Karate Belts: A Large Element Of The History Of Martial Arts

By Author: Andrew Bui
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The unique system of assigning certain shades of karate belts, or obis, to practitioners of the sport is one of the most interesting and recognized part of the sport today. Although the belt is only a small piece of fabric that is used to hold the jacket closed, it is a highly revered part of the sport, as it is the distinguishing factor that separates new practitioners from old.

Every color of the obi demonstrates hours of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, it is not an easy feat to move up the ranks in martial arts and doing so is something of great honor and pride, a triumph that demands respect. There are multiple feats that need to be accomplished at each level to move up to a new belt, though each dojo will have variances in what is required, there are some very strict rules that are to be honored by master instructors when they are guiding their students to higher rankings.

The obis entire purpose relates to rank and honor, everyone who sees the martial artist in their costume will know what rank they are at and if they are well versed in the sport, will know a little bit about what that person had ...
... to achieve to get there. In the beginning the belt did serve a functional purpose, but many years ago, a master known as Jigoro Kano determined that there should be a clear way of marking practitioners by their rank and skill set and so he developed the colored obi practice at his dojo and it eventually spread to encompass the sport as a whole.

There is actually no hard and fast rule as to what colors will be used for what level of skill, because instead of honoring a universal system, the master of each dojo is responsible for deciding which colors he will used for his students as well as what they must do to earn them. The common trend in this system is that the belts will go from the lightest colors to the darkest colors as the student ranks up, like from white to yellow and eventually to black, with various colored or numbers of stripes in between belt colors.

There are many myths out there that claim in years past, practitioners would only be provided one belt and as training went on the karate belts of these artists would get dirtier and dirtier, therefore a black belt was one that had been trained in for years. Though there is likely some truth to the dirt-stained belt story, overall they are simply strips of colored cloth that show off an ever-increasing skill set.
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