A prejudice common in the martial arts world is to automatically assume that training in the country of origin of a given martial art is superior to training anywhere else. I call it the “Training Overseas Fallacy.” I’ve practiced one martial art or another for forty-eight years, and taught for forty-four.
Many is the time that I have been asked a question, often murmured in a deeply earnest tone that goes something like: “So, did you study in China?” or: “How long did you train in Asia?”
When I explain that, not only have I never trained outside the United States, I’ve never BEEN outside the United States, the disappointment on the questioner’s face is palpable, immediately and deeply apparent; and I know that their opinion of me as a martial artist and teacher has diminished.
I must admit that in my early days as an instructor this question really bothered me. Was I less of an instructor for having been trained domestically rather than overseas? Deep inside my brain, I struggled between buying into this idea and thus feeling guilty for my perceived lesser qualifications, or angrily rejecting it.
In Good Company
Over time I grew more confident in my teaching ability and felt less threatened by such questions. In any case, it turns out that I’m actually in pretty good company! You see, I once saw and heard another example of a question like this at a seminar taught by my teacher, Dan Inosanto; a name with which many of you should be familiar.
For those who aren’t let me first steer you to the four episode mini-series, numbers 78 through 81, of my podcast, “The Martial Brain” entitled “One or Two Degrees of Dan Inosanto.” In these four episodes, I point out that Dan Inosanto has had a pivotal effect on the martial arts world in a number of ways. One way, in particular, is that he extensively researched, studied, and promoted the Filipino Martial Arts. He has more than gone the extra mile to put in the requisite years, blood, and sweat with more than two dozen completely different teachers, and was eventually certified by each one to teach the system. Now some of these systems were small, with limited curricula, but on the other hand, some had curricula that are quite extensive, like Pekiti Tirsia Kali, Lameco Eskrima, and the Lacoste System.
The fact that Mr. Inosanto had been Bruce Lee’s top student, as well as assistant instructor, training partner, and research assistant, gave him a great deal of credibility and prestige in the martial arts community. He used that status to give wide exposure to a large number of previously obscure martial arts styles, not the least of which were the Filipino arts. As a matter of fact, you would be hard pressed to find a more important figure in the martial arts of the Philippines in the Twentieth or Twenty-First Centuries than Daniel Inosanto.
And now I’m going to blow your mind.
He’s never been to the Philippines! That’s right! So, as I referred to earlier; one day at a Dan Inosanto seminar a young Filipina attendee asked him a question. What the question was is unimportant, but it did assume that Mr. Inosanto had been to the Philippines. When he told her that he had never been there her shock was evident.
But was it necessary for him to have trained in the Philippines?
His father was born there; his mother was born in Hawaii of Filipino parents; but he was born in America, and grew up in Stockton, California as American as I did in Evansville, Indiana. After the US victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, and in the Philippine-American War in 1902 a steady stream of Filipino people began moving to the US, mostly seeking work. The Philippines were now a US Territory, so despite the fact that there were a number of racist laws in those days prohibiting immigration to the US from most Asian countries, Filipinos were now legal US residents and thus could move here without passports or visas. A great many of them settled in Stockton, California, which is sometimes referred to as the “Filipino Capital of the US.”
Among these were Dan Inosanto’s parents, as well as a number of practitioners of the Filipino Martial Arts. Mr. Inosanto’s father was a highly educated man who acted as the Secretary/Treasurer of the Filipino immigrant community in Stockton. This means that Dan’s father, Sebastian, had a lot of influence in the community. He was able to use that influence to help secure local instruction for Dan in the fighting arts of his ancestral culture from a wide variety of gifted instructors, once Dan was mature enough to see its value.
So Dan Inosanto, arguably one of the greatest repositories of knowledge about the Filipino martial arts in the history of the world, never trained in the Philippines!
Now that’s a very special case. Not everyone can be born into such circumstances; and of course, for each martial art, it was true that for a time the best training was only to be had in its home country. Why isn’t this still the case?
Follow the Money
One answer to that question is approached by heeding the words often used by criminal investigators; “follow the money.” In the case of every martial art that became commercially successful, a steady flow of talented instructors, realizing that they possessed a skill-set that could be parlayed into a fortune, left their home countries to take up residence in the richer lands of the west. As the old saying among many immigrants goes, “The streets of America are paved with gold!”
Over the years this process has repeated itself, manifesting through many different arts from many different countries, and as a result, quality martial arts training has become global.
It IS important to keep in mind that in each case this economic pull also created an additional phenomenon; the opportunistic purveyor of fraudulent martial arts instruction. The cliché in the early days was that many a man got on the plane in Tokyo, Seoul, or Rio De Janeiro as a green or blue belt, and got off the plane in New York, LA, or London as a fourth-degree black belt. This was especially prevalent in the early years of financial success for each art, when a small window of time opened up in which there was a high demand for instructors, but also as yet a low degree of knowledge and understanding sufficient to judge who was real and who was a fake.
The Globalization of the Martial Arts
But even with this malevolent undercurrent of fraud, the opportunities in the rich western countries to find high-quality instructors began early and grew quickly. In the year 2019, it’s the case that new centers of excellence for many martial arts now exist
One would be hard-pressed to find better instruction in a wide variety of martial arts anywhere else in the world than in Southern California. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that San Diego, California has the densest population of world-class teachers of Brazilian jujitsu in the world.
Another interesting concentration is in the tiny Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Starting a few decades ago, this small country, through the influence of the son of the Emir, used its considerable oil money to bring in top talent from Brazil to train future generations. BJJ is now taught in the schools of this country as a regular physical education class. I suspect if you did the math you would find this tiny country to have the most favorable ratio on the planet of quality instructors to students.
Such stories of martial migration abound in the history of our industry!
Of course, my point here is not to argue that very high-quality instruction is NOT available in the country of origin of any given martial art. Nothing could be further from the truth! Wonderful experiences, both martial and cultural, can still be had from training in the home countries of many martial arts.
But thanks to our modern globalized world excellent instruction in the martial arts can now be enjoyed in many more places!
What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments section below!
- Never Say Never - October 1, 2019
- Martial Cinema Tropes - June 3, 2019
- The “Training Overseas” Fallacy - March 22, 2019
If I get this straight, you are trying to counter the argument “training in the country of origin of a given martial art is superior to training anywhere else.” For evidence you cite Dan Inosanto, Southern California, Abu Dhabi, and “thanks to our modern globalized world excellent instruction in the martial arts can now be enjoyed in many more places.” But you’ve never trained or even visited other countries? How can you compare the training in the US against other places without visiting at least one? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I think your argument needs some work.
I thik it all depends on the style. If you want to train some obscure koryu you have to go to Japan. BJJ you can probably find decent teachers of varying degree anywhere in the western world. Traditional Chinese martial arts tends to be a middle ground. You don’t need to go to China or Taiwan to find good kungfu but there’s still some stuff that’s quite hard to find outside.
As for the argument itself and how to prove it, well it’s hardly falsifiable. The only way to actually prove it is by empirical testing. Given that you can’t physically compare every fighter trained in their art’s country of origin vs one who did not you’ll never find if it’s actually true. But you can get a good enough answer. Jeff here is someone who’s been training for a long while and he’s probably seen his fair share of martial artists trained one way or another. Between his judgement and that of Dan Inosanto I’d say it’s good enough. But that maybe just me and a bit of authority fallacy.
Hi Richard. Thanks for the comment! While I think that having trained overseas would certainly give me an extra source of research material for my argument, I don’t think its absence is a game-breaker for the discussion. It’s not necessary for me to directly experience this to in order to stake out a position. There are MANY sources of information regarding this topic. I have plenty of experience training and sparring with martial artists from a number of styles who all got their training in the homeland of the art. While many of them are outstanding martial artists, it’s my experience that as a group they usually show approximately the same ratio of good to mediocre to bad that I have seen from those who trained elsewhere. The larger the sample size and the more recent the sampling, I think, make this comparison even more vivid. I have discussed this argument with dozens of instructors from lots of arts and countries. Lot’s of them, even many who got their training in the home country agree with me.
I studied with Mr. Westfall for years and if he missed out on not going to a foreign country to study you’d be hard pressed to say what it was that he missed out on. At my current school, the head instructor and some of his best students recently went overseas to study. I think I’m safe in saying the trip was parts developing appreciation of the country that gave rise to the art, respect to the home country of the art’s founder and possibly as a requirement for a teacher or school to be certified. I think these are reasons most students in a foreign land can identify with. The other point I would like to make is that you should adapt the art to where you live regardless of how the art is taught if your goal is self-defense. I was told in a seminar that only assassins carry certain weapons like the knife I had. I respect the viewpoint, but I am free to carry what weapon I think I can best defend myself with, and express my art as I choose, and in a way that works best in “my” culture.