Among contemporary karate and budō schools, it has become increasingly common to hear claims that a particular dōjō offers a “curriculum.” At first glance, this may sound reassuring, even professional. In reality, however, what is usually meant is not a curriculum at all but a syllabus: a sequential list of techniques, kata, and drills arranged by an instructor according to what they consider a logical progression.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a syllabus, the uncritical use of the word curriculum misleads. It invokes the weight of educational discourse without embracing its responsibilities. In effect, it becomes yet another marketing tool, designed to lend credibility to a practice that may be only loosely pedagogical.

What a Curriculum Is — and Is Not.
In education, curriculum carries significant philosophical and pedagogical weight. It is not simply “what is taught,” but encompasses:

• Aims and outcomes: the purposes of learning, the qualities to be developed.
• Content: the breadth, depth, and selection of knowledge and skills.
• Pedagogy: how learning unfolds and why.
• Assessment: how growth is measured, validated, and reflected upon.
• Values: the cultural, ethical, and social purposes underpinning education.

Curriculum is also always a political and economic instrument. Central authorities — ministries of education, governments, accrediting bodies — use curricula to codify norms, transmit cultural values, and shape future citizens. What is included or excluded is never neutral; it reflects contested struggles over identity, ideology, and purpose.

As an educator whose doctoral research focused precisely on how power, culture, and normative assumptions shape teaching, I cannot help but note how casually the term curriculum has been lifted into karate discourse. In schools and universities, curriculum is debated, contested, and politically charged. In budō, it is too often reduced to a neat list of “things to be done” — stripped of context, reflection, and accountability.

The Historical Roots of Karate’s “Curriculum”
Even the categories of kihon–kata–kumite — now treated as the universal building blocks of karate pedagogy — are far from timeless. They reflect a particular post-war project, spearheaded by the Japan Karate Association (JKA) under Nakayama Masatoshi.

Nakayama, a senior student of Funakoshi Gichin, systematised karate in the 1950s–70s into a structured, exportable model. His Best Karate volumes codified training into neat stages: basic drills, formal kata, and controlled sparring. This was crucial for karate’s spread into universities, schools, and eventually into global sport. Yet in the process, Funakoshi’s more holistic emphasis on karate-dō as ethical cultivation was sidelined.

Many Okinawan ryūha — Shōrin-ryū, Gōjū-ryū, Uechi-ryū — never relied on kihon as an isolated drill category. In those traditions, the kata themselves embodied both basics and applications, and the separation into “basics–forms–sparring” would have seemed artificial.

Thus, what is now presented globally as karate’s “curriculum” is in fact a JKA invention, reflecting the politics of post-war Japan, the drive to modernise martial arts, and the desire to make karate resemble a school subject.

Curriculum as Marketing
Here lies the deeper critique. To speak of a “curriculum” in karate is not neutral. In formal education, curriculum is a tool through which authorities codify not only knowledge but also citizenship, values, and identities. It is an exercise in cultural power.
In contrast, karate’s use of the term often arises from the pressures of globalisation and institutionalisation. As karate spread into Western schools, universities, and sports federations, the language of “curriculum” provided an aura of legitimacy. It reassured parents, appealed to educational administrators, and aligned martial practice with modern institutions. Yet it did so without adopting the political and ethical responsibilities the word implies.

Towards a Genuine Martial Arts Curriculum
If budō schools wish to use the word curriculum seriously, they must embrace its full implications. This would mean:

• articulating the aims of training (self-defence, cultural transmission, ethical cultivation, sport, or some combination);
• clarifying the values that underpin teaching;
• aligning pedagogy with those aims;
• developing assessments that capture not only reproduction of form but growth in understanding, adaptability, and ethical sensibility;
• acknowledging the cultural, political, and economic context in which martial practice unfolds.

Anything less is not a curriculum, but a syllabus dressed up in borrowed authority.

Conclusion
The misuse of “curriculum” in karate is not just a semantic slip. In education, curriculum is the central tool through which states and institutions define what counts as knowledge and shape future citizens. To apply the same word to a list of kata or drills, stripped of social or ethical reflection, is to misrepresent both education and budō.
Perhaps the real question is not whether karate has a curriculum, but whether karate is willing to accept the responsibilities that the word entails.


日本語の要約 (Japanese Summary)
今日、多くの空手道場や武道団体が「カリキュラム」を持つと主張している。しかし、実際にはそれは教育的意味でのカリキュラムではなく、単なるシラバス、すなわち技や型、組手を順番に並べたリストに過ぎないことが多い。
教育学においてカリキュラムとは、学習の目的、価値、方法、評価、そして社会的・政治的文脈を含む包括的な枠組みであり、国家や制度が市民性を形作るための政治的・経済的ツールでもある。これに対して、空手で使われる「カリキュラム」という言葉は、主にマーケティング用語として機能しており、真の教育的責任を伴っていない。
現在広く知られている「基本・型・組手」の三分法も普遍的なものではなく、戦後の日本空手協会（JKA）と中山正敏による国際化プロジェクトの産物である。沖縄の諸流派では必ずしもこの枠組みは用いられていない。
したがって、もし空手が本当に「カリキュラム」を名乗るのであれば、その言葉が持つ責任を引き受けなければならない。それは単なる技術の伝達ではなく、文化的・倫理的・社会的文脈を含めた教育的プロジェクトであるべきだ。

A Note to Readers
I must begin with an apology to regular readers for my long silence. The past eight months have been entirely consumed by my return home to Ireland and the search for a secure teaching post. Although the move itself has been in preparation for over four years, these recent months have been the decisive and most demanding stage — a period that absorbed not only my time and focus, but also no small measure of my health.

With a position now secured and my belongings on their way across the sea, I am at last able to turn my attention back to writing. I look forward to resuming my regular reflections and reviews on matters related to Japanese budō and international education. Thank you sincerely for your patience and for bearing with me during this absence.

Friday Academic Review: The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence (Cardiff University, 2024)
Citation
Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media & Culture. (2024). The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence. Symposium Call for Papers. Cardiff University.

Self-Defence and the Karate Debate.
It takes only a glance across the martial arts landscape to see how contested the very idea of “self-defence” has become. A YouTube video promising “five deadly karate moves for the street” might sit alongside a glossy seminar on “reality-based defence”, both claiming to deliver authenticity while disparaging one another. In Ireland, I have seen dōjō market traditional kata as “proven self-defence”, while others dismiss this as ritualised performance with little real-world application.

This paradox is at the heart of karate’s modern identity crisis: training is frequently justified as goshin-jutsu (self-protection), yet what practitioners mean by that term varies enormously. For some, self-defence resides in decoding kata, while others point to the need for scenario drills, awareness training, and legal literacy. The Cardiff symposium The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence (2024) steps into this contested field, insisting that before we can answer “what works”, we must first ask a deeper question: what do we mean when we speak of self-defence at all?

Summary of the Symposium Call
The symposium call frames its guiding question starkly: “What are the ethics and ideologies of self-defence?” (Cardiff University, 2024, p. 1). It draws attention to the historical unevenness of the right to defend oneself, observing that “the right to self-defence has been heavily allocated to certain subjects (e.g., white, propertied, male) and withheld from others” (ibid.). Women’s self-defence, it notes, was a crucial part of first-wave feminism in the UK (Dodsworth, 2019; Godfrey, 2012), while more recent work positions learning to fight as a potentially emancipatory act of “physical feminism” (McCaughey, 1997).

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin pushes the debate further, asking: “Is self-defence ethical? Is teaching self-defence ethical, and who can or should teach whom?” (Dorlin, 2022). The symposium builds on this, questioning the very boundaries of the self and the scope of defence: does it end with the body, or extend to the mind, clothing, architecture, or digital infrastructures? “Almost everything that humans have done to ward off one or another kind of threat might be viewed as self-defence” (Cardiff University, 2024, p. 2, citing Sloterdijk, 2013).

The media’s influence is also highlighted. From newspaper moral panics to cinematic tropes and gaming environments, the ways we imagine threats profoundly shape both practice and pedagogy. The organisers conclude that interpersonal self-defence is not simply technical know-how but a “complicated and controversial ethical, ideological and political matter” (ibid., p. 3).

Situating the Symposium within the Field
The Cardiff symposium aligns with the expanding intellectual project of martial arts studies, which has consistently treated combat practices not as neutral skill sets but as cultural texts. Paul Bowman’s scholarship (2015, 2021, 2023) is particularly resonant, situating martial arts within media circulation and ideological production. The symposium also draws heavily on feminist theory (McCaughey, 1997; Dodsworth, 2019), critical race scholarship (Light, 2017), and philosophical approaches to violence and protection (Dorlin, 2022; Sloterdijk, 2013).

In doing so, it poses a critical challenge to martial arts and karate practitioners alike. Rather than assuming that “self-defence” is a natural or universal good, we must recognise it as an historically and ideologically conditioned discourse.

Critical Observations
The text is, of course, a call for papers rather than a finished study. Its contribution lies in shaping an intellectual agenda rather than presenting definitive answers. Nevertheless, it raises several crucial issues.

First, the expansive scope—suggesting that almost any defensive gesture across history might qualify as self-defence—risks diluting analytic precision. Yet this breadth is not without purpose: it reminds us that logics of protection permeate every level of human culture, from national security doctrines to everyday bodily comportment.

Second, its emphasis on ideology cuts against the grain of standard karate pedagogy. Too often, bunkai (applications) are presented as timeless truths, as though kata encode universally valid strategies. By contrast, the symposium insists that “what counts” as defence is always a product of historical fears, cultural fantasies, and social norms.

Third, the ethical lens cannot be ignored. To describe karate as “self-defence” is not a neutral act. It positions instructors as arbiters of who deserves protection, what forms of violence are deemed legitimate, and whose lives are considered worth defending. In Irish dōjō, for example, women-only classes are sometimes framed as empowerment initiatives, yet without addressing whether they inadvertently reinforce assumptions about women’s vulnerability. Similarly, some seminars on knife defence play into racialised stereotypes of urban threat. These examples demonstrate why the ethical interrogation demanded by the symposium is so necessary.

Contribution to the Field
The symposium’s most significant contribution is to destabilise the complacent invocation of “self-defence” as a justification for martial practice. In doing so, it bridges martial arts studies, feminist theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. For karate in particular, it highlights that appeals to self-defence are not guarantees of authenticity but ideological claims that require scrutiny.

This does not diminish karate’s potential relevance. Instead, it forces practitioners and scholars alike to ask more complex questions: What are we teaching when we say we are teaching self-defence? Whose safety are we prioritising? What social narratives are we reinforcing?

Directions for Further Research
Several productive avenues follow from this intervention:

• Comparative studies of how karate organisations in different cultural contexts articulate self-defence, and what ideological assumptions underlie those framings.
• Analyses of how “reality-based” self-defence diverges ethically and pedagogically from traditional karate.
• Ethnographic research on the intersections of gender, race, and class in karate-based self-defence instruction.
• Historical inquiry into Okinawan and Japanese discourses around goshin, asking whether earlier frameworks offered alternative ethical orientations to those dominant today.

These lines of inquiry promise to enrich both scholarship and practice.

Conclusion
The Cardiff symposium is more than an administrative call; it is a critical reframing of “self-defence” as an ethical and ideological problem. For karate practitioners, it punctures the assumption that invoking self-defence is enough to secure authenticity or relevance. Instead, it challenges us to interrogate the cultural, political, and ethical conditions underpinning that claim.
​
As part of this Friday Academic Review Thoughts series, this review builds on earlier reflections on Bowman’s The Invention of Martial Arts by continuing to examine how martial practice is shaped not just by physical techniques but by cultural discourses. If karate is to speak meaningfully of self-defence in the present, it must do so with awareness of whose selves are imagined, and what worlds are being defended.

日本語の要約 (Japanese Summary)
本稿は、カーディフ大学で開催されたシンポジウム「The Ethics and Ideologies of Self-Defence」（2024年）を取り上げ、その学術的意義を検討したものである。シンポジウムは「自己防衛」とは何かを問い直し、その権利が歴史的に白人男性に偏って与えられてきたことや、女性の自己防衛がフェミニズム運動において重要であったことを強調する。また、防衛の境界を身体に限らず、精神・衣服・建築・テクノロジーにまで広げて捉え、メディアが脅威と防衛の想像を形成してきたことを指摘する。
空手において「自己防衛」がしばしば正統性の根拠とされるが、これは中立的な概念ではなく、文化的・政治的・倫理的条件に左右される言説である。本シンポジウムは、技術的側面を超え、誰が誰を守るのか、どのような社会的物語を強化するのかを問い直す必要性を示している。