The Japanese Vocabulary, and What It Is Doing There

Somewhere in the first month a new student is handed a list. Twenty or thirty words, a stance, a strike, a block, a count to ten. It is presented as part of the tradition and mostly it is not explained at all.

The part that earns its place

A shared technical vocabulary is genuinely valuable, for the same reason it is valuable in medicine or sailing.

It is precise. Front stance is three syllables of ambiguity in English, because there are several, and a named term picks one. It is portable: a class in Lisbon and a class in Osaka can train together because both know what the instructor is asking for. And it is stable over time in a way that translated descriptions are not.

None of that is mysticism. It is the ordinary utility of jargon, and any craft with more than a few practitioners develops some.

The part that is atmosphere

Counting is the clearest case.

There is no technical reason a class must count to ten in Japanese. It sounds right, it feels continuous with the art’s origins, and it costs nothing, so it stays. That is fine as long as nobody pretends it is doing something else.

The same goes for the more ceremonial phrases at the start and end of class. They mark a boundary, which is useful, and they are not carrying technical information.

Where the translations go wrong

Frequently, and always in the same direction: toward whatever sounds most impressive.

Uke is the standard example and worth knowing about. It is universally rendered in English as block, which has produced decades of students concluding that karate’s defensive movements are bad obstructions. The root verb is closer to receive, which covers deflecting, intercepting, striking the attacking limb, or moving so the strike lands harmlessly. The English word picked one narrow meaning and threw the rest away.

Elsewhere the drift runs to the poetic. Terms get glossed with dramatic literal readings that a Japanese speaker would find odd, and the readings survive because they are more fun than the mundane ones.

The question to ask

When you are given a term and a translation, ask what the word does rather than what it means.

Ask what changes if you perform the movement as an interception instead of an obstruction. Ask whether the dramatic gloss changes anything about how the technique is executed. If the answer is that it changes nothing, you have been given atmosphere, which is not a crime and is worth recognizing as such.

Learn the ten that carry meaning and let the rest arrive

There is a workable middle position between memorizing a glossary and refusing the vocabulary altogether, and it takes about a week.

Roughly ten terms in a Shotokan class do real work, in the sense that the Japanese word names a concept the English does not: kime, hikite, kiai, zanshin, maai, kihon, kata, kumite, dan and kyu. Those repay learning properly, because in each case the usual English translation loses the part that matters — hikite is not the pulling hand as scenery, it is the reason the other hand arrives with anything behind it.

Everything else is a label. Whether you learn that the technique is called gedan barai or the low sweep changes nothing about the technique, and a class that treats the label as content has confused the map for the ground. It is fine to learn those by exposure and never look them up.

The reason to be selective is that finite attention is spent either way. A beginner who has memorized sixty terms and cannot yet transfer weight has been given the least useful sixty things in the room.