Isa Sensei then began to link the old Okinawan dance to the Karamiti. He said that in the old days they couldn’t practice openly because of the Japanese ban on martial arts in Okinawa. So they began to incorporate Karamiti movements into the old dances and no one could tell that they were actually practicing fighting movements and thus were able to teach it to future generations. I had heard about this in history books and both my past teachers had mentioned it, so this wasn’t new. However, no one had ever actually demonstrated this to me in the flesh. In later training sessions in his dojo, Isa Sensei would show us a dance move and he would ask his assistant to punch, then Isa Sensei would do the same dance move as a multidimensional defense. It had a block, a strike, a joint lock, and finally a takedown. It was incredible to see a movement that was so smooth and beautiful in a dance, applied by someone who knew what they were doing, become such an awesome and effective movement of personal defense. For the first time I could actually see the connection between the old Karate and the old dance. It was a great connection for me because it filled a void that existed in my personal training. This is something that my Goju sensei, Shinjo Masanobu, told me, saying that the old timers had a form of self-defense that was now lost in Okinawa. He told me he had heard about it but he did not know it. Most if not all of the other senseis of his generation in Okinawa did not know it either. He added, we do our bunkai from a modern perspective, we did not learn the old bunkai of kata. Those old techniques died with the past generations, everything we have nowadays we had to basically make up and do the best job we could with what we had.

I believe that any honest karateka today can look at the curriculum he or she has been practicing for the last 10 or 20 years and say that something is missing. Analyzing what Isa Sensei had just told me about teachers taking a form of training and repackaging it to make it more palatable to the general public rang a bell in my head. I put two and two together and realized that what the old Okinawan masters did back then is what some GIs did upon returning to the U.S.A. after their tour of duty. We (non- Orientals) have been told by our Oriental teachers that we were not to change the katas or anything else. However, they themselves did what they told us not to do. We Americans have been doing this for years. We’ve done it for lack of information or because we only received the “tip of the iceberg.” Let’s face it, most GIs were in Okinawa one or two years, and there’s so much (or little) one can learn in such a limited time. Let’s not forget to also acknowledge that as in every culture, there are charlatans, and Okinawa is not immune to this human condition. Some Okinawan teachers who had very little training sold us Americans the Okinawan equivalent of the London Bridge.

Isa Sensei continued to tell me that it was foolish for today’s modern practitioners to practice 20 or 30 years worth of high and middle blocks. At face value, these techniques are not applicable in the real world. Eventually, we would have to find a way of defending ourselves in a system that was not so enclosed with such limited parameters.