SOME ISSUES TO CONSIDER REGARDING OLYMPIC KARATE
If you ever had a goal and started working feverishly on it, obsessing over it until the goal became more important than the reasons you had to take up the task in the beginning, you have an idea of how Olympic karate evolved. The original reason for working to make karate an Olympic sport was it supposedly would make karate more popular, which would result in more paying customers coming to every dojo — and lead to elevated status for the karate leaders who were dedicated to the task.
The problems were almost immediate. Unlike judo, which is recognized as one form of budo under the auspices of the Kodokan in Tokyo, karate is not a singular art. From its beginnings in Okinawa, it was always varied; we refer to these loosely as “styles.”
Some affix the term to the name of their styles of karate in imitation of classical Japanese disciplines. But karate and but even within those, many different schools existed.
