A grade should recognize development, not create the appearance of it.

When I took my shodan, a long time ago now, I had no idea it was going to happen.

I turned up for class as normal, early as always. I was usually the first to arrive because I helped teach the children’s class before the adults trained.

My instructor simply told me, “You’re taking shodan tonight”.

That was it.

There had been no announcement, no buildup and no grading fee. I hadn’t spent the previous few weeks preparing specifically for a test because I didn’t know there was going to be one.

Apparently everyone else did.

The juniors stayed behind with their parents, the adult class arrived, and people lined the walls of the dojo waiting for their turn to be called upon. I was the only person grading that evening, and it was tough. Very tough.

Looking back, I don’t think the value of that grading came from the bruises or the exhaustion. Those things were simply part of how we trained at the time. What mattered was that I was expected to demonstrate what I could actually do.

The belt came afterwards.

That distinction is important to me.

A grade should recognize something that is already there. It should represent ability, knowledge, understanding, experience or, at the senior levels, perhaps something broader. Putting a different belt around someone’s waist cannot create those things.

Yet sometimes rank appears to work the other way around.

The grade becomes the objective. Enough time has passed, a fee is paid, you turn up, and another stripe appears on the belt. The assumption seems to be that progression through the ranks is inevitable.

But should it be?

If someone moves from shodan to nidan, something should have developed. The same should be true from nidan to sandan, sandan to yondan, and onward. I don’t mean that every dan grade requires someone to become dramatically faster, stronger or more athletic. That would make little sense, particularly as practitioners grow older.

But something should have changed.

Otherwise, what exactly is the new grade recognizing?

Time in grade certainly matters. You cannot manufacture experience quickly, and there are things that only years of training, teaching, making mistakes and reconsidering what you thought you understood can provide.

But time passing is not necessarily the same thing as development.

Someone can train for ten years and continue repeating essentially the same year ten times.

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider the higher dan grades, because what a grade represents can change as someone progresses.

In many traditional karate organizations, technical ability and understanding remain significant considerations through the senior dan grades. At 9th and 10th dan, however, promotion is often less about demonstrating another measurable increase in physical ability and more about longevity, contribution, leadership, teaching and a lifetime of service to the art.

That makes sense to me.

A 75-year-old 9th dan should not have to prove that he can move faster or perform physically as he did twenty years earlier. His grade may represent something entirely different by then.

But that is very different from rapidly progressing through the earlier dan grades without the depth of training and experience those grades are supposed to represent.

And this is where rank can become problematic.

There is no universal standard for dan grades. A godan in one organization may represent something quite different from a godan somewhere else. The belt looks the same, the embroidered bars may look the same, but the standards behind them can be completely different.

That means the belt itself tells us surprisingly little.

I have met relatively junior grades whose ability and understanding were excellent, and I have encountered people with dan grades whose movement and knowledge left me wondering what those grades actually represented.

Perhaps that is inevitable when there is no single authority governing karate.

But I still think an organization has a responsibility to ensure that the grades it awards mean something within its own system.

Otherwise, rank gradually becomes decoration.

Once promotion becomes something that is simply expected, rather than something that reflects development, the grade begins to lose its meaning.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to progress. Most of us have probably looked forward to the next grade at some point.

But the belt should follow the development, not replace it.

Perhaps that is what I remember most clearly about my own shodan grading. I didn’t arrive expecting a black belt. I arrived expecting to train.

The grade was simply the recognition that my instructor believed I was ready to demonstrate what that belt represented.

I still think that is how it should work.

The grade should confirm the practitioner. The grade should never be used to create the illusion of one.