Book Review: Practical Karate 4: Defense Against Armed Assailants

The Cover of Practical Karate 4: Defense Against Armed Assailants

Authors: M. Nakayama and Donn F. Draeger

Reviewer: Mark Groenewold

Date: June, 2002

This book worries me. It worries me because it has some good stuff, some so-so stuff, and other stuff that I think is so dangerous I just want to toss this volume into moving traffic. God forbid that anyone ever reading these pages must deal with an armed assailant. The experience is scary as hell and turns you into a nervous wreck for days afterward. The adrenaline dump itself might turn your guts to jelly. Having been through a couple scrapes myself, working in Social Services while going to grad school, and I still remember how sick to my stomach I felt afterward. I suppose it is something that people can get used to, but being attacked by people who want to seriously injure or kill you is something that we need to always approach with extreme seriousness.

The best part of this book is on page 16 where the author writes:

“Finally, bear in mind that in an encounter with armed assailants you may not come out unscathed, even though you achieve victory; that often when you are faced with a beating by club or stick it is better to offer some easily borne `target' than a vital one. For example, it is better to suffer a broken arm or hand than a head. He who manages to escape without any injury from conflict with an armed assailant is indeed skillful, or more likely, just lucky.”

The bulk of this book is not nearly as good as these few lines. In fact, the rest of the book is pretty lousy, to put it kindly.

Remember that the armed attacker is different. This is not someone who just wants to beat you up, or `teach you a lesson'. This is someone who is coming at you with a weapon with the intent of making you stop breathing. It is either you or him. It better be him that is horizontal at the end. If not, it's your relatives that are getting calls from the police in the early hours of the morning to identify your body.

If these techniques do not work, you had best close the book and do some work, training, and research for things that are going to help you out in such a situation. Karate cannot be a game, it is not something to look cool in while doing action poses. You've got to train and practice techniques that are going to pulverize your attacker in 3 seconds or less. That may be all the time you have between who gets to live and who gets to die is decided.

The techniques I like are ones that anyone can use. I like the techniques that involve elbows to the softer parts of your attacker's body. I like the attacks to the neck and nose with a closed fist. I like kicks to the shins. I love the elbow to the face. For me, that is always the best bang for your buck.

The techniques I don't like are the ones that you need several years of karate in order to do well, if at all. Things like open handed strikes to the neck and eyes. Things like any kind of kick against an attacker more than three feet away from you. Things like blocks that pin the attacker's arms against him while you counter. These are things that need an accomplished hand in order to pull off. Otherwise leave them alone.

The techniques that I absolutely hate are the ones which are artificially taken from kata and `applied' to `real life' situations. There are poses of Nakayama-Sensei leaning over backwards to give his attacker ushiro-geri. There is one sequence (Uppercut knife slash attack), one that describes the situation where you `have ample room to maneuver' that has Nakayama-Sensei going voluntarily to the ground to use kicking attacks against his assailant a la Unsu.

Didn't he read his own text? He has `ample room to maneuver'! Run away!!! Do NOT flop to the ground and try to kick someone in the knee. Great Scott! If the man steps aside and then jumps on Nakayama-Sensei, the two will be rolling around, and one of them still has a knife he is trying to use. This is the dumbest idea I have ever seen in a self-defense book. I shudder to think of anyone trying to use this technique in a real situation.

Other techniques that I think are stupid and reckless are things like trying to catch your assailants elbows while he is trying to smash your brains in with a stick or club, using X-blocks against broken bottles, open-palmed blocks against knives, and trying to KICK THE ELBOW OF A KNIFE WEILDING OPPONENT SO YOU CAN SPEAR HAND THEM IN THE EYES. God help us if one of our students does stupid things like this. Karate instructors reading this review must make certain their students understand what techniques may save them and what techniques jeopardize them.

This book needs to be torn apart by good karate teachers. Keep the good and ditch the bad. Although I am a strong advocate against book burning, this one might be better with a little singeing. I really wanted this book to be the one Shotokan teachers could point to with pride. Sadly, it lacks everything we desperately need.

The next review in this series will be focussed on Defense for Women.

Saints preserve us.

Mark Groenewold
June, 2002

Copyright Notice