bar-on cohen (2006), kime and the moving body - somatic codes in japanese martial arts

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DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070885

2006 12: 73Body & SocietyEinat Bar-On Cohen

and the Moving Body: Somatic Codes in Japanese Martial ArtsKime

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Kime and the Moving Body: SomaticCodes in Japanese Martial Arts

EINAT BAR-ON COHEN

But I should be playing this, I think anxiously. It is the minuet. I should have joined the others,I should be playing again. And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the fiddleis under my chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am.

An Equal Music(Seth, 1999: 11011)

Introduction1

Keep your kime2 quiet inside your stomach, instructs the karate teacher; putyour hand on your abdomen, thats where the kick begins.

What is kime? How can it be hidden inside the body or felt by placing a hand

on the abdomen? And why does a kick start from that hiding place? These aresomatic conundrums that karate students must solve in order to master karatepractice. The meaning and the tactical use of kime, which is of crucial import-ance to karateka (karate students3), are concealed inside their bodies, to berevealed through movement. At first they do not know what kime is becausethey cannot discern it in their own or in their opponents bodies. The meaningof this un-translated Japanese word and its practical use unfold through years ofpractice.

Body & Society 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),Vol. 12(4): 7393DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070885

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Students of all martial arts learn how to move quickly and take aim precisely.They attain skills of perception that allow them to anticipate where theiropponent is moving and what she intends to do. As they repeatedly practice in

an effort to attain these skills, their bodies are also constructed anew. The way akarateka thinks and understands what body means, or what it contains, changesover time (Ots, 19944) as does the body itself: muscles grow stronger and moreflexible, perception and reaction become quicker and more accurate. The practiceof martial arts entails more profound changes in the practitioner as well, becausenew potentialities, such as kime, are discovered and honed into finely tunedinstruments.

Karate, the Japanese empty-handed martial art from the southern islands of

Okinawa, was modernized and transformed into a neo-tradition by MasterGishin Funakoshi (18681957). Traditionally a farmers way of opposing theSamurai, karate included the use of agricultural tools as weapons (still taught bysome schools). Funakoshi was the first Okinawan to demonstrate karate inTokyo, changing the name and practice of the traditional martial art significantly.Without shifting its pronunciation, Funakoshi replaced the kanji (ideograms)used for the original word, Chinese hand, into empty hand, hinting at the Zenideal of emptiness. The suffix do the way was added to further stress the

Japanese Zen spirituality, simultaneously equating it with the other Japanesemartial arts, which were the exclusive purview of the Samurai caste of warriors.Changing the name rendered karate more Japanese, more spiritual, and morenoble. Funakoshis students developed in different directions and today manykarate schools exist. Some train mainly for competition, others emphasizeefficiency in battle, and yet others such as Shotokan, headed by TsutomuOshima5 eschew the use of weapons and stress the spiritual-practical facet oftraining (Bar-On Cohen, 2005; Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000; Hurst, 1998).

Karate is a culturally transmitted practice without any text, discourse, orverbal exegesis between and among teachers and students.6 The meaning of theteachers words, the ways in which an exercise is carried out, and ultimatelykarate itself, emerge from within an individuals body. But how can the body,perceived and operated as it is from within, be culturally transmitted? How caninternal somatic experiences originate from without? How can the words andbody of one person be embodied in another? And how can adults learn complex,foreign (for Westerners, at least) and intricate ways of using, understanding andconstituting their bodies through non-verbal, non-symbolic and non-dualisticmeans? More generally, how is the body objectified, and what are its relationswith words, specifically with those words I call somatic codes words hanging,so to speak, on somatic experience?

74 Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4



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Learning karate means discovering it inside ones own moving body. Certainmodes of movement are conditions for achievement and for intentionality in themartial arts world-of-meaning. Having acquired those capacities of movement,

the karateka can design the karate training, and also his/her own body, to suitthe goals, in that way embodying karate. Only a karateka who is proficient inthe use ofkime and other somatic abilities developed through training, can beactive and successful in the world ofkarate. Moreover, the significance of usingkime goes beyond its practical value in combat; the very essence of karatetraining, of its interactive sociality, is to develop kime,7 as the revelation of poten-tialities hidden within is the essence ofkarate.

The long process of discovering karate inside ones body also involves words

for instance, kime which enable concise communication between students andteachers. Those words are meaningless to a beginner, but they become graduallyloaded with significance, and their meaning shifts as the students understandingof them is modified through somatic experience. I call such words, whose deci-phering depends on somatic experience and whose meaning varies accordingly,somatic codes. Somatic codes verbalize interior body dynamics, and theirsignificance emerges together with these dynamics. The codes have the capacityof succinctly focusing the participants awareness onto a certain aspect of

training, thus engendering an alternative possibility, supplemental to the exerciseitself, of rendering these somatic interiorities social. These words, located in theinterface between the innerness and the outerness of the body, are subordinatedto the somatic.

In contrast to other words, somatic codes do not designate an object that canbe grasped by the senses, put to use and fixed by logic; they designate ambigu-ous things, notions that are neither object nor subject, and also both object andsubject. Somatic codes are neither out there nor in here; they are both in the

world and part of me, of my body. In phenomenological terms those codes, likethe body itself, are both on and within the horizon-of-being. They are both toolsof apprehension and of action, as well as designated object (Csordas, 1994a;Merleau-Ponty, [1945]2002). Somatic codes have the capacity to draw thekaratekas awareness to things that emerge from inside the body. Kime, as anexample of a somatic code, is not located in any certain part of the body; itemerges from a place unrecognized by the person who is that body (Plessner,1970). Its emergence depends on interaction, and it is also a tool of interaction,a social instrument that can be put to use inter-subjectively.

Kime and the Moving Body 75



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Like Latours Nose

The body itself changes as new potentialities of kinesthetics and of perceptiondevelop where none existed before. Such change can be seen much in the senseused by Latour, who claims that to have a body is to learn to be affected (2004:205). The body is an interface that becomes more and more describable as itlearns to be affected by more and more elements . . . By focusing on the body,one is immediately or rather, mediately directed to what the body has becomeaware of (2004: 206, emphasis in original). Latour, referring to the perfumeindustry, asserts that the body is constructed through the constant reiteration ofarticulations by comparison; it learns, through memorizing differences, to be a

nose an expert in the perfume industry by acquiring the capacity to identifysubtle differences in odor. The body is made up of what it learns to discern; and,I would add, the body is also made up of what it learns to do. Learning to mastermartial arts is more complex than training to become a nose, as it involvesimmersing oneself in an entire world-of-meaning, a new cosmological ordercomposed of movement, senses, emotions and inter-subjectivity (Bar-On Cohen,2005). Nonetheless, becoming a karateka, embodying the practice and ultimatelybecoming karate itself, since karate has no abode other than the karatekas body,

depends like Latours nose on the endless reiteration of articulations bycomparison.

The Active Body

The issue of social learning for the use of our bodies is not new and touches onnotions such as how we are the apprentices of our bodies (Sheets-Johnstone,1999), how it is shaped through practice, learning and culture, and so on. But the

subject has not been widely addressed in social writing. The mindful body(Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987) was one attempt to resolve the Cartesiandualism of mind and body (Strathern, 1996). Other scholars have followed theirlead, concentrating on the body as symbol and on demonstrating its subordina-tion to societys will. The body has been portrayed as a passive billboard onwhich society, and particularly consumer society, pastes its dictates (Feather-stone, 1991). Following Foucault, stress has been placed on the ways in whichour bodies are shaped by discourse, focusing on what is done to the body ratherthan what the body does, and leaving the origin of agency (and, by the way, alsoof social oppression) unaccounted for (Turner, 1994). Feminist interest in thebody has also centered on the disciplined, docile body as subjected to itsgendered form. And much of the writing on disease and medicine as social




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phenomena concerns the consequences of modern medicines transformation ofthe body (Frank, 1991), positing the body as passive and leaving the active roleto discourse, symbols and words.

Yet it is insufficient to see the body as merely a surface to be inscribed, as acarrier of social signs. The body is clearly a potential, in process and movement,something which goes beyond itself (Featherstone, 2006: 213). Moreover,viewing the body as exclusively subject to discourse does not explain away theCartesian split but leaves it nonetheless ethereal, a vanishing body (Shilling,1993: 79). The body first presents itself as that which will remain solid, but thenit does melt into air (Frank, 1991: 133). Hence Lyon and Barbalet call for a newmodel whereby the body is understood not merely as subject to external agency,

but as simultaneously an agent in its own world construction (1994: 48).8I too would like to take a step toward taking up this challenge and posit the

active body as it is shaped and while it shapes its social environment. Non-discursive ways of making cultural sense of the world are neither mystical norinfantile; like words, they too follow logical operations of comparison,conclusion and so forth. The work of philosophers Suzanne Langer and MaxineSheets-Johnstone has drawn attention to these non-discursive modes of bodyknowledge (Langer, 19799), which have trajectories of their own: parallel, inter-

secting, chiasmic, or simply constructed with language and other semioticrepresentations. The somatic potentialities that unfold and turn into sources ofagency and communication are made of kinesthetics and are intimately connectedto the potentialities that movement engenders (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, 2000). InSheets-Johnstones words, [t]o have meaning is not necessarily to refer andneither is it necessarily to have a verbal label. Movement animation can be inand of itself meaningful (1999: 491).

Like other Japanese martial arts, karate is a system of elaborate fighting skills;

at the same time, however, it is also a Zen practice actively forming non-dualism(Hurst, 1998; King, 1993). The names of most Zen arts calligraphy, paperfolding, seated meditation (za-zen), flower arranging, pottery and more includ-ing the Japanese martial arts, have the suffix do. Do the way the way todiscovering something profound and extraordinary about the world and aboutoneself, the way to enlightenment. That way is training: repeating movementsover and over again until perfect praxis can be approached, while progressingsmoothly, without high points, interruptions or intervals within the body. Aftersome time, martial arts students might notice that their body-self has changed;they have discovered out-of-the-ordinary ways of moving and of using theirsenses. They find themselves in a new place, whose existence they had not beenaware of, and still on the way. As the goal of Zen practice, the objective of




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training is to achieve non-dualism through practice (Parker, 1992). The Easternnon-dualist worldview adds a new meaning to the martial arts students under-standing of their bodies, of the profound and the out-of-the-ordinary, and of

how to seek spirituality inside the body. The Japanese philosopher Yuasa hasexplained these processes (1987: 25):

To put it simply, true knowledge cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking,but only through bodily recognition or realization (tainin or taitoku), that is, through utiliza-tion of ones total body and mind . . . this is to learn with the body not the brain.

The non-dualistic possibilities lie within the body.This, however, has not explained how karate practice can achieve non-dualism;

it must still be described. Western karate trainers are immersed in dualistic world-views, yet fully capable of learning and mastering, even understanding, the non-dualistic practices. Most karateka embrace the new way of using their bodieswithout renouncing their ordinary lives. Unlike a cult, for example, practisingmartial arts does not remove the practitioner from his/her family, surroundings,religion and so forth (see, for example, Beit-Hallahmi, 1991, 1992). The newlyacquired non-dualistic way of using the body is not exclusive; it exists alongsidethe more dualistic fundamental understandings in the Western and modern world.

This concurrent approach to the body is clearly evident in the case of religiousJews training in the Japanese martial arts. While they advance in their apprentice-ship of the martial art, they retain the strict dualistic categorization and separationbetween various body parts, between the sacred and the profane, the body andthe mind, as demanded by the Jewish religion (see Goldberg, 2003), maintainingtwo seemingly opposing views of the body simultaneously.

Kimein Training

During training sessions, kime is not explained in words, it is only practiced intoexistence, so perhaps the best way to look at it, short of training itself, would beto go to the training hall and describe how kime is practiced there. I observed thetraining session from which the quotation that opens this article, as well as thefollowing descriptions, are taken, in November 2003 in Jerusalem.10 However,much of my understanding also stems from more than 20 years of practice intraining and learning from my Shotokan karate-do11 teachers. The followingdescriptions include detailed positions and body movements that might appeartechnical and perhaps tedious but, as the issue here is the moving body and notits representations, only such detailed accounts may elucidate the meaning anduse ofkime.




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This particular training session, held in a school gymnasium, is a specialoccasion, a farewell for the head of Israel Shotokan, Eli Cohen, who is leavingthe country to become Israels ambassador to Japan. About 60 experienced

karateka are participating. Like all sessions, it opens with a short ceremony ofbows and then the participants spread across the hall and begin a familiar seriesof warm-up exercises. Instructor Eli Cohen very softly counts out the rhythm inJapanese: ich, ni, san.12 He stresses the importance of a stretching and breathingexercise developing the pelvis, the tanden, which is good for strengthening thekime the hara13 he says using the two Japanese words. The participants sit onthe floor, legs stretched out straight, hands planted on the floor on either side ofthe buttocks. They lift their bodies up slowly, abdomens pointed at the ceiling,

weight resting on the hands and ankles, all the while inhaling, filling the lungsthrough the nose. They stay in the fully extended position briefly, then returnslowly to the sitting position, exhaling until no air remains in the lungs, and againlifting the abdomen. There are five corners, says Eli, the two hands, the twolegs, and the fifth corner is the abdomen. Concentrate only on this fifth corner,14

forget the other four. Eli wants the participants to feel as if they are hanging bytheir belts in mid-air, suspended from the ceiling as if this central corner theabdomen is what is holding them in that extended position and not the four

other points which are, in fact, planted on the floor.Eli does not explain what kime is, nor does he say how the karateka should

proceed in order to achieve this feeling of hanging from the ceiling while disre-garding the points of contact with the floor. He is talking to seasoned karatekawho already have an inkling of what kime is, having already sensed it in theirbodies. They understand what he is talking about; his words are neithermetaphorical nor mystical. They actually feel the floor disappearing; the knots oftheir belts are extended toward the ceiling, the lungs open and suffuse with air

the tanden holds their bodies in position.Later in the training session Eli refers again to the feeling of being suspended

by the belt from the ceiling, this time in combat. He proposes another exerciseaimed at the perception and the strengthening of kime.15 Now the participantsspar; the attacker uses a kick and the defender reacts with a fist. Eli explains anddemonstrates: the defender does nothing but strike with the maete to the eye,he says, and he must be cut by the mawashigiri. Maete is a short strikingmovement of the fist of the extended hand; mawashigiri is a circular kick of theback leg, creating a cutting effect much like that of a sickle. The exercise is a veryunbalanced one; the attackers movement is a long and difficult one, while thedefenders move is very short and relatively easy. It does not seem reasonable forthe exercise to work, namely, for the attack to be successful and for the leg to




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reach its target before the fist reaches the eye; for the leg, moving in a long, roundtrajectory, must move some two meters from its position in the initial stance tothe point of impact on the opponents body, and the fist need only move some

40 centimeters before contact with the opponents eye. But Eli insists that it canbe done, posing a tactical riddle, a somatic conundrum to be unraveled in aprecise somatic manner.

Eli demonstrates and explains at the same time. His movements are long,precise and calm, and although he must reach his target quickly, he does not seemto be in a hurry, and the tone of his voice is equally serene. This exercise demandsgreat precision and composure.

The leg starts out without a sign. If your movement is too strong, its too late; if your

movement is too rapid, its too late. Its very simple: [the defender] understands that [the leg]has started out only after it has already moved. Do this as if there was no kime thats right,the mawashigiri is in. Dont think about the leg, your body has done it thousands of times, itknows mawashigiri.

Elis remarks on the demonstration he has just performed with anotherkarateka show how to attain this tricky goal. When facing a skilled adversary, asquint of the eye, a twist of the front leg, a shift in balance, a shrug of theshoulder, a slight pulling back of the hand any of these can indicate to the

opponent that the attack has begun. The slightest change will lead the opponentto react with a counter-attack and consequently to undermine the exercise. Theinitial stance must therefore be perfect, a stance verging on movement yetextremely stable, as the leg is lifted and swayed in one strong swoop withoutcorrecting the body balance for that motion and without any preparatory move-ments. Already encompassing the potentiality of movement, ready to disclose themovement it contains, like the participants held by the knot of their belts, thestance has the karateka standing immobile in mid-motion a very practical illus-

tration of Husserls claim that holding still is [also] a mode of I do (1970: 106).It is not only muscular movement that can be detected by a trained karateka;

the attackers decision to move may also be perceived and thus undermine theattackers chances of success.16 Hiding kime, performing the exercise as if therewere no kime, means complete control over both movement and thought. In thissituation, a thought (a decision) or an emotion (the will to win, for instance) is asomatic activity that can be detected by the other, a corporeal mode of inter-subjectivity: the mind too is a movement. For the attack to surprise the opponentit should be void, it should start out without betraying a signal. The attackerhimself should forgo the decision; he should let his body decide when to attack,and he should let his body carry out the attack perfectly, as it was trained to do.Anything not directly connected to the task at hand can be perceived by theopponent; non-dualism is a fighting technique.




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To hide kime means that the attacker must not reveal his strength; on thecontrary, his opponent remains unaware of the impending kicking movementuntil the attack is already on its way, gaining distance and making up for the

imbalance in the roles of the two opponents. Only if the attacker succeeds inhiding the instant of attack, does his long circular movement have a chance ofovertaking his opponents short simple one. For this, Eli insists, the motion mustbegin from the pelvis: keep your kime quiet inside your stomach . . . rememberthe fifth point, the knot of the belt, that is the point that is moving, everythingelse will follow. The technical solution for this exercise is to move as if beingpulled by the belt. The sensation of hanging from the ceiling is recaptured in theattempt to surprise the opponent, almost as if the attacker himself is surprised,

as if he is being pulled into movement from the knot of his belt. Hiding strength,speed and effectivity in battle makes for a stronger warrior and at the same timeavoids boasting or any other expression of power.17 Moreover, it precludes anyemotion that might give away the incipient movement, because a skilledopponent would surely perceive the signal and the exercise would fail. Eli couldhave chosen a more balanced exercise that would allow the participants to engagein a freer, more expressive combat, but he chose the hiding the kime exercisethat presents the karateka with a challenge to his person, his entire body-self: a

practical-spiritual exercise demanding meditation-like18 serenity.The sensation of being suspended from the ceiling, however, cannot be

demonstrated; nor can the feeling that the movement begins with the tanden, thatit starts out from the belt knot. The training exercises can only turn thekaratekas attention to the kime.Kime is not taught; it can only be attained indi-rectly through motion in relation to the opponents19 moving body. Kime isenhanced by certain movements and perceived by its workings, by its success incombat. A karateka can know if his/her kime works, only through his/her

opponents reaction. If the attack allows the opponent to retract without hercontrolling that retraction, namely if the opponents tanden moves backwards,then kime has proven itself. In the exercise above, in which a long lunge attemptsto outpace a short blow, if the defender does not react in time, then the attackerknows that she has hidden her kime well.

Kime can only be revealed within social interaction, a potentiality to be playedout inter-subjectively. More phenomenologically put, in terms of body phil-osophy it can be argued that there is a deeper form of memory than that whichuses symbolic codes (Jespersen quoted in Sheets-Johnstone, 2000: 361).Kime islocated in the bodys imagining in habits, in the bodys memory of what it iscapable of. Thus kime can be quiet inside the stomach, as Eli says, it can hideitself. Like the senses and the muscles, the kime too is ready to be activated. Thekarateka knows it is there and knows he/she can hide it or use it just like any




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other part of his/her body, and just like he/she can use speech or, perhaps, evenhis/her self.

In the effort to crack the somatic riddle of the long circular movement

attempting to outpace the short one, Eli asks the participants to hide their kimelong enough to make the opponent unaware of the moving leg. At the instant ofimpact, however, when the mawashigiri reaches the opponents body, kime mustdisplay itself fully. Kime is masked and then reveals itself when it is too late forthe opponent, who must react to the moving leg and whose fist can no longer beeffective. Kime implies a smooth passage that does not allow for the instant oftransformation from hiding to full disclosure to be pin-pointed, since the hidingis embedded in the disclosure and the disclosure in the hiding (see Handelman,

2005b20). The shift from concealment to presence is fluid and non-detectable. Ifthere is no kime, if it is absent and not just hiding, it cannot reveal itself; theattack is then inefficient and not dangerous.Kime is created, hidden and disclosedsimultaneously through the exact positioning of the body, and of the pelvis inparticular; it is how the karateka advances, how the initial stance unfolds itsmovement. At the same time, however, it also is a state of emotion.

Kimefrom a Sino-Japanese Perspective

So, what then is kime? As already noted, the word kimecannot be defined stat-ically; its meaning is formed through experience. It is demonstrated, used,pointed at, but it is not and cannot be explained in words in the framework ofkarate training. This attempt to formulate the innerness of the body as it isformed is perhaps perplexing, but it should be borne in mind that kime is inter-subjective and also as much a characteristic of the body every body as isbreathing or moving ones limbs. Attack and defense cannot be effective without

kime. Having strong kime means being dangerous, not just throwing limbs atthe opponent but really menacing him/her. Kime can therefore be described asthe interior potentiality of strength and speed, of warriorship growing inside thetrained body, of the transfer of explosive energy (Habersetzer, 2000: 342). It is asomatic characteristic that a trained warrior can use at will.

A karateka uses kime like Vikram Seths violinist uses his body to make music:in the middle of a concert he finds himself thinking, I should be playing again.And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the fiddle is under mychin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am (1999: 11011). The violinists trainedbody can perform the very complex task of playing an instrument with othermembers of the quartet, starting at just the right moment and in the correctmanner, without thinking about it, or even when he is busy thinking aboutsomething else.




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The martial arts student encounters a new world of meaning whose notionsare not formulated verbally. On the contrary, training dismantles notions desig-nated by words and replaces them with other notions understood somatically,

notions from the Sino-Japanese world such as ki (chi in Chinese) that are trans-lated (inaccurately) as life energy. Martial arts students talk of enlarging theirki, their kime, their kiai (the expletive sound or cry of the warrior at the momentof impact). The students are not provided with any translation for these words;the notions they indicate exist only as part of the understanding of the body (andmind) in Sino-Japanese medicine and culture. In order to grasp and use suchnotions and to carry out the practices they entail, the students also need tounlearn what they already know, to discard the dichotomous categories they

normally use outside the training sessions.In the martial arts, and in the Sino-Japanese view of the body and its working

in general,21 the interface between the body and that which is outside it is notclear cut. The body is sometimes understood to include not only that which iscircumscribed by the skin but, during battle, the ma22 as well, the empty spacebetween the two warriors facing one another, and the opponents body as well.The sensation of being inside the opponents body when the opponent has strongkime has been described as the feeling of being surrounded and trapped like the

prey enveloped by an octopus many arms (Masciotra et al., 2001: 119); I liter-ally shrink into myself, lose control; I become unable to release a decisive actionalthough my opponent is within reach (p. 127).

Kime emerges from the Sino-Japanese way of looking at the body, at the wayit is constructed and operates, contracts disease and heals; this way may not becompatible with the usual Western (and modern Japanese) understanding of thebody. The Sino-Japanese view is that the body holds the potentiality of includ-ing more (and sometimes less) than that which is inside its skin and it is, conse-

quently, permeable to exchange with other bodies, objects and, ultimately, theentire cosmos. Unlike the scientific view, the body can be apprehended not onlyfrom an objective, exterior viewpoint, but it can also be grasped from within, byour sensation of the condition of our own body, the sense of knowledge the bodyprovides from within23 (Yuasa, 1993: 72). Neither ki, the vital energy or innerpower, nor kime can be used, reached or sensed through any part of the body,but only used, adjusted, hidden, or made to appear through practice. Like ki,kime is grasped as a whole, but there are zones where ki is concentrated,24 andthe tanden (hara) a point beneath the navel, exactly under the knot of the belt is considered to be an ocean ofki (Yuasa, 1987). The kime is concentrated thereas well, and can be perceived, as Eli proposes in the training, by placing a handon the tanden while moving. Every karate movement should begin from thetanden, the most stable region of the body. Thus the kick starts out from the




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tanden, the movement emerges from the pelvis, exteriorizing the kime as the legis hurled forward.

Kime has at least two explanations in Japanese (see note 2), one designated by

the kanji (ideogram) meaning extremity or polarity, indicating that kime is theextremity of the warriors potential to fight effectively: beyond his/her kimehe/she cannot fight or deter an adversary. That extremity is pushed further,making kime grow as the warriors fighting capability improves. The other expla-nation of the word kime comes from kanji for the verb to decide. That sense ofthe word connects physical strength, alertness and effectiveness to the mentalcapacity to decide. A karateka aims to conceal his/her decision to move; by hidinghis/her kime, he/she can surprise an opponent and move without the opponent

sensing it. In this way, kime is a decision taken by the body itself, as it were.This point can perhaps more tellingly be formulated in the negative: kime is

the decision to renounce decision, to allow the body and its fighting experiencetake over the decision. Kime is also used to detect the opponents decision tomove; it helps a warrior feel an opponents decision to take action and thus attackeven before the attacker is aware of it.Kime is used to fight more effectively, andalso to collect information from the environment, such as information about theopponents intentions. Obviously this is of great tactical advantage, but this

version of kime, of warriorship, also molds the correct emotional attitude akarateka should embody: that of emotional distance or emotional emptiness. Agenuine karateka should not boast about his/her ability and must avoid reckless-ness, but also ought not to display cowardliness. It is not enough to somaticallydisplay the absence of emotions; for the display to be credible in an extreme situ-ation like battle, emotions such as fear, anger and vengefulness themselves, whichare considered part of the body (Ots, 1994), must be overcome and must ceaseto exist. This demands strenuous training from the karateka, and thus karate is

also an emotional endeavor. In this context, emotions as a source of action, ofvolition, can be detected as movement and are, indeed, movement. Hence thecapacity to control the kime, to hide it or to use it, is also the capacity to avoidemotion in battle. An attack can succeed if the attacker renounces the will to win.In karate, volition must cease to exist so that, paradoxically, intentionality canemerge where volition lets off.

Semiotic Semantics Somatic Codes

Kime is a somatic-emotional experience and, like other sensed and felt experiences,it cannot be accounted for solely in words. Langer (1979: 1001) powerfullyexpresses the inadequacy of words in capturing emotion:




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Everybody knows that language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature.It merely names certain vaguely and crudely conceived states, but fails miserably in any attemptto convey the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience, theinterplay of feeling with thoughts and impressions, memories and echoes of memories,

transient fantasy, or its mere runic traces, all turned into nameless, emotional stuff.

Nonetheless, by looking at the non-discursive in experience, Langer reaches theconclusion that also the world of sensation operates in a logical semantic way,that feelings have definite forms, which become progressively articulated(Langer, 1979: 100, emphasis in original), and that, as Durig glosses Langer, wecan think with feeling (Durig, 1994: 262). The senses collect data and theirimpressions of the world inform cognition. The only way they can make sense

of the world is for the eyes and ears [to] have their logic their categories ofunderstanding (Langer, 1979: 89); they too must sort things out through logic-like operations in order to inform cognition. These logic-like operations are non-discursive because they are non-linear and non-objective and thus stand incontrast to the formal logic that is characteristic of language, mathematics and soforth. Non-discursive logic does not discern separate named objects, which canbe organized linearly, one after the other; rather, non-discursive logic can graspa full, undetailed, unnamed picture at one glance.

This way of making sense and of attributing meaning to the world isaccomplished though logic-like operations such as comparing, categorizing,correcting, iterating, correlating and thus learning from experience. Langerfurther argues, says Durig, that [d]enial of emotions is a classic symptom ofdualistic thinking (Durig, 1994: 256): because words and other representationsare central to Western thought and are accorded primacy over emotion and otherfelt experiences. Consequently, the non-dual in our lives is consequentlysubdued, even neglected. According to Langer, non-discursive semantics as a way

of conveying complex understandings is found in art, myth, ritual, music and, Iwould add, movement in general.

Kime as movement is a means of both collecting data and of doing, perhaps acondition for intentionality as Kapferer uses this notion in anthropology (2000:28, note 1; see also Kapferer, 1997):

I use the concept of intentionality minimally as referring merely to the directedness of humanbeings into the world of their existence. Such a directedness is a faculty of human existence.Human beings are already immersed in the world and come to a self-consciousness within it.

Consciousness is emergent from this directedness and not vice versa. It is as a consequence ofthis directedness that human beings become reflectively conscious of the meaning and motiva-tions of their activities.

The notion that [c]onsciousness is emergent from this directedness and not viceversa recalls Langer, again as glossed by Durig who states, Language is not a




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The Body in Movement Mind the Gap

The body, claims Merleau-Ponty ([1945]2002, 1968), is already in-the-worldfrom birth. It is the tool of perception, the pre-condition in the pre-verbal, pre-objective infantile state. The body enables discernment of objects in its environ-ment, through the world-building process of objectification (see also Csordas,1994a, 1994b, 1994c). At the outset, the horizon-of-being everything a personknows and can imagine is restricted to the tool of data collection she was bornwith, namely, the body. The world is void, so to speak, it makes no sense, it isungraspable but, immediately, a gap is created between the body-self and theworld of objects as it begins to make sense of the world, name the objects it

discerns, imagine how they are organized and so on. This growing gap betweenthe body as a tool of perception and the world of objects, this enlarging of thehorizon-of-being, is the process of objectification, including the objectivizationof the body itself, making it an object among objects. The horizon-of-being, thelimit of a persons objectified world of reality and potentiality or imagination,comes to include increasingly more objects, words and representations. Thus thebody itself has a double identity: as the first tool of perception, it is on theextremity of a persons objectified world, the horizon-of-being; but the body is

simultaneously in the world as a discernable object within the horizon-of-being,a representation, since the body can be looked at and spoken of from an outsideobjective point of view.

Kime, like the body itself, is both on and within the horizon-of-being. Bothkime and the body are tools of apprehension as well as of action and, at the sametime, named, designated, apprehended objects (Csordas, 1993, 1994b; Merleau-Ponty, [1945]2002). Merleau-Ponty understands this gap of objectivization toinclude all the world in its entirety. Csordas (2004) adds that it is the source of

our sense of alterity and of religion in general. Accordingly, the somatic pre-verbal abilities of perceiving the world become redundant and primitivecompared to words, representations and objects. In a world where alterity is sointimately within ourselves, as Csordas indicates, duality is the only possible wayof grasping the world.

But this is, in fact, not the case. Unlike the process of objectification describedby Merleau-Ponty and Csordas, in kime no gap opens between the body which comprehends the characteristic ofkime and the understandings it actu-

alizes. There is not even a gap between kime itself and the word kime, thesomatic code used to indicate the phenomenon. The gap by which words andother representations are created is not the only option for understanding therelation between soma and words. The non-verbal and the non-representational




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are not only pre-verbal and pre-objective, they continue their rich trajectorythroughout life as interactive, social and cultural options alongside representa-tions. And they too can lead to spirituality, albeit one of a different kind (see, for

example, Handelman and Shulman, 1997).Karateka practicing kime are using their body movement to grasp the

environment and to form the world-of-meaning ofkarate. Their bodies are notmerely tools to glean information; they are not receptacles that permit the storageof some other content made up of ideas and words. Kime is a body-object: notidea and not flesh, yet both idea and flesh. It pulls the karateka towards theextremity of her somatic potentiality and pushes that extremity even further tosomatic capacities she could not imagine existed. The somatic horizon-of-being

is no longer fixed in the flesh we happen to have and to be; the body and itspotentialities both of perception and of action enlarge and with them theworld itself. Perhaps this is the more profound meaning of the word kime asrepresented by the kanji meaning extremity.

Conclusion

The Sino-Japanese way of viewing the body coincides to some extent with the

phenomenological view: the body as it is experienced. The Japanese philosopherYuasa (1993) elaborates on this comparison in detail, and Ozawa-de Silva (2002)suggests that a new anthropological view of the body can stem from Yuasasphilosophical perspective. The present article is an attempt in that direction.

Ultimately, kime is a tactile-kinesthetic entity born in and of practice, cominginto being in a social setting through the specific organization of the body-self,fusing body and self into one stance and movement.Kime is entirely embodied,yet can only be used and recognized inter-subjectively. While tactically

performed in combat, kime also embodies a new spiritual potentiality thatdepends on the eradication of emotion and volition, perhaps annihilating theself itself. If volition is menaced by anothers act of violence, the somatic answeris to renounce volition altogether. Here the word kime in fact functions as anon-verbal utterance.25

Movement is the prime way of making sense of the world, claims Sheets-Johnstone, following Husserl. Movement is the first and basic means of perceiv-ing the world, encompassing verbal potentiality as well, since In discoveringourselves in movement and in turn expanding our kinetic repertoire of I cans,we embark on a lifelong journey of sense-making (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 136).Furthermore, she claims that (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 253):




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We are a moving-in-the-world being . . . Whatever the initial way of motivations and incipientintentionalities might be, they develop by way of a tactile-kinesthetic body. That body is itselfthe object of motivations and intentionalities in the form of head turning, stretching and soon. In such ways the tactile-kinesthetic body is itself constituted: we put ourselves together;

we learn our bodies. We do so through movement.

The practical philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari also points at the social,non-dualistic use of the body; they pose the question How do you makeyourself a body without organs? (2005: 149).26 What they mean can be under-stood as the holistic body, that which is left when you take everything away.What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifica-tions as a whole (p. 131). Gil describes the coming into being of the body

without organs through the choreography and dance of Merce Cunningham, adance of pure movement with no other referend but itself. Gil proposes a newosmosis whereby thought and body become one, and whereby a new fluidity, anew kind of movement, may circulate on this plane of immanence that is dance.This new osmosis comes about through body consciousness, or through a bodyof thought (2003: 122, emphasis in original).

When thought and body are one, words become somatic codes, echoing thebody in movement, deferential to its dynamics. So if movement is the source of

I cans and I dos, and if we can and do make a body without organs, thensomatic codes are central to the way we discover the world and act in it. Theylink our bodies together and permit the social passage of body, form, culture, andmeaning; they thereby also fluidly link the qualities of innerness and outernessof our somatic existence.

Potentialities such as kime and many daily somatic attitudes have a completelife informing us of our social and physical environment, inducing action andintentionality. Furthermore, as unlikely as it may seem, dual and non-dual points

of view are not mutually exclusive; we can (and do) hold both views at one andthe same time. Both duality and non-duality it would seem are culturallyconstructed. The body, with its potentialities of perception and of action, isformed throughout life, enabling a non-objectified process of discovering theworld through the body and of learning to be that body: a lifelong apprentice-ship to become our own body set in movement.

Notes

1. Although Don Handelmans work is not widely cited in this article, his thinking stands at theoutset see for example Handelman, 1998. I would like to thank my teachers Erik Cohen, MichikoOta and Asaf Hazani for their most valuable help, and the readers ofBody & Society for their remarksand encouragement. I would also like to dedicate this article to my karate teacher Meir Iahel.




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2. Kime even in Japanese, the origin of the word is not clear. One explanation is that theword comes from the verb kimeru to decide ( Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000); the other expla-nation was sent to me by the main dojo (school) of Shotokan-karate-do in Santa Barabara in the formof a kanji (Chinese ideogram used in Japanese) denoting extremity or polarity see below. The

quoted text is from field notes describing a training session held in Jerusalem in November 2003(translated from Hebrew).

3. Karateka both plural and singular.4. Ots describes the subversive potential of Chinese cathartic healing. In Chinese understanding,

emotion is understood as residing in the body and not in the mind, so students of oriental practicesmay change their view of the location of emotions.

5. Shotokan means the house of Shoto, which is the pen name used by Funakoshi when hecomposed Chinese poems, and also the name of the first karate training site (dojo) in Tokyo. At leasttwo schools are called by that name; my ethnography concerns the teaching of Oshimas school ofkarate. Oshima himself continued the trend of introducing into karate elements from other samurai

martial arts, especially kendo (sword play). A student ofkendo in his youth, he switched to karate andstudied with Funakoshi after the Second World War, when kendo was prohibited under McArthursadministration (private communication).

6. Some karate schools include bunkai (verbal explanations of the tactical reasons for eachmovement) in their training. Those are mainly used in order to detail the meaning ofkata movements,exercises that are preformed against imaginary opponents and therefore need explanation. However,those do not explain the more profound meaning of the somatic experience or the spiritual potential-ities embedded in the martial art and are, in that sense, not exegesis.

7. This could be said to be a spiritual aim, especially since karate, like other Japanese martial arts,is a Zen practice.

8. This has been addressed by the contributors to Embodiment and Experience (Csordas, 1994b),as well as by others.

9. Langer calls them non-discursive semantics, but that notion might be confusing.10. Conducted as part of my doctoral research (in anthropology) on Japanese martial arts in Israel

(Bar-On Cohen, 2005).11. I hold a black belt, second dan (out of five), in Shotokan.12. One, two, three.13. Hara as in harakiri the location used for disembowelment in the ritual Samurai suicide,

situated a few centimeters below the navel, also called tanden.14. It is a corner because it is at the angle created between the upper and the lower stretched body,

thus forming a new limb comparable to the hands and feet.15. Note that the perception and the strengthening ofkime is one and the same thing. Being able

to feel it cannot be separated from its constitution.16. Although in actual training the word see is used in a general sense, I use the word perceived,

because not only do the eyes perceive these slight signs, but movement itself is used for data collec-tion (see also Zarrilli, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). While the limbs change position in space, that space islearned and this potentiality is developed over years of training. In this sense, movement is also asensory organ. Karateka can train to perceive an attack coming from behind, and at times also trainblindfolded.

17. According to Bateson (1972), boasting can be a source of symmetrical schism, of schismogen-

esis. Karate and other fighting arts encompass a non-belligerent end; they are constructed in such away as to eradicate violence, refraining from boasting is part of that effort. However, the topic of themartial arts and non-violence is beyond the scope of this article.

18. There are two sorts of meditation in Zen: seated meditation, and meditation in constantwalking. The Zen aspect of martial arts is a development of meditation in constant walking (King,1993).




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19. An important part of karate training the kata, a set series of combat movements isperformed against imaginary opponents. Even in kata training, kime is exteriorized against a movingopponent, albeit an imaginary one.

20. The passage of the kime from concealment to revelation is, in Handelmans terms, braided

(Handelman, 2001, 2005a).21. Chinese medicine is based on this way of looking at the body (see, for example, Yuasa, 1987,

1993; Ots, 1994).22. Ma is the empty space between two opponents, the exact amount of space needed for them to

attack each other without taking a preliminary step. In general in Japanese culture, the ma is the emptyspace that gives significance to objects, the white of the paper in a drawing for example. Ohnuki-Tierney (1994) calls the ma a zero signifier. It is not a somatic code but a semiotic notion putting thingsin relation.

23. Yuasu calls this capacity coenesthesis.24. The sites of concentration are used for healing in acupuncture and in shiatsu.

25. Like the words of Japanese master Awa, who taught archery to German scholar Harrigel(perhaps the first Westerner to ever learn a Japanese martial art, at the beginning of the 20th century),the masters words, through their practice together, which serves as a nonverbal channel of communi-cation (Shun, 2006: 210).

26. Deleuze and Guattari take this discussion beyond the purview of this article. See also Feather-stone, 2006.

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Einat Bar-On Cohen is an anthropologist. Her PhD research dealt with Japanese martial arts as a caseof traveling culture; she also holds a second Dan black belt in Shotokan Karate-do. Currently she isconducting research on Israeli close-combat as a site where the social somatic understanding ofviolence is formed.


bar-on cohen (2006), kime and the moving body - somatic codes in japanese martial arts

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