The Karate Code: Did You Ever Ask Yourself What Karate Really Means?

by Jesse Enkamp, Hirokazu Kanazawa (Contributor), Tetsuhiro Hokama (Contributor)

Take charge of your own karate development and discover the true sophistication of traditional martial arts knowledge, as it is revealed in this exclusive behind-the-scenes book from a plethora of some of the last authentic living legends of classical karate - their wisdom right at your fingertips.

144 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2011

Reviews

[Cristian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, it's basically 12 answers from different great masters of karate in several styles (or "Ryu") to the question "what is karate". The trick is they had to reply with a single word, and then support or explain why, they chose that.

The book certainly has a lot of insight from different people that dedicated their life to Karate-do, and traveled different paths to achieve the same goal.

The problem is that being only 12 answers, and some of them pretty brief, there really wasn't much content to make a book out of it, so the author uses a lot of spacing between lines, and font size changes among other things, so as to complete the lacking space, and you end up with a 140~ pages book that would probably fit into something like 30.
Add that to the prize and it can arguably get a bit expensive.

Still, if you don't mind any of this (or can just ignore it), and you care about the philosophical or spiritual side of Karate-do, there are definitely 12 jewels to gain from this book.
Oh, there is also some bonus content you can download online, which is a nice addition I suppose.

[Kieran Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

No answer here

Enkamp Sensei is clear in the end by saying that karate is personal. So there is no answer here in the pages of this book as to what karate really is & that is not a bad thing. It is a personal journey.