1 Street Kobudo

Fighting is about having no qualms, whether you're in a bar, a street at night, walking home, in a bus stop. Weapons are what you may have at hand, and you may not have anything but your body and your commitment to the moment. Attack or flee is the basic premise, a most primitive unit of survival.

Where does karate come into the picture? Nothing can teach you how you are going to react to an imminent danger of bodily harm. A dojo is to fighting what boot camp is to war, an approximation. In a dojo you hone your fighting skills, learn to move, advance, retract, in a zillion drills over the years. Although it is a simulation, nonetheless, you are in a combat mode more often and more repeatedly that your average person. With the exception of a professional fighter, your average dojo practitioner is mixing it up with someone on a weekly basis all year around. It does count for something. If, and only if, the person takes it seriously, contemplates the possibility that he or she might have to go at it for real and can't chose when.

Then you make the dojo a laboratory for conflict, learn to read intent, size up bodies quick, learn to pick up cues. In other words, the person is there, aware and alert in the dojo to all that is happening around him and within himself.