the world that we are about fighting and hitting; we - not like other martial arts - still hold true to the old ways of meditation and morals. But there are those who join it so they can learn to fight and hit others, rarely they get to high belts though. Maybe one day they will realize that it is worthy having more martial arts and giving them space to show what they really mean, but until then, I rather not participate in a superficial tournament of fighting meaningless matches.

Katás

Katás, as I already said in my blog, are sequences or series of moves that are perfromed individualy . A katá always starts and ends in the same position, this positon is called yoi. Until now I already learned many different katás, such as the katá fundamental, pianidã, pianshodã, piangodã, pianyodã, among others. All the katás that start with the pian (bigginer) are the katás for the belts bellow brown belt. After that they change names and do not have a specific word to define them, examples are the baasai, cuchanco, and the tinto. These are much harder and will take a karate student in average one year of very hard training to do it well, and many more to do it perfectly. For me to go to my next belt which is brown I have to know the baasai which is the first of the superior katás, the piangodã which is for the green belts and the piangodã which is for the blue belts. Not only do I have to actually know their order and specific moves but also to perfrom them perfectly and with streangh. Even though a kata might not seem very helpfull in practical terms since it is usually slow and has moves that you would never ever even think of using in a fight they are very essential for the karate studante. In a fight, you dont have time to think one your attack and defence, it is all spontaneaus, the role of the katá is to provide you with an arsenal of moves that might not seem usefull but that can come in handy at any sudden point.