Belt/Rank Meaning

Ok. So if you know me at all, or have read many of the things I’ve writ­ten, you know that one of my seri­ous gripes about Asian mar­tial arts (and their west­ern copies) is the cus­tom of “rank­ing” or award­ing level-markers to prac­ti­tion­ers. I’m not going to spend too much space in this arti­cle dis­cussing the carrot-on-a-stick prin­ci­ple, the love of rank­ings as a japan­ese cul­tural phe­nom­e­non, or my opin­ions about the men­tal health of those who place too much impor­tance on what belt they wear. I do plan to dis­cuss a par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of mean­ing as it applies to mar­tial arts ranks.

Before I get on a roll here, I would like to direct your atten­tion to this belt-related arti­cle at 24fc.

Let me also point out that the irony of me down­play­ing the impor­tance of belt rank in an arti­cle I have writ­ten about that very sub­ject does not escape me (and for the record, I have yet to make any claims to men­tal health on this web site). I think belt ranks have exactly the mean­ing and impor­tance that we ascribe to them. I tend to take a semi­otic view of mean­ing and a trans­ac­tional view of value, so don’t expect for a sec­ond that this arti­cle is going to try and ana­lyze the con­cept of rank­ing in some sort of ratio­nal vacuum.

Martial arts are founded in com­pe­ti­tion — they are about com­bat (inter­nal and exter­nal). Anyone who tries to tell you dif­fer­ently is try­ing to get you to enroll your child in his McDojo. Competitiveness is per­va­sive in the mar­tial arts world. The kinds of peo­ple who do this sort of thing (develop and test their phys­i­cal abil­i­ties against oppos­ing par­ties) are com­pet­i­tive by nature, though some may deny it. I used to believe that I was not com­pet­i­tive, but I have since real­ized that I was merely fool­ing myself. I am com­pet­i­tive — just not when it comes to fight­ing abil­ity or belt rank.

I can jump and shout all day long that belts are not a big deal, but the fact is very clear that a great many mar­tial artists care a great deal about the issues sur­round­ing belts and rank­ings. Thus, belt rank is an issue of great impor­tance, by definition.

So belt rank is impor­tant. There is no deny­ing it. It may not be very impor­tant to you, or you may not want any­body to know how impor­tant it really is to you, but it is impor­tant, and under­stand­ing this does mat­ter to you. With that out of the way, we can turn to what belt ranks actu­ally mean. This will be a much more dif­fi­cult exploration.

Belt Equivalence Concepts

One pop­u­lar notion of the mean­ings of var­i­ous belts is the idea that the rank of shodan is akin to a bachelor’s degree from a uni­ver­sity. The argu­ment goes that the four years of tra­di­tional post-secondary edu­ca­tion are thought of as prepa­ra­tion for enter­ing the work­force. This is sup­posed to be roughly equiv­a­lent to the idea that a shodan will have basi­cally learned the tech­ni­cal cur­ricu­lum of a mar­tial art.

I have also seen the com­par­i­son stretched to sug­gest that higher degrees of black belt may be likened to grad­u­ate stud­ies. I can only hope that this is intended as a joke. Though I have yet to par­tic­i­pate in any graduate-level stud­ies in uni­ver­sity, I know a lot of extremely “edu­cated” peo­ple, and I do not con­sider my rel­a­tively high rank in Taido to be any kind of match-up to that level.

Though mar­tial art grad­ing syl­labi often require “research” or some kind of “the­sis,” close exam­i­na­tion reveals that the actual require­ments are very light. For shodan and 2dan, the world-standard Taido exam­i­na­tion requires the appli­cant to answer 5 fill-in-the-blank ques­tions. For 3dan, the require­ment is a 3 to 5 page paper on the topic of “Taido.” I wrote five page papers on more spe­cific top­ics in high school. Yet, this “aca­d­e­mic require­ment” is one jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for exalt­ing higher belt ranks.

I would sug­gest that, if one were truly seri­ous about draw­ing a com­par­i­son between mar­tial arts edu­ca­tion and stan­dard west­ern acad­e­mia, the anal­ogy receive a thor­ough over­haul. I say that reach­ing shodan does not require any­where near the amount of work or learn­ing we expect of col­lege grad­u­ates. I would place shodan as a high school graduate.

We could look at it this way:

White belt is like kinder­garten. You learn the rules. You get indoc­tri­nated into the group. You fig­ure out what is expected. You move around a lit­tle bit, but you still can’t really read or work with num­bers too well.

Purple belt would be the pri­mary school of mar­tial art edu­ca­tion. You learn the basics and sim­ple com­bi­na­tions. You build vocab­u­lary. You gain core com­pe­ten­cies and study skills.

Green belt is junior high. Here you start to have a lit­tle more auton­omy in your train­ing, but more is expected of you. There is more sense of com­pe­ti­tion among class­mates. Classes are harder. Tests are harder. You real­ize that it is very pos­si­ble to fail your next grading.

In high school, you have to demon­strate that you have learned all the stuff the school sys­tem has told you to learn. Brown belts must do the same if they wish to reach black belt level. Upon grad­u­a­tion, many stu­dents get jobs at the video store. Upon reach­ing shodan, many mar­tial artists cease to practice.

I’ll sug­gest that shodan is like fresh­man year of col­lege in that stu­dents have to learn how to teach them­selves. Perhaps 2dan and 3dan could be seen to rep­re­sent the remain­ing three uni­ver­sity years, such that reach­ing 4dan would equal a col­lege degree (in a very fig­u­ra­tive sense). If actual research were pre­sented, I would have no prob­lem call­ing 5dan a master’s and 7dan a doc­tor­ate in that mar­tial art.

Actually, scratch that

Looking back over those last few para­graphs, I still believe the com­par­i­son to be really, really limp. An aca­d­e­mic edu­ca­tion requires cod­i­fied and objec­tive stan­dards to be met. Furthermore, grades are awarded. Graduating high school with a 2.0 aver­age does not guar­an­tee admis­sion to col­lege. Graduating col­lege with a BA in com­par­a­tive reli­gion will not do much to land a steady job (nor will a PhD in astro­physics, in case you were curious).

In the mar­tial arts, a black belt is a black belt. We don’t qual­ify black belts based on their grades at the time of pro­mo­tion (though per­haps we should). Would it be ridicu­lous to sug­gest that a 2dan with a 4.0 out­ranks a 4dan that barely passed his last exam with a D? Maybe it would, but we could eas­ily see a stu­dent fail­ing to reach brown belt because he couldn’t pass punching.

Another thing we don’t do is spec­ify some­one as a 3dan in spar­ring or a shodan in basics. Martial art belt ranks are sup­posed to be com­pre­hen­sive (though they sel­dom are) in the scope of exper­tise they sig­nify. I often hear mar­tial artists talk­ing about their senior instruc­tors in terms of being good at one aspect but not another. Why don’t we just go ahead and spec­ify the rank to a par­tic­u­lar skill? My guess is because it would destroy the hier­ar­chy our egos demand.

For the above rea­sons, I have to say the anal­ogy to any real edu­ca­tional sys­tem (designed by trained edu­ca­tors and tested by objec­tive third-parties such as prospec­tive employ­ers) is seri­ously lack­ing. However, I wouldn’t mind using a sys­tem that made use of let­ter grades, sub­ject con­cen­tra­tions, objec­tive stan­dards, and ver­i­fi­able research. Under such a sys­tem, my tran­script might look some­thing like this:

• Date passed 4dan: 10/2004
• Cumulative Grade Point Average: 3.3
• Major course of study: Education, with con­cen­tra­tion in Taido Theory
• Minor course of study: Hokei

Of course, this tran­script doesn’t show that I barely passed my spar­ring require­ment, still can’t do sha­jogeri worth a damn, have a knack for piss­ing off my instruc­tor, was the founder and head instruc­tor of my own Taido club, and have par­tic­i­pated in sev­eral “study abroad” pro­grams. Nor does it include a list of pub­li­ca­tions or shit-lists I’ve landed in, but I don’t think it’s any­thing to worry about — some­how, I doubt if the major­ity of the Taido com­mu­nity is going to go for this system.

What is involved?

I feel we should attempt to relate the mean­ing of each level to the kinds of things we expect of peo­ple at those lev­els, or pos­si­bly to the kinds of things we expect of peo­ple prior to achiev­ing that level. This means we will look at what stu­dents do at a par­tic­u­lar belt rank. As one of my poetry pro­fes­sors once told me: adjec­tives describe real­ity; verbs define it.

Shu, Ha, Ri

The tra­di­tional Japanese view of the edu­ca­tional process works through three stages:

• Obey (shu) - beginner-level.
• Adapt (ha) —  advanced-student level.
• Break (ri) —  mastery.

Shu, ha, and ri are said to mean obe­di­ence, diver­gence, and tran­scen­dence, respec­tively. A more accu­rate trans­la­tion would be: fol­low, break, sep­a­rate. For an in-depth dis­cus­sion of shu, ha, and ri, see (once again) 24fc.

In a nut­shell, the idea is that a stu­dent begins by doing as the instruc­tor says to do. Eventually, he knows enough to make small adjust­ments for his own pur­poses. He goes from copy­ing to adapt­ing. Beyond a cer­tain level, the stu­dent will have have learned all he is capa­ble of learn­ing from some­one else, and he will have to teach him­self. At this point, the stu­dent leaves his instruc­tor and goes off to learn the lessons that will make him a mas­ter in his own right.

“Shu, ha, and ri” sounds nice and poetic. It would be great if things actu­ally worked that way. After spend­ing three years as a school teacher in Japan and as a mem­ber of a Japanese Taido dojo, let me give you a bet­ter descrip­tion of the process:

obey, copy, obey, copy…

it goes on like that for a very long time. Eventually, a small per­cent­age of stu­dents get to a point where they may: think, and try some­thing new. The stu­dent will then: seek approval from his instruc­tors. If they do approve, he will con­tinue to obey. If they do not, the stu­dent has the option to: leave. Whichever path the stu­dent takes at this point, there is a good like­li­hood that he will then: teach, either as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of his own teacher (whom he will con­tinue to obey), or as the leader of a new orga­ni­za­tion. In either case, he will expect his own stu­dents to obey and copy him.

Traditional Western Approach

In the west, we have a dif­fer­ent terms for this process: indoc­tri­na­tion, mem­o­riza­tion, prac­tice, appli­ca­tion, which would be roughly equiv­a­lent to the school anal­ogy I gave above (pri­mary, junior, sec­ondary, uni­ver­sity). I men­tion it again only for the pur­pose of com­par­i­son to the shu, ha, ri idea. Though focussing on what the stu­dent actu­ally does at each level this time around, I still don’t see this way of look­ing at belt ranks as hold­ing much water unless some very con­crete changes are made to the way we admin­is­ter gradings.

The Meaning of Meaning (or, what meaning means to me)

To come back to my ear­lier state­ment about value being trans­ac­tional, my belief is that per­sonal mean­ing of an object is tied to what one does to acquire that object. If one would will­ingly trade $10,000 for a Rolex, that watch means $10,000 to that per­son. If one believes that hav­ing a Rolex will allow him to sleep with beau­ti­ful women and impress other men, that watch means sex and power. The impor­tant ques­tions sur­round­ing mean­ing are:

1. What would you do to acquire the thing?
2. How do you expect to ben­e­fit by acqui­si­tion of the thing?

These two vital ques­tions are just as true for objects (or sit­u­a­tions) that we do not believe we are capa­ble of acquir­ing, as well as those we have long-since acquired. With regard to belt rank­ing, we could sum it up by asking:

What are the require­ments, respon­si­bil­i­ties, and priv­i­leges asso­ci­ated with this level?

Looking at these fac­tors sci­en­tif­i­cally would per­haps allow us greater under­stand­ing of why so many mar­tial artists get their prover­bial panties in a wad over belts. (Un?)fortunately for us, such sub­jec­tive ques­tions are out­side the realm of sci­ence. The best we can hope to do is keep these sub­jec­tive fac­tors in mind when we think about belt rank issues, real­iz­ing that objec­tive com­par­isons are not going to be attainable.

This is Not a Competition

So, let’s all get over our­selves. Martial arts are inher­ently indi­vid­ual sports. There is a social aspect to being a mem­ber of a dojo, but the actual prac­tice is per­sonal. In order to get the most out of our prac­tice, I believe that we all need to spend less time com­par­ing our­selves to oth­ers and a lot more time explor­ing our own expe­ri­ences. Competition is an inher­ent part of that process, but the over­all goal is not com­pet­i­tive in and of itself.

Instead of all this focus on require­ments, respon­si­bil­i­ties, and priv­i­leges (rank­ing and what they mean to us), we could all ben­e­fit from view­ing our prac­tice as a gate­way to greater self-awareness and actu­al­iza­tion. The irony is that, as we improve our­selves and our abil­i­ties form the inside out, we meet all of the exter­nal sig­ni­fiers nat­u­rally and effort­lessly. We also find greater joy in what we do. Finding this peace makes it dif­fi­cult to be con­cerned with what other peo­ple say and do.

Looking at things this way, I sug­gest that ‚if we’re not going to be rig­or­ous about it, let’s just drop the belts. There’s noth­ing to be afraid of. People can still tell who’s good and who knows what he or she is talk­ing about. Bullshit stinks in any form, but peo­ple will always know the gen­uine arti­cle when they see it. Talented mar­tial artists and skill­ful teach­ers needn’t fear a lack of cre­den­tial. Only the char­la­tans have any­thing to lose by relin­quish­ing their fancy uni­forms, titles, and stripy belts.

As instruc­tors, the only thing we really have to lose is our integrity.