Violent Repose

(Time Magazine, March 1961)

 

Rarely had Hollywood, which knows something about such things, witnessed such a spectacle of eye gouging, groin kicking and neck chopping. To a lavishly mirrored studio on Los Angeles' South La Cienega Boulevard last week came a pack of TV and film stars to watch an exhibition of the latest fad in craze-crazy filmland: karate. A more violent cousin of jujitsu and judo, Japanese-imported karate (pronounced kah-rah-tay) aims at delivering a fatal or merely maiming blow with hand, finger, elbow or foot, adopts the defensive philosophy that an attacker deserves something more memorable than a flip over the shoulder. Karate is now taught in more than 50 schools across the U.S., has an estimated 50,000 practitioners. But nowhere has it caught on more solidly than in Hollywood, where disciples seek tranquility in its rigid discipline and authority.

Better Board than Head. Karate has won the allegiance of such as Actors Rory Calhoun, Macdonald Carey, Nick (The Rebel) Adams and TV Detectives Frank Lovejoy, Darren McGavin, and Rick (Dangerous Robin) Jason. Elvis Presley, who learned the sport in Germany as a G.I., now spars with two sidekicks during moviemaking lulls, and even Film Composer Bronislaw Kaper has taken to the loose white gi suit worn for karate lessons. Says Hollywood Columnist Joe Hyams: "We all work in an environment that's fraught with hostility. It's great to bust a board instead of a head."

Board busting with the naked hand is a spectacular but comparatively recent demonstration of karate (literally, empty hands). Legend holds that the sport was started in the 6th century by an Indian Buddhist monk named Daruma Taishi, who taught it to Chinese monks. It was refined on Okinawa after 1600, introduced in the 1920s to Japan, where it quickly shared popularity with the gentle art of jujitsu and its systematized variation, judo. But where their aim is to use an opponent's own weight to throw him to the floor without necessarily injuring him, karate aims at increasing its user's own strength to kill or injure an adversary by striking him at any of 26 vital points—chiefly with the toughened edge of the hand or the clenched fist. Although used by Japanese troops during World War II, karate is considered too ferocious for the U.S. armed forces. Nor do municipal police forces take regular karate training. "In no court," said one police official, "would karate be called 'reasonable force' in subduing a prisoner."

Karate King. The high priest of Hollywood's fast-growing karate sect, and host at last week's exhibition, is a black-maned, 6-ft., 210-lb. devout Mormon named Ed Parker, who, he says, learned the deadly, lightning-fast ballet in his native Honolulu in order to avoid getting into fights with friends who taunted him because he did not drink or smoke. After serving a Coast Guard hitch during the Korean War and graduating from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he moved to Pasadena, opened his first karate studio four years ago, started a second in January. He frowns upon any ostentatious use of karate, prefers to ram his fist through ten corrugated roof tiles in the privacy of his studio.