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The characters/ideograms mean, “One fist certain kill.” The first character means, “One,” the second character means, “fist,” the third character means, “Invariably; certain; inevitable,” the fourth character means, “Kill; murder; butcher; slice off; split; diminish; reduce; spoil.”
While the first two characters when set apart from the second pair means, “one fist,” the second pair alone means, “certain kill.” Yet, when all four are set it means, “One fist deadly.” Some other interpretations follow:
“One Fist, Certain Death” “To annihilate at one blow” “one strike, one kill” “Kill with one strike” “One punch kill” “One hit, one kill”
All the interpretations lead to one accepted belief in the karate communities, i.e., that one is able with sufficient training to kill another human being with one strike or blow or punch or hit, etc. This article expresses my views as to the possibility or impossibility of this ability.
Yes, karate has achieved a reputation of being a very capable system of fighting and in our modern era it also has great potential for self-defense. It has great potential if the practitioners train in an appropriate manner to achieve that goal while in most cases, to date, that is just not true. At least from the auditorium seat where I sit.
I have spent some considerable time studying self-defense and the system of hitting or striking as is practiced in the Okinawan system of karate. It has come to me that the human body was not created to apply such deadly force, i.e., an ability to kill with our bodies. Even when it does it is often a fluke of a particular situation or a result of other than human body such as curbs or other such hard and unmoving obstructions and obstacles that kill, i.e., the human body may have struck another human but if death occurred it was more from say, “Gravity,” pulling the body and head to fall, strike a hard object and result in that person’s death.
When I was first introduced to the information recently presented and published about hitting someone and being hit by someone especially in a chaotic fight it began to dawn on me that the so-called one strike, one kill meme or maxim was false. Even with karate’s karada-kitae or body hardening that includes makiwara for conditioning the hands and feet the variables that would have to align make the possibility of a killing strike, punch or hit almost impossible (allowing for that one fluke when certain other issues allow a hit to kill, i.e., hit someone who happens to have some medical condition resulting in death when hit, punched or struck (then truthfully, you could not truly say it was the punch but the physical medical issue like with gravity, etc.).
There are many karate professionals who will refute this claim of mine and will show or demonstrate their perspective by a demonstration of their immense strength, ability to break bricks, etc., and how hard they can hit solid objects like the makiwara and other surfaces. There is a community of body hardening enthusiasts out there who earn a living and a reputation in such demonstrations. When viewed even by experienced karate-ka it would feel, seem and be perceived as the ability to hit someone so hard they would die but in reality this is just not true.
Ikken Hissatus or one strike, one kill, may be a great meme to impress fledgling students and to motivate practitioners into believing their ability to develop a hard body will equate to having skills to stop an attacker with just one punch (leaving out the killing part altogether).
Even a one hit to stop an attack is rare, most will be unable to accomplish this and it can be seen in competitive sports like boxing, MMA and UFC fighting contests. If this were possible then those professional competitors would be knocking folks out very fast and we know that would not be the exciting events we pay to see, right?
So many physical and mental things must come together and align while in the chaos of an attack under the adrenal stress conditions induced in violent conflicts that achieving such a lofty goal is reduced by a considerable margin. Even in training under controlled conditions not many can perform to such levels including “Karate Masters.”
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1 comment:
It should be noted and added to this article that karate, from Okinawa and even the Japanese edition, was not meant to be a killing system. Okinawan karate was and is a system used to close in and combine grappling and striking to render an adversary helpless and even incapacitate with strikes. Very little training in most Okinawa dojo would, have and still do reflect this as a primary goal. This concept is inherited from the practice of Japanese Kendo. Do a search for the article by Dave Lowry, Ikken Hissatsu, published in Black Belt Magazine for additional information.
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