(Chojun Miyagi overseeing his students as they pose for a photograph, they are from L - R: Meitoku Yagi, Eiichi Miyazato, Seikichi Toguchi, and Eiko Miyazato)
I'm not sure what it was like in times gone by, but today, we like to have a name for everything!
It's not enough to simple practice karate, you have to have a name for the kind of karate you're doing. I wonder sometimes if this hasn't got more to do with acquiring an assumed level of prestige than anything else: maybe?
If you look at the photo above you can see (in the first three students) the founders of the Meibukan, the Jundokan, and the Shoreikan. Only Eiko Miyazato, as far as I know, didn't go on to establish a dojo which later grew into a world wide organization. Here they are all doing the same karate, under the watchful eye of the same teacher, and yet today, each of the three groups I've just mentioned have a very different approach to "goju-ryu". I train at the Jundokan, but, I have often visited the Meibukan to pay my respects to Meitoku Yagi's eldest son, Meitatsu Yagi sensei. The training I do and the training I've seen at the Meibukan are very different...so which style of goju-ryu is authentic to Miyagi sensei's teaching?
The answer, as far as I'm concerned is....NEITHER!
That's because I don't believe there is "one" correct way to execute the techniques of karate, and just because many people use the name Goju-ryu for the karate they do, it doesn't mean it is anything like the karate of Chojun Miyagi. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there isn't a person alive today who is practicing their karate in exactly the same way Miyagi sensei did it; and why should they?
The "tradition" of traditional karate is not found in repeating moves exactly as others have done in the past, but in the way you apply yourself, today, to the karate that you practice. I think it's about time we all stopped relying on what others once did, and, with all due humility, openly admit that the karate we do is 'our' karate. Of course, once we do that we have to take responsibility for what we're doing. No more excuses like, "This is how we do it in our style", or, "This is how our association does it." You have to understand why "you" do what you do, and if you don't, then perhaps you need to train more, and teach less.
Recently I've had two visitors to the Shinseidokan, they came a week apart and both practice goju-ryu, but neither of them practiced their karate anything like the way I do. What often strikes me most about the people who visit is not the physical difference in their karate, but their mentality, their thinking behind what they do. I'm frequently amazed at the difference between what people do, and what they think they are doing.
