RETHINKING RANK
“RATHER THAN SEEING JUDO AS A MEANS OF OFFENSE AND DEFENSE, KANO THOUGHT IT SHOULD BE VIEWED AS A MEANS OF ENHANCING ONE’S LIFE.”
I once asked a high-ranked friend, “What is a shodan? How do you know if a person is a first-degree black belt — or a second or third degree? Does it depend on whether he or she can defeat certain other practitioners of the same art?”
My friend couldn’t answer the question with any conviction. I’d brought it up because I was a member of several promotion committees, each of which had its own criteria for shodan. Even within the same organizations, differences existed. Furthermore, I’d noticed that there were many American brown belts who easily could defeat Japanese black belts.
Once judo practitioners reached nidan and sandan, it was a different story, I’d found. There seemed to be more Picasso art than Newtonian science to the way high-level judoka got promoted, and I was confused. The following are some thoughts on what I still consider a perplexing subject.
QUESTIONS
Obviously, being promoted is not just about winning, but what causes us to equate higher rank with higher physical ability? Why are we obsessed with higher rank when we don’t even know what it represents or whether we are truly eligible? Does the belt-ranking system even have value?
Before Jigoro Kano and the Meiji Restoration, there was Back then, a person practiced in an ordinary kimono, usually a and an Because of the times — Japan was throwing out the old and bringing in the new, primarily from the West — anything related to its feudal past karate, jujitsu and so on)
