The History of Fighting

Top – Two young German boys play at being soldiers c.1914
Bottom – Three new recruits for the German War Machine c.1917

Source: greatwar.nl

Muhammad Ali looking dejected after losing his final fight to Trevor Berbick in 1981.

Source: dailymail.co.uk

"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys;
look upon them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death".

~ Sun Tzu ~

The Heian (peaceful mind) kata are derived from the older Okinawan Pinan kata (which also means peaceful or calm mind). Sensei Gichin Funakoshi changed the name of these and many other Shotokan kata when he took karate to Japan in the early 1920s in a bid to make them more accessible to a Japanese consumer base. An interesting karate history fact is that the kata we know today as Heian Nidan was originally the first of the Heian kata until in the 1930s, Funakoshi switched Nidan with Shodan. Some styles still practice it the original way around though what Shotokan karate calls Heian Shodan is arguably a lot easier than Nidan, which is probably why they were switched in the first place.

They are practiced and seemingly designed so that students can learn increasingly difficult techniques as they progress in the art of karate and they were developed by Okinawan Master Anko Itosu at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the Heian kata probably have their origins in much older forms from China known as Channan or Kushanku (Kanku Sho and Dai may also originate from these kata). Legend has it that Master Itosu (or perhaps an older teacher, Tode Sakugawa) learned a kata called ‘Chiang Nan’(pronounced Channan in Japanese) from a Chinese diplomat and Kung Fu expert who lived in Okinawa called Kung Hsiang Chun. Though the original kata is lost, it is believed that it was very long so Itosu divided it into five as they would be easier to learn.

Another theory is that Itosu, who took the previously secretive martial art into the schools in Okinawa, found that children had difficulty learning kata so he devised the Pinan kata group to aid this. It is believed by some that he took moves from the Bassai and the Kanku sets in particular and arranged them so they gradually got more difficult through the various Pinan kata.

More Kata History

The history of human rights is a long one and can be said to have started in 539 BCE when the first king of ancient Persia, Cyrus the Great, defeated the Babylonian army and took the city. Once this task was done, he freed the slaves there and introduced new laws that declared people’s right to equality and to choose their own religion.



These laws were recorded in cuneiform script on a baked-clay cylinder known as the Cyrus Cylinder, a law code that is recognised as the first known charter for human rights.

humanrights.com

MMA superstar Ronda Rousey

theilium.com

These nuclear bomb detonations, (known as the Able and Baker Tests respectively), took place in July 1946 as part of Operation Crossroads on the island of Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. A fleet of decommissioned US and seized Japanese vessels were deployed in the area with the intention of simulating and documenting the effects of nuclear weapons in naval warfare. They were the precursors to a series of large thermonuclear tests that over the next decade or so would render Bikini unfit for human habitation, a situation that is only recently beginning to reverse itself.



The first experiment of Operation Crossroads, the Able Test, occurred on July 1 when a bomb was dropped from the B-29 Super-Fortress Dave's Dream of the 509th Bombardment Group; the same plane that was used as the photographic equipment aircraft on the Nagasaki mission in 1945. The 23-kiloton air-deployed nuclear weapon was detonated 520 feet (158 m) above the target fleet though the bomb missed its aim point by 710 yards (649 m) which led to less than spectacular results.



The bomb used for the Baker Test on July 25 was the same design as the one used on Nagasaki in the previous year and in this test was detonated ninety feet underwater amongst the target fleet. More successful than Able, it is most remembered for producing a series of unique photographs because the blinding flash of the explosion that normally obscures the target area was mostly unseen as it was underwater. The large Wilson cloud and the vertical water column are characteristic Baker shot features and the clear images of the surrounding ships give a good sense of the scale of the mushroom cloud.

Sources:

rarehistoricalphotos.com
wikipedia.org

"It's better to practice a little than talk a lot"

~ Muso Soseki (1275 – 1351) ~

Photographs of monks from the Shaolin Temple of Songshan, taken by Isabel Munoz in 1998 – 1999.

1. Two-handed sword
2. Headstand
3. The Frog Jump
4. Flying over the Roof
5. High Kick

Source: sayshanti.wordpress.com

A young Nelson Mandela doing some boxing training. He wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom;

"I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one's body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.....Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, colour and wealth are irrelevant.....I never did any real fighting after I entered politics. My main interest was in training; I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress. After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter,"

Image Source: motionfitness.co.za