In our dojo, when a student passes a grading, they are instructed not to post about it on social media or otherwise tell others. It isn’t that we don’t want their accomplishment known; as soon as I get home from a student’s promotion, I announce it on Facebook. I am very proud of my students and the fruits of their dedication.
So why are students prohibited from doing so themselves? Consider a venerable karate fable.
A deshi (an apprentice to the way of karate) once asked, “What is the difference between a person of Tao and one who does not understand the Tao?” Their sensei replied, “It is simple. When a person who does not understand the Tao receives their shodan (first-degree black belt), they can hardly wait to run home and tell everyone they know they made shodan. Upon receiving their nidan (second-degree black belt), they will climb to the rooftops and shout to the populace. Upon receiving their sandan (third-degree black belt), they will jump in their car and parade through town honking its horn, telling one and all about their sandan.”
“When the person of Tao receives their shodan, they will bow their head in gratitude. Upon receiving their nidan, they will bow their head and shoulders. Upon receiving their sandan, they will bow to the waist and quietly walk alongside the wall so that people will not see them.”
The Japanese word for Tao is dō, which means “the way,” as in karate-dō, the way of karate. A genuine karateka navigates their way through humility, which is given by both how we talk and not talk about ourselves.
Or consider a different karate story.
The late Nishiyama Hidetaka was a great Shotokan sensei who pioneered Japanese karate in America. Randall Hassell, himself an accomplished practitioner who led his own dojo, once wrote about being visited by Nishiyama. Hassell was starry-eyed in his presence, but to Hassell’s surprise, Nishiyama spoke to him like an equal, which greatly raised Hassell’s self-esteem. Then, when they went to Hassell’s dojo, Nishiyama asked to see everyone’s kata (a traditional pattern of techniques), and requested that Hassell go first. Hassell wrote that he was full of confidence and, not wanting to disappoint Nishiyama or the audience of his students, he executed the first move of the kata with more power and precision than he had ever done before. But Nishiyama instantly stopped him, shaking his head and going, “No, no, no.” He pushed Hassell’s arms one way and hips another and told him to start again. Then again, and again and again. And so it went, on and on, 45 minutes of unrelenting criticism and repeated restarts of a kata that normally takes 90 seconds to perform. Finally, with Hassell tottering from exhaustion and shame, Nishiyama told him to finish. Then, so quietly that no one else could hear, told him, “Good kata.”
For a real karateka, the assessment of one’s sensei is what matters. What the rest of the world sees or hears is of no real consequence. Outsiders cannot understand the depth and complexity of the relationship forged over years and decades between a good sensei and a good deshi. If a student is promoted and needs to tell their friends and acquaintances about it, what they’re saying, loudly and unmistakably, is that what their sensei thinks isn’t enough.
There’s a particular parallel that even those who have no connection with karate already understand. It’s a general belief that if you do a charitable deed, one that genuinely helps someone in need or raises them up, it only gets cheapened if you tell others about it. It’s considered tawdry to boast about it on or off social media. For most people, genuine charity—genuinely good acts from the heart—should be done for its own sake. Seeking to be admired for doing good takes away its goodness.
Then it’s revealing that nonetheless most people have no compunction about posting or boasting about other achievements, whether it’s a professor spotlighting their publications, a professional spotlighting an award, a competitor spotlighting a trophy, or just someone bragging about how many steps they took that day. There’s a severe disjunction between how they treat a truly good act and a personal accomplishment—which is a kind of admission that their accomplishment lacks what we call good in the moral sense. In these times, many people find celebrating themselves in the most public way irresistible. Hence, professors and non-academics alike jump on their social media and honk their way through town.
From a karate perspective, there is something pathological about such behavior. If you accomplish something noteworthy and receive an award for it, you are being applauded for what you have done. If it’s a genuine accomplishment, it can merit applause, at least from those knowledgeable enough to understand its worth. But if you post about it on social media, it means such meaningful recognition not enough: you also want others to know about it and praise you for it. In other words, you want to be applauded for being applauded. And if you keep checking to see how many “likes” your announcement has gotten, you’re seeking to applaud yourself for being applauded for being applauded.
Sadly, this recursive craving of praise is found widely in karate, too. It’s common for a Westerner to post their promotion on social media as if it’s a trophy, to seek the internet admiration of their friends and followers. That happens with tyro karateka getting their first promotion and veterans with decades of training advertising a new high rank. Both want as many people as possible to know. The desire for more and more praise vanquishes even familiar teaching stories of karate, despite its being a way embedded in Japanese and Okinawan cultures where humility is an explicit virtue.
My personal experience is that people regularly get incensed by anyone observing that their seeking after admiration is seeking after admiration. I think that proves the aim is true, like a karate strike hitting a vital point. A common and angry response is that such criticism is arrogant, which is a censure that tries to walk a very tricky line between the evil of arrogance and the appeal of celebrating oneself. Sometimes an accusation of arrogance is just the outrage of “how DARE you criticize me?!”
Yet the thoughtful karateka should accept the reproach, at least in a certain way. Arrogance qua the failure of humility attaches to almost all of us to some degree. It certainly does to me. While the way of karate holds that humility is essential to being a good person—to being a person of Tao—it also holds that we fall just as short of it as we fall short of perfect technique. We never fully achieve either. But we keep trying. The nature of karate does its daily best to help, because its manifest difficulty makes practicing it is such a regularly humbling experience. It should be hard to brag about yourself as a master when your failures and shortcomings are made glaringly obvious every week on the dojo floor, even if too many karateka manage to do so.
If it hasn’t already become apparent, the issue is very much one of how we see and talk (and post) about ourselves. It’s about our relationship to ourselves, and how we enact it in public or private. These days, the emblematic and social media-driven image of the self is, of course, the selfie. So perhaps I can end by pointing out that even this culture polices self-promotion: the person who posts endless selfies is a popular figure of derision, regardless of whether they’re undeniably gorgeous or not. There’s a limit, even far outside Japan, Okinawa, or a humble way of karate, to how much we’ll tolerate people celebrating themselves. Karate just understands that selfies come in many forms besides the pics on your phone.