The worth of a (black) belt - Part 1

What’s in a belt? A belt of any other colour would be so neat (with apologies to Shakespeare).

It’s the perennial whipping boy of the karate internet - What is a black belt? What does it mean? They don’t deserve theirs! Our gradings are tougher than yours! How did they get their belt? You’re only an x-belt, what do you know? So why not add my 2-bob’s worth to the melting pot of vitriol, opinion and disinformation out there?

What I want to explore, because I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately, is what the belt could represent and why it can vary from person to person. I’ve got no interest in rehashing the old chestnuts of its history/derivation myths; nor of how it meant so much more in the good ol’ days. I’m hoping to maybe tread down a less well-worn path or two.



Who says you can have a black belt?
In the general run of things, people don’t award themselves a black belt. (Yes, I know it can happen, but if someone does, then they’re probably someone to avoid. Make an excuse about leaving the iron on and needing to check it, and then leave as quickly and quietly as possible.) But for the most part, people are awarded their belt by another entity. Who or what the entity is can have a major impact on how the recipient views their belt, how others view it, and what it represents.

These days, there are a large number of karate organisations, with multiple dojos, multiple instructors and a formalised pedagogy and curriculum. The bigger they are, the more formalised their requirements for awarding belts tends to be. Some may only offer fixed times for grading each year; many will require minimum amounts of training time before grading; others may require all gradings for certain levels to take place at the honbu dojo; yet others may need a large panel of senior instructors to grade, ratify and award the belt; and some may only allow senior grades to be awarded by the head of the organisation.

And none of that is wrong. Awarding belts in this manner has a number of benefits. Firstly, it assigns an organisational rank where everyone sits firmly inside a known heirarchy; secondly, the requirements for any grade are standardised, allowing for movement between parts of the organisation to not require re-training or review. Having a panel means the quality of the grade is also standardised and that the standard is being tested and reviewed with every act of grading. Hence, within the organisation, all people of a particular belt will know where they stand in relation to those above, below and around them and have a clear idea of the expectations their organisation has of them.
How good is that?

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are some groups/dojo/independent instructors who award belts on a less formalised basis. In these cases, they may or may not hold a formal grading session: they generally know all of their students and their abilities personally; they may award a grade to people at different rates depending on their improvement, or jump people several ranks because of ability and aptitude; they may individualise the reasons for a particular belt from student to student. This way of working is particularly efficacious when dealing with a small group - the grade is awarded based on the student’s improvement and sustained ability, rather than for their ability to perform at a particular moment in time. People are not rushed to grading because there is only one opportunity in a year, and they don’t want to miss it. And the instructor awarding the grade genuinely knows what the student is capable of and what they need to do to advance their learning further.
How good is that?

But are there any downsides to these ways of awarding a rank, especially given these superficially incompatible grading regimes? Well, it depends on what the rank is meant to be for.

If I may, I would like to share my personal experiences with grading before I go further. I started my martial arts training in a small, old-school independent shotokan dojo, where the grading was carried out by either the chief instructor or one of the senior black belts. Grading took about a month with copious feedback and refinement, and the grading ‘day’ was essentially a showcase of our improvement and a formality in the grading process. Later, I trained and graded with JKA, one of the largest shotokan organisations in the world where grading day was the only time the panel had to see me - 3 kata, some kihon and sanbon-kumite all performed without any input/feedback from the panel and all with the potential to cause instant failure. Bujinkan grading, while part of the organisation, was conducted by the dojo’s chief instructor and was idiosyncratic to the dojo (and indeed individualised to the point of confusion as to what each belt/grade represented). My Yoshinkan aikido grading was a curious mixture of the two shotokan approaches - a month of preparation, but the day of grading was in front of a panel and was not a formality; a slip-up here had the potential for causing failure. Now, in what is increasingly apparent is my last martial resting place, we have a small group with everyone known to the chief instructor, who does all the dan-level gradings to a set curriculum, but individualises what is emphasised on grading day, based on the previous few months of on-going testing/review. This is the background to what will follow in Part 2.