Complete Shotokan Karate
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| The Cover of Complete Shotokan Karate |
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Writing a review for such a karate book, or in fact, any karate book puts me in a difficult position. As someone who is also writing a book about karate, namely Karate: The Japanese Way, I have to be careful not to confuse my concerns with whatever book I may review with my desire to see my own text find a home in the libraries of karate enthusiasts everywhere. In short, I have to be careful of my biases and not mess up doing a proper objective review of a text. Please bear with me, and also please feel free to disagree with me as well should you opinions and mine conflict.
Complete Shotokan Karate is, and I believe that the author is fully aware of this problem, not quite "complete". Picking up the text for the first time I thought, "How can this be `complete'? There are tons of things that are not even referred to." But with such obvious questions aside, there is also much in this text which noteworthy. And in contrast to many other karate books on the market, does some things well where other books fail.
Reilly-Sensei is a man who is undoubtedly passionate about karate. His desire to teach and explain what he has painstakingly learned over many years is certainly obvious. We can see his passion in the excellent layout of the text, the work put into the text's design, the quality of paper used, the organization of ideas move naturally and rationally from one to the next, and the tight writing style employed throughout. This is a good book. It is thorough and articulate.
The book is divided into two parts. The first section deals with the history of karate, its roots, and its migration from the Middle East to Japan. The second section deals with a variety of things ranging from etiquette in the dojo, sparring drills, kata, and some grading information.
The first section of the book gives me more questions than answers. Reilly-Sensei, perhaps in a strong internal desire to attach meaning and significance to the craft of karate, imposes the notion of the samurai ethos on the training activities of Okinawan peasants who trained in secret without the benefits of armor, swords, or horses. Historically, the roots of karate have literally nothing to do with the training, ethos, mentality, or practice of samurai warriors. In fact, if we are to argue that it is Gichin Funakoshi who is the father of Shotokan karate, we can safely say that samurai warriors were all long dead a few hundred years before karate even left the islands of Okinawa for the Japanese mainland.
Others may argue that although there were no samurai that the samurai spirit remained strong throughout history. It may be their desire to refer to their karate instructors as "samurai warriors" that brings them to such conclusions, but such notions are not supported by much more than wishful thinking. Personally, I think that a great karate teacher should just be called "Sensei" and we should leave it at that. Also, when considering our Japanese instructors' cultural heritage we can trace quite a few Japanese people back to their medieval roots. We can do the same for people of other nationalities too. I might claim that I have some historic link to the house of Charlemagne. You might say that you have roots that go back to Moses or Abraham. Someone else might claim to belong to the house of Eric the Red.
But when it comes to Shotokan karate, the martial art of the here and now, such things are largely irrelevant.
On a positive note, however, the first section has some interesting ideas about some of the philosophical notions of karate. The first ninety pages of the book have a lot of interesting reading of Japanese themes and historical ideas and although not relating to karate entirely, do relate to a Japanese background against which karate can be seen and compared.
The second section, much like the first is a mixed bag. The second section of the text starts well enough with some discussion and demonstration of dojo etiquette, certainly useful for novices to karate. Also, the first several pages explain and demonstrate some basic sparring drills. These too are well done and great for beginners. From this point, however, Reilly-Sensei adds some dull multiple attacker drills which seem rather limited in that most of the students seem to be standing about without much direction.
The second section of the book also has a few of Reilly-Sensei's students and perhaps co-instructors performing a variety of kata that we can easily find in the Nakayama series, Best Karate. It is with no small amount of wonder why these kata were included. Reilly-Sensei aside, there are several errors in each kata's presentation, the result being a clear demonstration why the Best Karate series is far superior. It is hard to imagine why any student would prefer to use those demonstrations of kata to what we can readily find in more original texts. Including the kata would not have been a problem if there had been more in describing them, demonstrating more applications, or expanding them to another level. None of the above was done and the text would be much better without the kata section altogether.
Reilly-Sensei's passion and devotion to the art of karate cannot be brought into question. Throughout the text his technique is superb and an excellent model for students to follow and emulate. Insofar as the historical research is concerned, however, there are some enormous assumptions, which are difficult to gloss over. Although Complete Shotokan Karate is a good read, it is not a text, which has you referring to it time and time again. On a positive note, I would like to also add that this book is significant in that it is a book that is written, to some extent, outside the realm of a purely Japan- centered karate. And for that reason alone, might be interesting for students to pick up and make comparisons.
Mark Groenewold
Ishikawa-ken, Japan
July 2001
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