Martial arts training, especially for children, is often touted as a tool for character development. You can see this claim on the brochures—half the time, right on the front window—of nearly any storefront martial arts school in your town. It’s not obvious, on the face of it, that learning to kick, punch, and throw your fellow humans would be the sort of thing that makes one a better person.
And yet, there’s a long history of these claims in martial arts. In fact, a number of the arts practiced today (judo, karate-do, kendo, taekwondo, and so on) were explicitly formulated for “perfection of character.” In order to understand that, we have to reflect on the massive disruption that firearms brought to the world of combat. When cold weapons (spears, swords, etc.) were king and their fighting methods were regularly used on the battlefield, in civilian fights with bandits, and so on, those fighting skills were like growing vegetables or shoeing a horse—just part of the life skills toolbox. Nobody thought a guy was a paragon just because he could fight, any more than they’d think a good farmer or blacksmith or cobbler was automatically a saint. The skills are not obviously related to good character, and anyway, there are too many counterexamples. Lots of guys could fight that were not model citizens.
The same is true today, if you look at the predominant fighting technology of today: firearms. Nobody thinks that their pistol instructor is automatically a good role model or financial advisor or life coach. Nobody thinks of their local Marine barracks as the obvious place to go look for direction in how to be a good person. And yet somehow, an aura of good character clings to someone who’s mastered the skills of fighting with empty hands or swords—why is that?
It didn’t happen by accident. When cold weapons took a back seat to firearms, the old skills became far less important, for the same reason that 15-year-olds don’t learn how to take care of a horse in Drivers’ Ed. Many of those older skills were simply lost, because they weren’t that useful anymore. But in Japan in particular, some of the old skills were recycled into martial ways. So kenjutsu, “sword technique” became kendo, “sword way” iaijutsu, “the technique of drawing the sword” became iaido, “the way of drawing the sword,” thus also for kyudo, judo, aikido, karate-do, and so on. That -do suffix means “way” and denotes a way of life, with overtones of introspection, character development, and spirituality, as opposed to the older -jutsu suffix which simply implies a pragmatic method of doing something. An older -jutsu art would render a practitioner competent in a year or so of assiduous practice, good in three years, excellent in five. The -do forms, the martial ways, were intended to be lifelong pursuits, explicitly repurposing old-style combat training methods toward the goal of “perfection of character.” Why this became such a big trend in Japan in particular is a longer discussion than we have time for, but feel free to dig into it if you’re curious; the decline of the samurai class in the late shogunate and the Meiji Restoration is an interesting study.
For our purposes it’s sufficient to notice that the shift from a -jutsu, a practical skill, to a -do, a way of life, is a really substantial change, with something gained and something lost. What’s lost is the sense of immediately practical skill accessible to relatively short-term study. What’s gained is a host of opportunities for personal development. Martial arts training gives you all the opportunities that any athletic endeavor would give for developing focus, precision, discipline in working toward a goal, etc., and adds conflict management and emotional control on top of it. In a number of ways, martial skills really do create an ideal venue for learning larger life lessons. But there are two problems:
- While becoming good at a physical discipline certainly will give you opportunities to grow your character, it doesn’t automatically mean you will make the most of the opportunities. Plenty of guys are NFL/NBA-level athletes and terrible human beings. Plenty more are good at karate or judo or whatever and are equally terrible human beings.
- What “perfection of character” means is highly variable. A martial way is a potent tool to shape character in a particular direction, but what direction? The “perfection of character” fostered by judo, karate-do, kendo and the other early 20th-century Japanese martial ways gave us the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the “Three Alls” policy, the Changjiao Massacre, the Rape of Manila…I could go on. It’s not for nothing that cults have a long history of using these sorts of physical disciplines to mold their followers. Lots of groups do, because they’re a potent tool.
In a contemporary, Western context, though…consider your basic storefront dojo with “Lose Weight! Build Character! Better Grades!” in the window. The suburban soccer mom who signs her kids up for lessons there has a very particular meaning of “character” in mind: courteous, kind to others, able to resist bullying, diligent, hardworking, fair, honest…you know the drill. When an art specifically says (in that context) that it’s about character development, people expect a black belt or instructor credential to indicate a role model, a person worth emulating. And there are organizations that do that, and do a good job of it. Jason Wilson’s Cave of Adullam Transformational Training Academy comes to mind as a particularly notable current example.
But not every organization works that way, no matter what’s on the front window. One way to gauge what the black belt or instructor rating means in a particular art is to look at who does, and who doesn’t, get the credential. If you don’t disqualify a man for, say, taking a couple friends to go catch a professional rival alone for a three-to-one beat-down that culminates in beating him with an iron bar…well, there ya go. Maybe don’t look to that organization’s instructors as life coaches. There’s a lot of distance between a Jason Wilson and an Helio Gracie.
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