The History and the Legend
Belts and sashes weren’t originally a part of Martial Arts. Like many martial art subjects, there are numerous myths and legends regarding their origin.
And yes, belts are more than just something to keep your pants up and covering your tighty-not-so-whities during kata or taolu training.
One of the more commonly touted stories is that a master would give you a white belt and then the both of you could gauge your training progress by the color of it. In other words, that one belt would absorb colors (and germs—ew!) from all of your training days.
Did you get cut or scraped up? Blood stain!
Did you fall and roll around on the ground? Dirt and grass!
Sweaty…er, everything? Sweat stain!
After years of training, the result would be a very dirty belt colored almost black. Even that wasn’t the end of the cycle though, as that would eventually get sun-bleached and worn down into a gray belt reminiscent of the white belt they began with.
Or so the legend goes.
From this story came the idea that washing your belt was akin to washing away your experience and hard work. Many still consider the thought to be blasphemy.
While it is a romantic idea that can inspire a new student to work hard, it is not the true origin of wearing a colored cloth around your waist. Let’s look at where this strange custom really came from.
The Genesis of Grading
The history of issuing martial art rank can be traced all the way back to the olden days. Before Daniel LaRusso went up against Cobra Kai for the first time. Back before the days of disco, mullets, and Billy Jack. I’m talking about way, way back.
Back in the 8th century, menkyo (license) began to be passed down in various Japanese arts, including Chado (tea ceremony), Shodo (calligraphy), Ikebana (flower arrangement), Sumi-e (ink wash painting), and martial arts (y’know, the thing you are currently studying).
Menkyo, while much rarer than the belts and sashes of modern times, could be issued for levels of proficiency in various subjects and would often be recognized on makimono (rolled scrolls).
The highest level menkyo one could receive would be menkyo kaiden. This recognized full transmission of the entire art unto another, effectively meaning they were to be the next major authority on the subject. Their names, their reputations, were now considered attached via scroll.
A major accomplishment, to be sure. The kind that most people nowadays would want to tweet about or put on Instagram. #SenseiLikesMeBetterThanYou
The reality is, this idea of license handling shouldn’t sound too archaic or foreign. A similar thing can be found in modern times and pop culture to a certain degree. In modern times, we have licensing agreements and legal documents between companies. You could argue that somebody who starts an LLC under an established business is doing something similar.
However, while menkyo were important to the history of the martial arts and its system of passing rank, the evolution doesn’t end there.
The Chinese Connection
Assigning rank and order to a group of people is nothing new.
Heck, haven’t you heard of high school?
Go is an ancient oriental board game with a heavy focus on strategy. It has been popular for many years, even back in B.C. Years.
Go was popular enough that over time, a ranking system named Jiu Pin Zhi was developed to catalog players by their proficiency. The lower the Pin, or level, the higher their skill level. Even this is thought to have a basis garnered from an unlikely area: government.
Around the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 220), a court official in imperial China named Chen Qun came up with the idea of the Nine Rank System, a system of organizing the state bureaucracy by importance. The Nine Ranks were comprised of Upper, Middle, and Lower classes, each containing three ranks. Total it up and you get Nine Ranks. Each rank could be further classified into a standard and secondary rank, doubling the count however.
Both of these systems, The Jiu Pin Zhi and the Nine Rank System, are thought to have been some of the first early steps towards the ranking system familiar to martial artists.
The “Haves” and the “Have-nots”
During the late 1600s, one of the most prominent players of Go named Hon’inbō Dōsaku devised a more popular ranking system to differentiate the beginner and advanced players.
In his ranking system, students were awarded various Kyū and Dan ranks, Kyū being the beginner ranks and Dan being the advanced ranks. As your skills improved, you attained different Kyū ranks until eventually you earned your first Dan rank, Shodan. From that point, you advanced via Dan ranking, reaching a higher number Dan the more experienced you were.
This ranking system ended up being adopted by the founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano.
Menkyo were awarded few and far between in the martial arts. One of the benefits of using this Dan system was that it gave Jigoro Kano the opportunity to grade and award students a bit more regularly.
In 1883, about a year after the formation of his art, he promoted two of his senior students, Shiro Saigo and Tomita Tsunejiro, to Shodan.
Belts still hadn’t come into play yet though.
Jigoro Kano now had senior students who were Yudansha (those with Dan grading) and students still in the beginner Kyu stages, Mudansha (those without Dan grading).
Ever the educator, Jigoro Kano found a new idea for showing rank by looking towards the school systems. He found that beginner and advanced practitioners in different sports such as swimming were visually marked. In the case of swimming, it was a black ribbon kept around the waist of those with more experience.
By 1886, Jigoro Kano adopted the practice of marking his Yudansha with a black belt. This belt wasn’t quite the belt we use in modern time however. The design was in line with the Kaku Obi, the wide belt used to keep a kimono closed.
It wasn’t until 1907 that Kano Jigoro introduced the more narrow cotton belt commonly worn nowadays.
However, these were still just white belts and black belts. We can attribute a martial artist named Mikinosuke Kawaishi for formulating the array of colored belts grading progress.
The Rise and Fall of the Rainbow!
Mikinosuke Kawaishi was a man with many new ideas.
When he moved to Paris in the 20th century and began spreading the art his teacher, the Kano Jigoro of past paragraphs’ fame, taught him, he got the chance to introduce new pedagogical ideas to the martial arts community.
One of the major differences he found in teaching overseas was in what motivated his students. Most Judo students in the East were content with simply focusing on the journey of self improvement. The students in the West, however, benefited greatly from a constant reminder of progress and rank.
To remedy this, he introduced colored belts to his students to give a sense of accomplishment and motivation.
By the 1950s, the idea of colored belts had spread across to the United States and other arts as well.
Nowadays, the idea of a colored cloth being worn seems impossible to detach from the martial arts, at least in commonplace thought. You would be hard-pressed to find a school that doesn’t have an array of colors in use for training.
Taekwondo and Karate practitioners wear belts.
Some Muay Thai boxers wear colored pra jiad (a type of armband).
Savateurs can be graded with colored gloves.
Many Kung Fu schools nowadays award sashes.
It’s not an absolute process though. The order of colors differs from style to style, school to school. A blue belt in Karate doesn’t automatically equate to the same proficiency level as a blue belt in Taekwondo. Heck, it might not even equate to the blue belt in another Karate school or style.
The expectations and exact requirements (curriculum memorized, minimum time spent in grade, etc.) are entirely dependent on where you go.
The only thing generally agreed upon is the beginning and end; white being the first color and black being the last. Again, even that can still change depending on the style and school however.
Though most Japanese and Korean systems will have everybody keep the knot of the belt in the center of the front, there are schools, systems, and teachers who elect to have different rules.
Especially in Chinese systems using sashes, they may keep their knot tied in the center of the back, on the left side, or on the right side. This could depend on whether you are the teacher or a student (junior or senior); male or female; or traditionally, a warrior or scholar.
While having such a grading system has some definite pros, there are also some not-to-be-forgotten cons (unfortunately, I mean both interpretations of “cons”: disadvantages and also con-men).
Let’s look at a couple of side effects, good and bad, that happens with having a ranking system visibly on display:
- The teacher can quickly recognize where a student is at in their training, more or less, by a glance of their belt
- Other students can do the same and easily seek advanced belts for help
- It gives a sense of accomplishment rather regularly
- It gives a student much more accessible short-term goals and long-term goals
- Some schools will tack on testing fees and belt fees just so they can squeeze more money out of their custo—er, student
- It can be easy to become too focused on only reaching the “end goal” belt that you miss out on enjoyment of your art.
- Some schools will use the belts as a selling point and rush students through the curriculum, neglecting actual skill development (unfortunately, this has become such a popular phenomenon in the martial arts community that these types of schools have garnered the nickname, McDojo, likening their ‘quick vs quality’ mentality to the popular fast food franchise, McDonald’s).
There are many more benefits and controversies surrounding the use of belt rank, too many to fully list here. Like many things in martial arts and in life, introspection and doing your own research is best.
One of our Martial Journal contributors, Louie Martin, shared his thoughts about the benefits of focusing on the belt here! I would recommend checking out his thoughts as well.
What about MY Sash?!
That’s a good bit of insight into the history and reasoning for the regularly seen ranking system, but what about your belt?
I’ve got five words with a comma in the middle for you: Respect rank, don’t worship it.
Your belt will never carry more importance than you. It is just an object and, personally, I find actions to be more valuable than objects.
You can have numerous gray fibers sticking out of your black-ish belt, but if you can’t represent that rank in any way more significant than matching gray hairs sticking out of the top of your head, you are missing the whole reason for the rank
The rank doesn’t matter. It is just a piece of fabric. You can give a Gucci wallet to a homeless man but that doesn’t mean he is a millionaire. That wallet is only a display of his wealth if he can fill it with his own dollars.
Then again, if he is truly rich enough to fill that fancy wallet, does he still need something so extravagant to show his wealth for any reason aside from ego?
Meditate on the money, my friend.
Do you feel belts and ranks are a good part of martial arts training or that they should be disregarded? Drop a comment below with your thoughts! Whether for or against the idea of rank, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say!
You can read another Martial Journal article delving into the idea of ranks and belts here!
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Great article, thanks for writing!
I discovered research that shows while Prof Kawaishi may have brought colored belts to his students in France in 1935, he did not invent them. They were already in use for at least two years when he first visited the Budokwai in London:
“Kawaishi thought that a more structured system of colored belts would provide the student with visible rewards to show progress, increasing motivation and retention.[3] However, written accounts from the archives of London’s Budokwai judo club, founded in 1918, record the use of colored judo belts at the 1926 9th annual Budokwai Display, and a list of ranked colored judokas appears in the Budokwai Committee Minutes of June 1927. Kawaishi visited London and the Budokwai in 1928, and was probably inspired to bring the colored belt system to France.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_jiu-jitsu_ranking_system#History
I wrote that section of the Wikipedia page, and anyone who is suspicious of Wikipedia (like me) is free to visit the page and click on the sources I included.
I’ve been following this path for 53 years. First, for a couple of years, it was Go Ju, and then Shorin where I had been invited to a private school. In the late 1960s there were very few karate schools in Seattle. My memory is that there were three commercial dojos, and probably not many more private ones.
Belts started white, then green, then brown and then black. Karate gi were always white. The private dojo I had been invited to join had a dressing room where belts hung on a wooden peg. Any student to take any color belt he wished off of the peg and put it on. He just had to back it up when he came unto the floor. As senior student I was expected to protect weaker or older junior students from misbehavior of others. In the years I was there I remember only two situations that required extra attention. Both resolved quickly.
Sounds like a fascinating experience that I’m sure led to a quite unique training environment.
I just blogged Martial Arts Ranks: Clarifying Origins, Colors, and the Father of Japanese Swimming, that shows:
1. Prof Mikinosuke Kawaishi did not invent colored judo belts; he only brought the idea with him to France in 1935.
2. Prof Jigoro Kano was not inspired by “swimming ribbons” or “swimming grades” when he invented Kodokan Judo ranks. In fact, the opposite is true — Kano brought ranks to swimming.
https://martialhistoryteam.blogspot.com/2020/05/martial-arts-ranks-clarifying-origins.html
I’d also like to amend my previous comment to note that I should have said
“Kawaishi may have arrived in the UK by 1928, and appears to have first visited London and the Budokwai in 1931. From there he was probably inspired to bring the colored belt system to France.”
Very interesting! I sincerely appreciate your respectful and researched feedback and am not above admitting a slip up on my part. I just finished reading through the link you provided and the article you wrote (as well as the article by Mike Callan you pulled for reference in the Wikipedia link). This is the first I have heard of the facts you presented and I am very interested in delving deeper down this new “rabbit hole”. Again, thank you.
Very interesting, and I see the reasons. But I still think it’s about other than training and ability. I saw an ad of a 6 year old being the youngest black belt. Belt rankings have lost its place in the meaning and respect.