Tekken, Lidia, and the Japanification of Karate

While winning fights seems to be the obvious purpose of the martial arts, that is not the be all and end all of them. Most of us are familiar with the Zen connection, those monks and practitioners using archery or bare handed martial arts forms in the same way that others might use the tea ceremony. If that seems a little impenetrable consider how many of us use martial arts as our preferred form of stress relief. Unless you are actively training for a fight and it is already booked, the chances are that a number of your training sessions are just for you. For all the mockery we have made of Aikido and Systema as largely useless fighting arts in Wushu Watch articles, most of the practitioners of those arts are taking part for the same reason that many of us practice Jiu Jitsu or Muay Thai or Yoga: just for the sake of enjoying them.

The belief that martial arts should strike straight to the point and ignore the impractical might even be a relatively modern invention in itself. Granted, since the first civilization built houses on a line people have wanted to know how to win a fight on “The Street” but much of the unarmed martial arts tradition is linked closely with the military where it has always been undertaken more for exercise and confidence than actual efficiency. And then there are the martial arts as entertainment. From the Peking Opera to Hong Kong cinema to professional wrestling: all teach and require the fighting arts but use them in a deliberately flamboyant way. While the purpose of these fights is to entertain and not to provide an accurate portrayal of real fighting, nothing has done more to make the average Joe think a few karate classes will turn him into a one man riot squad than martial arts in television, movies, comics, animation and video games.

When we are talking about combat sports—where points are lost and damage is done on wasted efforts—there is no other concern than practicality. Why would you do something pointlessly flashy when you might get chinned with a good right straight as you take your run up? But in entertainment there is freedom. Let us take an example from both worlds: Jean Claude van Damme. Van Damme trained under the great Dominique Valera and had real accomplishments in the ring—he could fight. Yet if Jean Claude dispatched every attacker in the course of a movie with a slide back and a good one-two, that would get old very quickly. The people want the razzle dazzle, and fortunately Jean Claude could provide that.

It is in media that martial arts can regress to the very wooden and traditional throwing of shapes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they should. And this brings us on to our subject today: Tekken 7.

A Brief History of The King of Iron Fist Tournament

Tekken has been a mainstay of the fighting game scene since the series debuted on the Playstation in 1994. Where Street Fighter’s visuals remained 2-D until Street Fighter IV in 2008, Tekken used three dimensional characters and stages from its first release. More interestingly, while Street Fighter has adopted 3-D models and stages in its newest incarnations, it remains a “2D fighter” in that the action unfolds on a line—there is no sidestepping towards or away from the camera. In spite of the original Tekken using 3-D graphics, it was locked on a line just the same. It wasn’t until Tekken 3 in 1998 that Tekken introduced the sidestep and opened up an entirely new dimension of gameplay.

A few weeks back, I picked up Tekken 7 on a whim after seeing a video of JKA karateka, Tatsuya Naka performing the motion capture for the game’s newest character. The series has a history of putting well known martial artists in the ping-pong ball covered suits—the original motion capture for fan favourite, King was performed by puroresu and MMA legend, Minoru Suzuki. Having trained under Naka before, I thought it would be fun to play a character mapped to some of his movements. A hundred or so online matches later and I now see Tekken 7 in my dreams.

Lidia Sobieska & Japanese Karate

The character of Lidia Sobieska is as daft as you would expect in a fighting game. She is the twenty-nine year old Prime Minister of Poland and also happens to be a karate master. After failing in diplomacy with the Mishima Zaibatsu she has decided she will sort them out with her fists. So far, so normal. But where karateka have been a mainstay of fighting games forever, Lidia is a karateka in a distinctly Shotokan flavour. Shotokan is defined by its very long stances and big movements. That is on display in Lidia with the lengthy stepping punches and powerful right straights to the body from a very extended stance.

For the purposes of talking about MMA and combat sports, I have previously said that there are only really two styles of karate: there are those that compete under point fighting rules, and those that compete under knockdown or Kyokushin style rules. But when you get into lineages and forms and technical tendencies it gets a bit more complex and Shotokan is interesting because it straddles the line: it is considered a “traditional” style compared to Kyokushin and other knockdown karate styles, and yet it is far removed from its Okinawan roots.

Gichin Funakoshi was a sub-five foot school teacher who was about as far from a fighter as you could imagine. Yet he fell under the tutelage of an Okinawan martial artist in the employ of the king named Anko Asato. Martial arts in the Ryukyus were a pursuit of the nobility and Asato hooked Funakoshi up with just about every notable master he knew, allowing Funakoshi to collect a huge number of forms (kata). Funakoshi went to the Japanese mainland with no intention of founding a “style” but ended up teaching in Tokyo with the support of Judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano, who mandated karate training for many of his black belts.

Anyone who became a big name in Japanese martial arts in the 1940s probably trained at Funakoshi’s dojo in the 1930s. Hinori Otsuka trained under Funakoshi and then founded Wado-ryu, and Mas Oyama sought out Funakoshi to begin his karate journey long before he became the face of hard hitting knockdown karate. In fact both Wado and Kyokushin are considered “Japanese styles” as well. But Funakoshi’s own stances and movements were nothing like his students’. Funakoshi’s stances were short and high, as is traditional in Okinawan karate. It was Funakoshi’s son, Gigo who did much of the teaching at Funakoshi’s dojo and who began the obsession with low stances and large, dynamic movements. He is also credited for introducing the roundhouse kick to traditional karate. With regards to why Gigo demanded longer, lower stances to the point of impracticality, no one really knows. It could have been to build strong legs and hips, or it could have been entirely aesthetic.

Unfortunately Gigo Funakoshi died of consumption at a young age, and Gichin Funakoshi became a figurehead for two organisations: the Shotokai and the Japan Karate Association. When Gichin Funakoshi died, the Shotokai went off the deep end under Shigeru Egami, who took long stances to their logical conclusion. His work The Heart of Karate-Do is a fascinating read wherein all the ideas make sense, but the outcomes look ridiculous.

The Japan Karate Association meanwhile was able to take the Shotokan style and expand across the globe. As a group that was mainly made up of university clubs, the JKA was keen to bring competition to karate but Funakoshi himself had been very much against that idea. By taking Funakoshi’s precept that in karate “the arms and legs should be treated like swords” and buying wholeheartedly into the idea of ikken hisatsu or “one hit, certain death”, the JKA came to create a form of point sparring competition for karate that continues to this day. It was at this point that form rediscovered function: Gigo’s long stances might have been far removed from the practical upright stances of Okinawan karate, but in point fighting the long stances came to serve the same role as the thrust in fencing—covering as much distance as possible to land first at all costs. In this way Shotokan competition borrowed from and shared some similarities with kendo.

A typical example of the “Japanification” or “Shotokanization” of Okinawan karate comes in one of Lidia Sobieska’s signature sequences. The combination is called “Gankaku” and it is taken from the Shotokan form of the same name. A side snap kick, into a long, stepping right straight.

A side snap kick? Yes, a side snap kick. A kick that exists in no other form of karate. Another Gigo Funakoshi invention, allegedly for the purpose of developing better flexibility and mobility. The side snap kick takes the idea of the traditional side kick and says “what if you snapped it like a front kick?” The resulting kick is one where the striking surface is the side of the foot (sokuto), but the kick is thrown upwards, hinging at the knee. It is useless as a strike, but terrific as a way to sustain injuries to your own knee.

Yet in Shotokan the side snap kick came to replace the traditional kicks in many Okinawan forms. Where in the Okinawan form you would simply lift your knee to the side and throw a front kick out in that direction, Shotokan adopted the side snap kick as a key feature wherever the front kick to the side could be replaced. Why? Probably because it looked really good.

Gankaku was the name that Funakoshi adopted for the Okinawan form called Chinto. Watch a performance of Chinto from any Okinawan style and you will see the kicks are lower and the stances are shorter. The signature manji-uke pose, one hand high behind the head, one low in front of the body, is far more pronounced in the Shotokan version. In fact “Gankaku” supposedly means “crane on a rock” in reference to the one legged portions of the Shotokan version. The practitioner gets up on one leg and then kicks from there.

Many Okinawan versions of the kata have an understated withdrawal of the leg to the rear and then a kick after the foot touches down behind the practitioner—much more akin to the classic withdraw and counter kick of modern kickboxing and Muay Thai. The entire Chinto form makes a fascinating historical study—and we might do one at a later date—but its purpose here is to demonstrate how much of Shotokan seems to be built around the aesthetic.

Okinawan Karate on a Pedestal

Yet in studying the stylistic differences between Japanese and Okinawan karate there is often a view that Shotokan and other Japanese styles corrupted the fighting perfection of Okinawan karate. Even working in the MMA sphere, I still regularly encounter the view that “Okinawan karate would be better suited to MMA because it is more based in real combat.” Though it seems that in many regards the addition of competition to karate made it a better fighting art, regardless of the “corruption” of the traditional forms.

It is largely accepted that the intended applications of kata have fallen by the wayside in modern karate, but there is a tendency to treat old karate as good and new karate as a flawed imitation. It is important to recognize that good deal of traditional Okinawan Te and the Chinese martial arts it descended from were based on faulty logic to begin with. Take for instance double punches, which are some of the more powerful single hits of Lidia’s arsenal, and were part of the fictional Mishima style in Tekken long before that.

Karate kata have tons of double punches and double handed strikes. Leaning ones, downwards ones, high-low ones, and they all have very specific names in Japanese. The double punch is blatantly daft if you consider it for even a second: that is why no one was throwing them in either knockdown or points tournaments even in the early days. If you throw both hands at once, one or either hand is not going to have the body’s rotation behind it, making it pretty pointless. When looking at weird techniques like this “U punch” or awase-zuki it is worth remembering that in many Chinese martial arts “accuracy over power” was taken to an extreme conclusion.

Martial arts were closely guarded on Okinawa and trusted students would hand copy their teacher’s own imitation of a Chinese text called the Bubishi. Gichin Funakoshi had a copy and included passages from it in his first book in 1922, but never stated where these passages were taken from or acknowledged the Bubishi’s existence. Kenwa Mabuni first revealed the Bubishi to the public in his 1934 work A Study of Seipai. The Bubishi is a remarkable historical document which contains a number of musings or poems on the nature of fighting. This was a fairly common way to pass along fighting knowledge and similar poems and sayings can be found in Chinese martial arts traditions such as Baguazhang. The Bubishi also contains the famous forty eight diagrams—each illustrating fighting principles in a somewhat cryptic way.

Yet most of the text is devoted to diagrams pertaining to chi meridians and potion-making. Pages upon pages comprised of vital points which will cause death if struck at certain hours, and herbs that might well have been native to coastal regions of China and not to Okinawa. Remember that these were all copied meticulously, by hand. These erroneous beliefs were closely guarded by the same people who passed down the knowledge of the forms and so the two ideas cannot be casually separated. When you think of it in this context, of course a double punch is worth throwing if you hit two key vital points at once in the Hour of the Rat and cause death the following day.

If you open up those hands in the U punch you have another commonly seen posture called toraguchi. A handful of throat and a handful of sack is always going to give you a leg up on your opponent when the fight gets to the inside. Toraguchi even features in the Bubishi itself.

So much of unarmed martial arts before the modern era was a case of expectation rather than reality. And to demonstrate that we need only look at the cat stance (neko-ashi-dachi) that Lidia can shift through to perform mix ups.

The cat stance is a position where the fighter is light on the lead leg, up on the ball of his front foot, and carrying most of his weight on the back leg. In Okinawan karate the cat stance is one of the main stances used in kata, and in most Shotokan forms—with the emphasis on long, deep stances—it is often replaced with a deep back stance (kokutsu-dachi). It is pretty clear how you could look at the cat stance and say “like that, but with more leg work” and come to Shotokan’s back stance.

But the cat stance is one you will see plenty in Chinese martial arts. The slight details will differ but that short stance with the light lead foot is commonplace. You will have seen plenty of Nak Muay applying the same principle to get their teep out quicker or start halfway to a good leg check. In Chinese martial arts and Okinawan karate the cat stance is also important for the same reason as the Sanchin stance—the lead knee obstructs the centreline path from floor to groin. If everyone is training to throw lighting fast lead leg kicks to the crotch, you want your lead leg already obstructing your crotch and ready to kick crotches in return!

While the Shotokan cat stance obviously sacrifices mobility and has little application in modern combat sport, there were plenty who thought it should. Mas Oyama is perhaps history’s most influential karateka from a combat sports perspective. He founded the Kyokushinkai, introduced knockdown karate, and was worshiped by men like Andy Hug, Francisco Filho and just about every Kyokushin lineage kickboxer you can name. You will recall that Oyama began training Shotokan under Gichin Funakoshi, but he later trained Goju-ryu under Gogen Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi believed the cat stance was the best for fighting and Oyama absorbed this. In fact, when Oyama wrote the bizarre Advanced Karate in 1970 he insisted that cat stance was the optimal fighting stance and devoted hundreds of pages to nonsensical hand postures which he believed put a fighter in advantageous positions such as “antenna stance” and kaishu-kamae.

In 1975, Oyama began holding the Kyokushin World Tournament under knockdown rules and was likely disappointed to find that the fighting looked nothing like his expectation. Watch a karate match under knockdown rules at any point in time and you will not find a cat stance or antenna stance in sight.

In Lidia’s moveset the cat stance serves as a telegraph to offer a mix up between a number of different techniques to her standard stance. In this sense it isn’t far removed from Oyama’s ideal demonstrated in Advanced Karate: it is a position which says to the opponent “look at all the weird bullshit I do from here.” But in the context of a fighting game, the stance shift itself and the large, dynamic motion of it can actually be seen as a practical consideration. Not only does it look cool, but it tells the opponent one of a two or three things is coming and makes them guess.

The cast of characters in Tekken 7 stands at over fifty at the time of writing, and the studio has done a great job of not only transposing dozens of unique martial arts styles, but even taking the fighters with similar backgrounds such as the Mishimas and making them feel noticeably distinct from each other. While every new character that comes out is accused of being imbalanced or broken, Lidia’s enormous power and wall-to-wall carries were quickly offset with a little real-world knowledge of Shotokan. The bursting in and out over large distances in long, narrow stances, means that the style is incredibly linear. It is quite literally fencing with the fists and feet. Stepping off the line of attack can making karate blitzing very difficult. And that is a real stroke of genius here: Lidia’s weakness is the linearity of her striking style in the major fighting game franchise that places most emphasis on lateral movement.

Decades after it was thought all the main martial arts styles had been ticked off the list, fighting games are still finding new styles to inspire their fighters (such as Hakan’s oil wrestling in Street Fighter) or ways to reinvent classic ones with better research and modern technology as they have with Lidia Sobieska.