While fighting seems to be the obvious purpose of martial arts, that is not the be all and end all of them. Most of us are familiar with the Zen connection, those monks and practitioners using archery or bare handed martial arts forms in the same way that others might use the tea ceremony. If that seems a little impenetrable consider how many of us use martial arts as our preferred form of stress relief. Unless you are actively training for a fight that is already booked, the chances are that a number of your training sessions are just for you. For all the mockery we have made of Aikido and Systema as largely useless fighting arts in Wushu Watch articles, most of the practitioners of those arts are taking part for the same reason that many of us practice Jiu Jitsu or Muay Thai or Yoga: just for the sake of enjoying them.

The belief that martial arts should strike straight to the point and ignore the impractical might even be a relatively modern invention in itself. Since the first civilization built houses on a line, people have wanted to know how to win a fight on that street, but much of the unarmed martial arts tradition is linked closely with the military where it was undertaken more for exercise and confidence than actual efficacy. And then there are the martial arts in media. Nothing has done more to make the average Joe think a few karate classes will turn him into a one man riot squad than the portrayal of martial arts in television, movies, comics, animation and video games.

When we are talking about combat sports—where points are lost and damage is done on wasted efforts—there is no other concern than practicality. Why would you do something pointlessly flashy when you might get chinned with a good right straight as you take your run up? But in entertainment there is freedom. Let us take an example from both worlds: Jean Claude van Damme. Van Damme trained under the great Dominique Valera and had real accomplishments in the ring—he could fight. Yet if every Jean Claude dispatched every attacker in the course of a movie with a slide back and a good one-two, that would get old very quickly. The people want the razzle dazzle, and fortunately Jean Claude could provide that.

It is in media that martial arts can regress to the very wooden and traditional throwing of shapes of old. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they should. And this brings us on to my subject today: Tekken 7

Tekken has been a mainstay of the fighting game scene since the series debuted on the Playstation in 1994. Where Street Fighter’s visuals remained 2-D until Street Fighter IV in 2008, Tekken used three dimensional characters and stages from its first release. More interestingly, while Street Fighter has adopted 3-D models and stages in its newest incarnations, it remains a 2D fighter in that the action unfolds on a line—there is no sidestepping towards or away from the camera. In spite of the original Tekken using 3-D graphics, it was locked on a line just the same. It wasn’t until Tekken 3 in 1998 that Tekken introduced the sidestep and opened up an entirely new dimension of gameplay.

Last week I picked up Tekken 7 on a whim after seeing this video of JKA karateka, Tatsuya Naka performing the motion capture for the game’s newest character. The series has a history of putting well known martial artists in the ping-pong ball covered suits—the original motion capture for fan favourite, King was performed by puroresu and MMA legend, Minoru Suzuki. I had trained under Naka before and thought it would be fun to play a character mapped to some of his movements. A hundred or so online matches later and I now see Tekken 7 in my dreams.

The Japanification of Karate

The character of Lidia Sobieska is as daft as you would expect in a fighting game. She is the twenty-nine year old Prime Minister of Poland and also happens to be a karate master. After failing in diplomacy with the Mishima Zaibatsu she has decided she will sort them out with her fists. So far, so normal. But where karateka have been a mainstay of fighting games forever, Lidia is a distinctly Shotokan flavour.

Shotokan is defined by its very long stances and big movements. That is on display in Lidia with the lengthy stepping punches and powerful right straights to the body from a very extended stance.

For the purposes of talking about MMA and combat sports, I have previously said that there are only really two styles of karate: there are those that compete under point fighting rules, and those that compete under knockdown or Kyokushin style rules. But when you get into lineages and forms and technical tendencies it gets a bit more complex and Shotokan is interesting because it straddles the line: it is considered a “traditional” style compared to Kyokushin and other knockdown karate styles, and yet it is far removed from its Okinawan roots.

Gichin Funakoshi was a five foot tall school teacher who was about as far from a fighter as you could imagine. Yet he fell under the tutelage of an Okinawan martial artist in the employ of the king named Anko Asato. Martial arts in the Ryukyus were a pursuit of the nobility and Asato hooked Funakoshi up with just about every notable master he knew, allowing Funakoshi to collect a huge number of forms (kata). Funakoshi went to the Japanese mainland with no intention of founding a “style” but ended up teaching in Tokyo with the support of Judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano, who encouraged karate training for many of his top students.

[Funakoshi Stance]

Anyone who became a big name in Japanese martial arts in the 1940s probably trained at Funakoshi’s dojo in the 1930s. Hinori Otsuka trained under Funakoshi and then founded Wado-ryu, and Mas Oyama sought out Funakoshi to begin his karate journey long before he became the face of hard hitting knockdown karate. But Funakoshi’s stances and movements were nothing like his students’. Funakoshi’s stances were short and high, as is traditional in Okinawan karate. It was Funakoshi’s son, Gigo who did much of the teaching at Funakoshi’s dojo and who began the obsession with low stances and large, dynamic movements. He is also credited for introducing the roundhouse kick to traditional karate.

[Gigo Stance]

Unfortunately Gigo died of consumption at a young age, and the aged Gichin Funakoshi became a figurehead for two organisations: the Shotokai and the Japan Karate Association. When Gichin Funakoshi died, the Shotokai went off the deep end under Shigeru Egami, who took long stances to their logical conclusion. His work The Heart of Karate-Do is a fascinating read wherein all the ideas make sense, but the outcomes look ridiculous.

[Egami Stance]

The Japan Karate Association meanwhile was able to take the Shotokan style and expand across the globe. As a group that was mainly made up of university clubs, the JKA was keen to bring competition to karate but Funakoshi himself had been very much against this idea. By taking Funakoshi’s precept that in karate “the arms and legs should be treated like swords” and buying wholeheartedly into the idea of ikken hisatsu or “one hit, certain death”, the JKA came to create a form of point sparring competition for karate that continues to this day. It was at this point that form rediscovered function: Gigo’s long stances were for building strength in the legs and hips, but in point fighting the long stances came to serve the same role of the thrust in fencing—covering as much distance as possible to land first at all costs.

Tekken’s Lidia is a mix between the long, straight hitting and shifting blows that make up the meat and potatoes of Shotokan practice and sparring, and the stylized movements of kata. This means that movements like this one—straight out of the kata called Jion—get used as a launcher. Obviously, launching opponents for juggling combinations was probably not the purpose in the original form. But to return to that point from earlier: this is entertainment and it looks cool, so why not?

A few of the interesting kata movements in Lidias arsenal are the cat stance, double punches, and the manji-uke and they give us a chance to explore traditional ideas of what a fight should be. The cat stance is a position where the fighter is light on the lead leg, up on the ball of his front foot, and carrying most of his weight on the back leg. In Okinawan karate the cat stance (neko-ashi-dachi) is one of the main stances used in kata, and in most Shotokan forms—with the emphasis on long, deep stances—it is often replaced with a deep back stance (kokutsu-dachi). It is pretty clear how you could look at the cat stance and say “like that, but with more leg work” and come to Shotokan’s back stance.

But the cat stance is one you will see plenty in Chinese martial arts. The slight details will differ but that short stance with the light lead foot is commonplace. You will have seen plenty of Nak Muay applying the same principle to get their teep out quicker or start halfway to a good leg check. In Chinese martial arts and Okinawan karate the back stance is also important for the same reason as the Sanchin stance—the lead knee obstructs the centreline path from floor to groin. If everyone is training to throw lighting fast lead leg kicks to the crotch, you want your lead leg already obstructing your crotch and ready to kick crotches in return!

While the Shotokan cat stance obviously sacrifices mobility and has little application in modern combat sport, there were plenty who thought it should. Mas Oyama is perhaps history’s most influential karateka from a combat sports perspective. He founded the Kyokushinkai, introduced knockdown karate, and was worshipped by men like Andy Hug, Francisco Filho and just about every Kyokushin lineage kickboxer you can name. You will recall that Oyama began training Shotokan under Gichin Funakoshi, but he later trained Goju-ryu under Gogen Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi believed the cat stance was the best for fighting and Oyama absorbed this. In fact, when Oyama wrote the bizarre Advanced Karate in 1970 he insisted that cat stance was the optimal fighting stance and devoted hundreds of pages to nonsensical hand postures which he believed put a fighter in advantageous positions such as “antenna stance” and kaishu-kamae.

In 1975, Oyama began holding the Kyokushin World Tournament under knockdown rules and was likely disappointed to find that the fighting looked nothing like his expectation. Watch a karate match under knockdown rules at any point in time and you will not find a cat stance or antenna stance in sight.

In Lidia’s moveset the cat stance serves as a telegraph to offer a mix up between a number of different techniques to her standard stance. In this sense it isn’t far removed from Oyama’s ideal demonstrated in Advanced Karate: it is a position which says to the opponent “look at all the weird bullshit I do from here.”

Expectation and Reality

Karate’s time in Japan is a clear case of “expectation vs reality.” When you declare that every karateka’s hands are lethal weapons so the first blow landed must win, your fighting style ends up looking very different to the forms you have been practising. The same is true when you host full contact tournaments but ban head punches—it’s not going to look much like what the guys who put your forms together thought fighting was.

But crucially, this is not to say that that these forms of competition spoiled Okinawan karate. It is largely accepted that the intended applications of kata have fallen by the wayside in modern karate, but there is a tendency to treat old karate as good and new karate as a flawed imitation. It is important to recognize that good deal of traditional karate and the Chinese martial arts it descended from were based on faulty logic to begin with. Take for instance double punches, which are some of the more powerful single hits of Lidia’s arsenal, and were part of the fictional Mishima style in Tekken long before that.

Karate kata have tons of double punches. Leaning ones, downwards ones, high-low ones, and they all have very specific names in Japanese. The double punch is blatantly daft if you consider it for even a second: that is why no one was throwing them in either knockdown or points tournaments even in the early days. If you throw both hands at once, one or either hand is not going to have the body’s rotation behind it, making it pretty pointless. When looking at weird techniques like this “U punch” or awase-zuki it is worth remembering that in Chinese martial arts “accuracy over power” was taken to an extreme conclusion.

Martial arts were closely guarded on Okinawa and trusted students would hand copy their teacher’s own imitation of a Chinese text called the Bubishi. Gichin Funakoshi had a copy, included passages from it his 1922 book, but never publicly acknowledged the book. Kenwa Mabuni first revealed the Bubishi’s existence to the public in his 1934 work A Study of Seipai. The Bubishi is a fascinating historical document which contains a number of musings or poems on the nature of fighting, as well as the famous forty eight diagrams—each illustrating fighting principles in a somewhat cryptic way.

[48 diagrams]

Yet most of the text is devoted to diagrams pertaining to chi meridians and potion-making. Pages upon pages comprised of vital points which will cause death if struck at certain hours, and herbs that might well have been native to coastal regions of China and not to Okinawa. Remember that these were all copied meticulously, by hand. These erroneous ideas were closely guarded by the same people who passed down the knowledge of the forms and so the two ideas cannot be casually separated. When you think of it in this context, of course a double punch is worth throwing if you hit two key vital points at once in the Hour of the Rat and cause death the following day.

However, if you open up those hands you have another commonly seen posture called toraguchi. A handful of throat and a handful of sack is always going to give you a leg up on your opponent when the fight gets to the inside. Toraguchi even features in the Bubishi itself.

[Diagram]

Okinawan Whispers

Lidia’s use of the manji-uke posture is another example of traditional, big moves karate. The practical application of manji-uke when it is seen in kata is widely accepted to be raising a caught or grabbed leg on the crook of the biceps and pushing across the opponent with the other hand. A simple dump, in other words.

In Tekken it is another stance mix up to throw weird stuff out of. But manji-uke is a perfect example of why we even have different karate styles in the first place. Just as the Bubishi was copied by hand and cautiously guarded, so were the forms that made up a good deal of martial arts practice in Okinawa. Gichin Funakoshi had to travel to his teacher’s home in the dead of night to learn. Another famous karateka, Choki Motobu stole his karate by watching his brother training through a hole in the fence. When you are learning one-on-one and passing it on the same way, no one will ever know what is misremembered or added for stylistic flair.

For instance, across the many styles of karate out there, these two hand positions are used pretty interchangeably. Is that for a practical reason? Or is that just how one guy did it and then all his students ended up doing the same? Over time slight differences become more pronounced and you might end up with different moves altogether when you look at two styles that had the same root.

Many of Lidia’s movements are drawn from the Shotokan kata Gankaku. Gankaku was originally called Chinto, but Funakoshi often changed the names of kata into more romantic or descriptive ones. Gankaku means “crane on a rock” and refers to the one legged portions of the kata. The original Chinto has an even more romantic origin story, however. The Okinawan king’s chief bodyguard, Matsumura Sokon was sent to investigate reports of a shipwrecked Chinese sailor who was stealing food from the islanders at night. Matsumura confronted the sailor and the two had an epic martial arts battle on the beach. The two came to an agreement that Matsumura would feed and help the sailor, if the sailor taught Matsumura his style of Chinese boxing. Matsumura codified the moves the sailor taught him into a kata, and named it Chinto after the sailor.

Traditional Okinawan forms are pretty stingy on the kicks, and they seldom go above the belt. Chinto / Gankaku contains half a dozen and a jumping kick as well. In Shotokan’s Secret, Bruce D. Clayton offers the intriguing theory that the kata is meant for fighting on uneven ground (like a beach), as it unfolds up and down a line, with a marked difference in the style of techniques in each direction. Whatever the case, the signature sequence is this retraction of the leg into a one legged stance, followed by a kick and a stepping punch.

When Lidia was first released, players quickly realized that this combo was a great opener to accumulate a ton of damage, and it appears in her move list as “Gankaku”.

Here is a huge example of small differences becoming something bigger. In the Shotokan and Shito-ryu versions of the kata, the karateka raises himself up onto one leg in the crane stance, then kicks and steps through to punch. In another version of the kata seen in Chotoku Kyan lineage, such as in Isshinryu, the leg is simply retracted behind the karateka—as if to remove it from attack—and the returns as a kick.