"What's your Style? The art of Fighting without Fighting?"

I’m rather a fan of chocolate. White chocolate, milk chocolate, don’t worry not mint chocolate I’m not a barbarian!

So a chocolate related koan for you.

“You get a tin of celebrations chocolates (You take out the bounty’s because no-one wants those) and a tin of Quality Street. You empty the quality street tin, by whichever method you fancy (chances are... you eat them), and into the now-empty quality street tin you place the celebrations and close the lid. Inside do you have the same chocolates?”

Even Romeo had opinions on the matter:

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

I can honestly say that almost no question makes me die a little inside more than, what style do you do? It is like the most important thing about the sum of your training is which stances are most common in your kata.

The truth: there is only you and your training. There is only Karate. Two arms, Two legs, 1 head. You have trained and are prepared or you are not.

The very origins of style is paradoxical. For those who train to preserve a style “exactly” as it was taught by their teacher all they are really doing is allowing the art to stagnate and eventually decay. Consider Hironori Otsuka, the founder of Wado Ryu Karate. This was in fact the first “style” that I learnt, but I haven’t ever tried to preserve the Wado Ryu I learnt in the exact image of anyone else, in fact I’m just following the example Otsuka set, to train your own way. Otsuka didn’t try to preserve Karate in the way of his teacher. Otsuka studied Shindo Yoshin Ryu Jujitsu before ever beginning karate with Gichin Funakoshi. He then only studied with Funakoshi for a comparatively short period of time and the eventual split from the as-yet-unnamed Shotokan style was a direct result of Otsuka combining all that he knew. He valued the partner work and footwork from his Jujitsu and so it would be only natural to absorb this within his new skillset from Karate. The eventual result, what we now describe as Wado Ryu Karate.

This, therefore, leads me to conclude that to say I practice Wado Ryu is synonymous with saying I practice to imitate Otsuka. Unfortunately, it is a mathematical certainty that to merely imitate will lead to progressively poorer performance. Imagine that Otsuka’s most direct student learnt 99% perfectly what Otsuka knew and passed this on to his next student who again tried to imitate but again probably wont reach more than 99% imitation (of course 99% is a bold over estimate, however, works as best case scenario). This is now at best a 2% decrease, I think you get the idea where I’m going with this...

This cycle will inevitably lead to loss of knowledge and so it is essential to seek knowledge from numerous point sources. The simple truth is that there is no reason in training the same as Otsuka, because …