New Rank

The Karate Club just had its most recent round of belt examinations.

Everybody passed. The highest student in the class just earned his Purple Belt.

Each Belt has a rank number that works as a countdown to Black Belt. Yellow Belt is 8th Kyu. Orange Belt is 7th. That sort of thing.

A Purple Belt is 4th Kyu. Three more ranks to go, but only one more colour.

The highest three Kyu ranks all wear a Brown Belt. There is no way to determine which of the ranks a person is by looking at the belt. Normally, the same belt is worn though each of these ranks.

It feels very good to enter the Brown Belt ranks.

When associations put on advanced training, it is often restricted to Black and Brown Belts. The Browns get included. Often they look pretty lost at what we are doing, but they get to attend and train.

This is both intimidating and very exciting for the Brown student.

To make the step into Brown challenging, the Kata learned is not from the family of Katas used for all the belts below that.

The one they learn is called Tekki Shodan. It is not fancy, but is very hard to get right. It is designed to all but force the student to make errors. If they do make the errors, they fail the test. It is a very unnatural beast until, at some point, it finally clicks. This is usually a year or two after one has to use it to test. An interesting problem.

I liked being a Brown Belt.

It's almost as cool as Black.

And our new Purple is one step away.