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Kime and the Moving Body: Somatic

Codes in Japanese Martial Arts

EINAT BAR-ON COHEN

But I should be playing this, I think anxiously. It is the minuet. I should have joined the others,
I should be playing again. And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the fiddle
is under my chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am.
An Equal Music (Seth, 1999: 110–11)

Introduction1
‘Keep your kime2 quiet inside your stomach’, instructs the karate teacher; ‘put
your hand on your abdomen, that’s where the kick begins’.
What is kime? How can it be hidden inside the body or felt by placing a hand
on the abdomen? And why does a kick start from that hiding place? These are
somatic conundrums that karate students must solve in order to master karate
practice. The meaning and the tactical use of kime, which is of crucial import-
ance to karateka (karate students3), are concealed inside their bodies, to be
revealed through movement. At first they do not know what kime is because
they cannot discern it in their own or in their opponent’s bodies. The meaning
of this un-translated Japanese word and its practical use unfold through years of
practice.

Body & Society © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 12(4): 73–93
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070885

www.sagepublications.com
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74 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

Students of all martial arts learn how to move quickly and take aim precisely.
They attain skills of perception that allow them to anticipate where their
opponent is moving and what she intends to do. As they repeatedly practice in
an effort to attain these skills, their bodies are also constructed anew. The way a
karateka thinks and understands what body means, or what it contains, changes
over time (Ots, 19944) – as does the body itself: muscles grow stronger and more
flexible, perception and reaction become quicker and more accurate. The practice
of martial arts entails more profound changes in the practitioner as well, because
new potentialities, such as kime, are discovered and honed into finely tuned
instruments.
Karate, the Japanese ‘empty-handed’ martial art from the southern islands of
Okinawa, was modernized and transformed into a neo-tradition by Master
Gishin Funakoshi (1868–1957). Traditionally a farmers’ way of opposing the
Samurai, karate included the use of agricultural tools as weapons (still taught by
some schools). Funakoshi was the first Okinawan to demonstrate karate in
Tokyo, changing the name and practice of the traditional martial art significantly.
Without shifting its pronunciation, Funakoshi replaced the kanji (ideograms)
used for the original word, ‘Chinese hand’, into ‘empty hand’, hinting at the Zen
ideal of emptiness. The suffix do – ‘the way’ – was added to further stress the
Japanese Zen spirituality, simultaneously equating it with the other Japanese
martial arts, which were the exclusive purview of the Samurai caste of warriors.
Changing the name rendered karate more Japanese, more spiritual, and more
noble. Funakoshi’s students developed in different directions and today many
karate schools exist. Some train mainly for competition, others emphasize
efficiency in battle, and yet others – such as Shotokan, headed by Tsutomu
Oshima5 – eschew the use of weapons and stress the spiritual-practical facet of
training (Bar-On Cohen, 2005; Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000; Hurst, 1998).
Karate is a culturally transmitted practice without any text, discourse, or
verbal exegesis between and among teachers and students.6 The meaning of the
teacher’s words, the ways in which an exercise is carried out, and ultimately
karate itself, emerge from within an individual’s body. But how can the body,
perceived and ‘operated’ as it is from within, be culturally transmitted? How can
internal somatic experiences originate from without? How can the words and
body of one person be embodied in another? And how can adults learn complex,
foreign (for Westerners, at least) and intricate ways of using, understanding and
constituting their bodies through non-verbal, non-symbolic and non-dualistic
means? More generally, how is the body objectified, and what are its relations
with words, specifically with those words I call ‘somatic codes’ – words hanging,
so to speak, on somatic experience?
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 75

Learning karate means discovering it inside one’s own moving body. Certain
modes of movement are conditions for achievement and for intentionality in the
martial art’s world-of-meaning. Having acquired those capacities of movement,
the karateka can design the karate training, and also his/her own body, to suit
the goals, in that way embodying karate. Only a karateka who is proficient in
the use of kime and other somatic abilities developed through training, can be
active and successful in the world of karate. Moreover, the significance of using
kime goes beyond its practical value in combat; the very essence of karate
training, of its interactive sociality, is to develop kime,7 as the revelation of poten-
tialities hidden within is the essence of karate.
The long process of discovering karate inside one’s body also involves words
– for instance, kime – which enable concise communication between students and
teachers. Those words are meaningless to a beginner, but they become gradually
loaded with significance, and their meaning shifts as the student’s understanding
of them is modified through somatic experience. I call such words, whose deci-
phering depends on somatic experience and whose meaning varies accordingly,
‘somatic codes’. Somatic codes verbalize interior body dynamics, and their
significance emerges together with these dynamics. The codes have the capacity
of succinctly focusing the participants’ awareness onto a certain aspect of
training, thus engendering an alternative possibility, supplemental to the exercise
itself, of rendering these somatic interiorities social. These words, located in the
interface between the innerness and the outerness of the body, are subordinated
to the somatic.
In contrast to other words, somatic codes do not designate an object that can
be grasped by the senses, put to use and fixed by logic; they designate ambigu-
ous things, notions that are neither object nor subject, and also both object and
subject. Somatic codes are neither ‘out there’ nor ‘in here’; they are both in the
world and part of me, of my body. In phenomenological terms those codes, like
the body itself, are both on and within the horizon-of-being. They are both tools
of apprehension and of action, as well as designated object (Csordas, 1994a;
Merleau-Ponty, [1945]2002). Somatic codes have the capacity to draw the
karateka’s awareness to things that emerge from inside the body. Kime, as an
example of a somatic code, is not located in any certain part of the body; it
emerges from a place unrecognized by the person who is that body (Plessner,
1970). Its emergence depends on interaction, and it is also a tool of interaction,
a social instrument that can be put to use inter-subjectively.
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Like Latour’s Nose

The body itself changes as new potentialities of kinesthetics and of perception
develop where none existed before. Such change can be seen much in the sense
used by Latour, who claims that ‘to have a body is to learn to be affected’ (2004:
205). The body is ‘an interface that becomes more and more describable as it
learns to be affected by more and more elements . . . By focusing on the body,
one is immediately – or rather, mediately – directed to what the body has become
aware of’ (2004: 206, emphasis in original). Latour, referring to the perfume
industry, asserts that the body is constructed through the constant reiteration of
articulations by comparison; it learns, through memorizing differences, to be a
‘nose’ – an expert in the perfume industry – by acquiring the capacity to identify
subtle differences in odor. The body is made up of what it learns to discern; and,
I would add, the body is also made up of what it learns to do. Learning to master
martial arts is more complex than training to become ‘a nose’, as it involves
immersing oneself in an entire world-of-meaning, a new cosmological order
composed of movement, senses, emotions and inter-subjectivity (Bar-On Cohen,
2005). Nonetheless, becoming a karateka, embodying the practice and ultimately
becoming karate itself, since karate has no abode other than the karateka’s body,
depends – like Latour’s ‘nose’ – on the endless reiteration of articulations by
comparison.

The Active Body

The issue of social learning for the use of our bodies is not new and touches on
notions such as how we are the apprentices of our bodies (Sheets-Johnstone,
1999), how it is shaped through practice, learning and culture, and so on. But the
subject has not been widely addressed in social writing. ‘The mindful body’
(Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987) was one attempt to resolve the Cartesian
dualism of mind and body (Strathern, 1996). Other scholars have followed their
lead, concentrating on the body as symbol and on demonstrating its subordina-
tion to society’s will. The body has been portrayed as a passive billboard on
which society, and particularly consumer society, pastes its dictates (Feather-
stone, 1991). Following Foucault, stress has been placed on the ways in which
our bodies are shaped by discourse, focusing on what is done to the body rather
than what the body does, and leaving the origin of agency (and, by the way, also
of social oppression) unaccounted for (Turner, 1994). Feminist interest in the
body has also centered on the disciplined, docile body as subjected to its
gendered form. And much of the writing on disease and medicine as social
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 77

phenomena concerns the consequences of modern medicine’s transformation of

the body (Frank, 1991), positing the body as passive and leaving the active role
to discourse, symbols and words.
Yet ‘it is insufficient to see the body as merely a surface to be inscribed, as a
carrier of social signs. The body is clearly a potential, in process and movement,
something which goes beyond itself’ (Featherstone, 2006: 213). Moreover,
viewing the body as exclusively subject to discourse does not explain away the
Cartesian split but leaves it nonetheless ethereal, a ‘vanishing body’ (Shilling,
1993: 79). ‘The body first presents itself as that which will remain solid, but then
it does melt into air’ (Frank, 1991: 133). Hence Lyon and Barbalet call for a new
model ‘whereby the body is understood not merely as subject to external agency,
but as simultaneously an agent in its own world construction’ (1994: 48).8
I too would like to take a step toward taking up this challenge and posit the
active body as it is shaped and while it shapes its social environment. Non-
discursive ways of making cultural sense of the world are neither mystical nor
infantile; like words, they too follow logical operations of comparison,
conclusion and so forth. The work of philosophers Suzanne Langer and Maxine
Sheets-Johnstone has drawn attention to these non-discursive modes of body
knowledge (Langer, 19799), which have trajectories of their own: parallel, inter-
secting, chiasmic, or simply constructed with language and other semiotic
representations. The somatic potentialities that unfold and turn into sources of
agency and communication are made of kinesthetics and are intimately connected
to the potentialities that movement engenders (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, 2000). In
Sheets-Johnstone’s words, ‘[t]o have meaning is not necessarily to refer and
neither is it necessarily to have a verbal label. Movement – animation – can be in
and of itself meaningful’ (1999: 491).
Like other Japanese martial arts, karate is a system of elaborate fighting skills;
at the same time, however, it is also a Zen practice actively forming non-dualism
(Hurst, 1998; King, 1993). The names of most Zen arts – calligraphy, paper
folding, seated meditation (za-zen), flower arranging, pottery and more – includ-
ing the Japanese martial arts, have the suffix do. Do – the way – the way to
discovering something profound and extraordinary about the world and about
oneself, the way to enlightenment. That ‘way’ is training: repeating movements
over and over again until perfect praxis can be approached, while progressing
smoothly, without high points, interruptions or intervals within the body. After
some time, martial arts students might notice that their body-self has changed;
they have discovered out-of-the-ordinary ways of moving and of using their
senses. They find themselves in a new place, whose existence they had not been
aware of, and still on the way. As the goal of Zen practice, the objective of
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training is to achieve non-dualism through practice (Parker, 1992). The Eastern

non-dualist worldview adds a new meaning to the martial arts students’ under-
standing of their bodies, of the profound and the out-of-the-ordinary, and of
how to seek spirituality inside the body. The Japanese philosopher Yuasa has
explained these processes (1987: 25):
To put it simply, true knowledge cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking,
but only through ‘bodily recognition or realization’ (tainin or taitoku), that is, through utiliza-
tion of one’s total body and mind . . . this is to ‘learn with the body’ not the brain.

The non-dualistic possibilities lie within the body.

This, however, has not explained how karate practice can achieve non-dualism;
it must still be described. Western karate trainers are immersed in dualistic world-
views, yet fully capable of learning and mastering, even understanding, the non-
dualistic practices. Most karateka embrace the new way of using their bodies
without renouncing their ordinary lives. Unlike a cult, for example, practising
martial arts does not remove the practitioner from his/her family, surroundings,
religion and so forth (see, for example, Beit-Hallahmi, 1991, 1992). The newly
acquired non-dualistic way of using the body is not exclusive; it exists alongside
the more dualistic fundamental understandings in the Western and modern world.
This concurrent approach to the body is clearly evident in the case of religious
Jews training in the Japanese martial arts. While they advance in their apprentice-
ship of the martial art, they retain the strict dualistic categorization and separation
between various body parts, between the sacred and the profane, the body and
the mind, as demanded by the Jewish religion (see Goldberg, 2003), maintaining
two seemingly opposing views of the body simultaneously.

Kime in Training
During training sessions, kime is not explained in words, it is only practiced into
existence, so perhaps the best way to look at it, short of training itself, would be
to go to the training hall and describe how kime is practiced there. I observed the
training session from which the quotation that opens this article, as well as the
following descriptions, are taken, in November 2003 in Jerusalem.10 However,
much of my understanding also stems from more than 20 years of practice in
training and learning from my Shotokan karate-do11 teachers. The following
descriptions include detailed positions and body movements that might appear
technical and perhaps tedious but, as the issue here is the moving body and not
its representations, only such detailed accounts may elucidate the meaning and
use of kime.
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This particular training session, held in a school gymnasium, is a special

occasion, a farewell for the head of Israel Shotokan, Eli Cohen, who is leaving
the country to become Israel’s ambassador to Japan. About 60 experienced
karateka are participating. Like all sessions, it opens with a short ceremony of
bows and then the participants spread across the hall and begin a familiar series
of warm-up exercises. Instructor Eli Cohen very softly counts out the rhythm in
Japanese: ‘ich, ni, san’.12 He stresses the importance of a stretching and breathing
exercise developing the pelvis, the tanden, which is ‘good for strengthening the
kime – the hara’13 he says using the two Japanese words. The participants sit on
the floor, legs stretched out straight, hands planted on the floor on either side of
the buttocks. They lift their bodies up slowly, abdomens pointed at the ceiling,
weight resting on the hands and ankles, all the while inhaling, filling the lungs
through the nose. They stay in the fully extended position briefly, then return
slowly to the sitting position, exhaling until no air remains in the lungs, and again
lifting the abdomen. ‘There are five corners’, says Eli, ‘the two hands, the two
legs, and the fifth corner is the abdomen. Concentrate only on this fifth corner,14
forget the other four’. Eli wants the participants to feel as if they are hanging by
their belts in mid-air, suspended from the ceiling as if this central corner – the
abdomen – is what is holding them in that extended position and not the four
other points which are, in fact, planted on the floor.
Eli does not explain what kime is, nor does he say how the karateka should
proceed in order to achieve this feeling of hanging from the ceiling while disre-
garding the points of contact with the floor. He is talking to seasoned karateka
who already have an inkling of what kime is, having already sensed it in their
bodies. They understand what he is talking about; his words are neither
metaphorical nor mystical. They actually feel the floor disappearing; the knots of
their belts are extended toward the ceiling, the lungs open and suffuse with air –
the tanden holds their bodies in position.
Later in the training session Eli refers again to the feeling of being suspended
by the belt from the ceiling, this time in combat. He proposes another exercise
aimed at the perception and the strengthening of kime.15 Now the participants
spar; the attacker uses a kick and the defender reacts with a fist. Eli explains and
demonstrates: ‘the defender does nothing but strike with the maete to the eye’,
he says, ‘and he must be cut by the mawashigiri’. Maete is a short striking
movement of the fist of the extended hand; mawashigiri is a circular kick of the
back leg, creating a cutting effect much like that of a sickle. The exercise is a very
unbalanced one; the attacker’s movement is a long and difficult one, while the
defender’s move is very short and relatively easy. It does not seem reasonable for
the exercise to work, namely, for the attack to be successful and for the leg to
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reach its target before the fist reaches the eye; for the leg, moving in a long, round
trajectory, must move some two meters from its position in the initial stance to
the point of impact on the opponent’s body, and the fist need only move some
40 centimeters before contact with the opponent’s eye. But Eli insists that it can
be done, posing a tactical riddle, a somatic conundrum to be unraveled in a
precise somatic manner.
Eli demonstrates and explains at the same time. His movements are long,
precise and calm, and although he must reach his target quickly, he does not seem
to be in a hurry, and the tone of his voice is equally serene. This exercise demands
great precision and composure.
The leg starts out without a sign. If your movement is too strong, it’s too late; if your
movement is too rapid, it’s too late. It’s very simple: [the defender] understands that [the leg]
has started out only after it has already moved. Do this as if there was no kime – that’s right,
the mawashigiri is in. Don’t think about the leg, your body has done it thousands of times, it
knows mawashigiri.

Eli’s remarks on the demonstration he has just performed with another

karateka show how to attain this tricky goal. When facing a skilled adversary, a
squint of the eye, a twist of the front leg, a shift in balance, a shrug of the
shoulder, a slight pulling back of the hand – any of these can indicate to the
opponent that the attack has begun. The slightest change will lead the opponent
to react with a counter-attack and consequently to undermine the exercise. The
initial stance must therefore be perfect, a stance verging on movement yet
extremely stable, as the leg is lifted and swayed in one strong swoop without
correcting the body balance for that motion and without any preparatory move-
ments. Already encompassing the potentiality of movement, ready to disclose the
movement it contains, like the participants held by the knot of their belts, the
stance has the karateka standing immobile in mid-motion – a very practical illus-
tration of Husserl’s claim that ‘holding still is [also] a mode of “I do”’ (1970: 106).
It is not only muscular movement that can be detected by a trained karateka;
the attacker’s decision to move may also be perceived and thus undermine the
attacker’s chances of success.16 Hiding kime, performing the exercise as if there
were no kime, means complete control over both movement and thought. In this
situation, a thought (a decision) or an emotion (the will to win, for instance) is a
somatic activity that can be detected by the other, a corporeal mode of inter-
subjectivity: the mind too is a movement. For the attack to surprise the opponent
it should be void, it should ‘start out’ without betraying a signal. The attacker
himself should forgo the decision; he should let his body decide when to attack,
and he should let his body carry out the attack perfectly, as it was trained to do.
Anything not directly connected to the task at hand can be perceived by the
opponent; non-dualism is a fighting technique.
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To hide kime means that the attacker must not reveal his strength; on the
contrary, his opponent remains unaware of the impending kicking movement
until the attack is already on its way, gaining distance and making up for the
imbalance in the roles of the two opponents. Only if the attacker succeeds in
hiding the instant of attack, does his long circular movement have a chance of
overtaking his opponent’s short simple one. For this, Eli insists, the motion must
begin from the pelvis: ‘keep your kime quiet inside your stomach . . . remember
the fifth point, the knot of the belt, that is the point that is moving, everything
else will follow’. The technical solution for this exercise is to move as if being
pulled by the belt. The sensation of hanging from the ceiling is recaptured in the
attempt to surprise the opponent, almost as if the attacker himself is surprised,
as if he is being pulled into movement from the knot of his belt. Hiding strength,
speed and effectivity in battle makes for a stronger warrior and at the same time
avoids boasting or any other expression of power.17 Moreover, it precludes any
emotion that might give away the incipient movement, because a skilled
opponent would surely perceive the signal and the exercise would fail. Eli could
have chosen a more balanced exercise that would allow the participants to engage
in a freer, more expressive combat, but he chose the ‘hiding the kime’ exercise
that presents the karateka with a challenge to his person, his entire body-self: a
practical-spiritual exercise demanding meditation-like18 serenity.
The sensation of being suspended from the ceiling, however, cannot be
demonstrated; nor can the feeling that the movement begins with the tanden, that
it starts out from the belt knot. The training exercises can only turn the
karateka’s attention to the kime. Kime is not ‘taught’; it can only be attained indi-
rectly through motion in relation to the opponent’s19 moving body. Kime is
enhanced by certain movements and perceived by its workings, by its success in
combat. A karateka can know if his/her kime works, only through his/her
opponent’s reaction. If the attack allows the opponent to retract without her
controlling that retraction, namely if the opponent’s tanden moves backwards,
then kime has proven itself. In the exercise above, in which a long lunge attempts
to outpace a short blow, if the defender does not react in time, then the attacker
knows that she has hidden her kime well.
Kime can only be revealed within social interaction, a potentiality to be played
out inter-subjectively. More phenomenologically put, in terms of ‘body phil-
osophy it can be argued that there is a deeper form of memory than that which
uses symbolic codes’ (Jespersen quoted in Sheets-Johnstone, 2000: 361). Kime is
located in the body’s imagining – in habits, in the body’s memory of what it is
capable of. Thus kime can be ‘quiet inside the stomach’, as Eli says, it can hide
itself. Like the senses and the muscles, the kime too is ready to be activated. The
karateka knows it is there and knows he/she can hide it or use it just like any
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82 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

other part of his/her body, and just like he/she can use speech or, perhaps, even
his/her ‘self’.
In the effort to crack the somatic riddle of the long circular movement
attempting to outpace the short one, Eli asks the participants to hide their kime
long enough to make the opponent unaware of the moving leg. At the instant of
impact, however, when the mawashigiri reaches the opponent’s body, kime must
display itself fully. Kime is masked and then reveals itself when it is too late for
the opponent, who must react to the moving leg and whose fist can no longer be
effective. Kime implies a smooth passage that does not allow for the instant of
transformation from hiding to full disclosure to be pin-pointed, since the hiding
is embedded in the disclosure and the disclosure in the hiding (see Handelman,
2005b20). The shift from concealment to presence is fluid and non-detectable. If
there is no kime, if it is absent and not just hiding, it cannot reveal itself; the
attack is then inefficient and not dangerous. Kime is created, hidden and disclosed
simultaneously through the exact positioning of the body, and of the pelvis in
particular; it is how the karateka advances, how the initial stance unfolds its
movement. At the same time, however, it also is a state of emotion.

Kime from a Sino-Japanese Perspective

So, what then is kime? As already noted, the word ‘kime’ cannot be defined stat-
ically; its meaning is formed through experience. It is demonstrated, used,
pointed at, but it is not and cannot be explained in words in the framework of
karate training. This attempt to formulate the innerness of the body as it is
formed is perhaps perplexing, but it should be borne in mind that kime is inter-
subjective and also as much a characteristic of the body – every body – as is
breathing or moving one’s limbs. Attack and defense cannot be effective without
kime. Having ‘strong’ kime means being dangerous, not just ‘throwing’ limbs at
the opponent but really menacing him/her. Kime can therefore be described as
the interior potentiality of strength and speed, of warriorship growing inside the
trained body, of the transfer of explosive energy (Habersetzer, 2000: 342). It is a
somatic characteristic that a trained warrior can use at will.
A karateka uses kime like Vikram Seth’s violinist uses his body to make music:
in the middle of a concert he finds himself thinking, ‘I should be playing again.
And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the fiddle is under my
chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am’ (1999: 110–11). The violinist’s trained
body can perform the very complex task of playing an instrument with other
members of the quartet, starting at just the right moment and in the correct
manner, without thinking about it, or even when he is busy thinking about
something else.
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 83

The martial arts student encounters a new world of meaning whose notions
are not formulated verbally. On the contrary, training dismantles notions desig-
nated by words and replaces them with other notions understood somatically,
notions from the Sino-Japanese world such as ki (chi in Chinese) that are trans-
lated (inaccurately) as ‘life energy’. Martial arts students talk of enlarging their
ki, their kime, their kiai (the expletive sound or cry of the warrior at the moment
of impact). The students are not provided with any translation for these words;
the notions they indicate exist only as part of the understanding of the body (and
mind) in Sino-Japanese medicine and culture. In order to grasp and use such
notions and to carry out the practices they entail, the students also need to
unlearn what they already know, to discard the dichotomous categories they
normally use outside the training sessions.
In the martial arts, and in the Sino-Japanese view of the body and its working
in general,21 the interface between the body and that which is outside it is not
clear cut. The body is sometimes understood to include not only that which is
circumscribed by the skin but, during battle, the ma22 as well, the empty space
between the two warriors facing one another, and the opponent’s body as well.
The sensation of being inside the opponent’s body when the opponent has strong
kime has been described as the feeling of being ‘surrounded and trapped like the
prey enveloped by an octopus’ many arms’ (Masciotra et al., 2001: 119); ‘I liter-
ally shrink into myself, lose control; I become unable to release a decisive action
although my opponent is within reach’ (p. 127).
Kime emerges from the Sino-Japanese way of looking at the body, at the way
it is constructed and operates, contracts disease and heals; this way may not be
compatible with the usual Western (and modern Japanese) understanding of the
body. The Sino-Japanese view is that the body holds the potentiality of includ-
ing more (and sometimes less) than that which is inside its skin and it is, conse-
quently, permeable to exchange with other bodies, objects and, ultimately, the
entire cosmos. Unlike the scientific view, the body can be apprehended not only
from an objective, exterior viewpoint, but it can also be grasped from within, by
our sensation of the condition of our own body, the sense of knowledge the body
provides from within23 (Yuasa, 1993: 72). Neither ki, the vital energy or inner
power, nor kime can be used, reached or sensed through any part of the body,
but only used, adjusted, hidden, or made to appear through practice. Like ki,
kime is grasped as a whole, but there are zones where ki is concentrated,24 and
the tanden (hara) – a point beneath the navel, exactly under the knot of the belt
– is considered to be an ocean of ki (Yuasa, 1987). The kime is concentrated there
as well, and can be perceived, as Eli proposes in the training, by placing a hand
on the tanden while moving. Every karate movement should begin from the
tanden, the most stable region of the body. Thus the kick starts out from the
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tanden, the movement emerges from the pelvis, exteriorizing the kime as the leg
is hurled forward.
Kime has at least two explanations in Japanese (see note 2), one designated by
the kanji (ideogram) meaning ‘extremity’ or ‘polarity’, indicating that kime is the
extremity of the warrior’s potential to fight effectively: beyond his/her kime
he/she cannot fight or deter an adversary. That extremity is pushed further,
making kime grow as the warrior’s fighting capability improves. The other expla-
nation of the word kime comes from kanji for the verb ‘to decide’. That sense of
the word connects physical strength, alertness and effectiveness to the mental
capacity to decide. A karateka aims to conceal his/her decision to move; by hiding
his/her kime, he/she can surprise an opponent and move without the opponent
sensing it. In this way, kime is a decision taken by the body itself, as it were.
This point can perhaps more tellingly be formulated in the negative: kime is
the decision to renounce decision, to allow the body and its fighting experience
take over the decision. Kime is also used to detect the opponent’s decision to
move; it helps a warrior feel an opponent’s decision to take action and thus attack
even before the attacker is aware of it. Kime is used to fight more effectively, and
also to collect information from the environment, such as information about the
opponent’s intentions. Obviously this is of great tactical advantage, but this
version of kime, of warriorship, also molds the correct emotional attitude a
karateka should embody: that of emotional distance or emotional emptiness. A
genuine karateka should not boast about his/her ability and must avoid reckless-
ness, but also ought not to display cowardliness. It is not enough to somatically
display the absence of emotions; for the display to be credible in an extreme situ-
ation like battle, emotions such as fear, anger and vengefulness themselves, which
are considered part of the body (Ots, 1994), must be overcome and must cease
to exist. This demands strenuous training from the karateka, and thus karate is
also an emotional endeavor. In this context, emotions as a source of action, of
volition, can be detected as movement and are, indeed, movement. Hence the
capacity to control the kime, to hide it or to use it, is also the capacity to avoid
emotion in battle. An attack can succeed if the attacker renounces the will to win.
In karate, volition must cease to exist so that, paradoxically, intentionality can
emerge where volition lets off.

Semiotic Semantics – Somatic Codes

Kime is a somatic-emotional experience and, like other sensed and felt experiences,
it cannot be accounted for solely in words. Langer (1979: 100–1) powerfully
expresses the inadequacy of words in capturing emotion:
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 85

Everybody knows that language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature.
It merely names certain vaguely and crudely conceived states, but fails miserably in any attempt
to convey the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience, the
interplay of feeling with thoughts and impressions, memories and echoes of memories,
transient fantasy, or its mere runic traces, all turned into nameless, emotional stuff.

Nonetheless, by looking at the non-discursive in experience, Langer reaches the

conclusion that also the world of sensation operates in a logical semantic way,
that ‘feelings have definite forms, which become progressively articulated’
(Langer, 1979: 100, emphasis in original), and that, as Durig glosses Langer, ‘we
can think with feeling’ (Durig, 1994: 262). The senses collect data and their
impressions of the world inform cognition. The only way they can make sense
of the world is for ‘the eyes and ears [to] have their logic – their “categories of
understanding”’ (Langer, 1979: 89); they too must sort things out through logic-
like operations in order to inform cognition. These logic-like operations are non-
discursive because they are non-linear and non-objective and thus stand in
contrast to the formal logic that is characteristic of language, mathematics and so
forth. Non-discursive logic does not discern separate named objects, which can
be organized linearly, one after the other; rather, non-discursive logic can grasp
a full, undetailed, unnamed picture at one glance.
This way of making sense and of attributing meaning to the world is
accomplished though logic-like operations such as comparing, categorizing,
correcting, iterating, correlating and thus learning from experience. Langer
further argues, says Durig, that ‘[d]enial of emotions is a classic symptom of
dualistic thinking’ (Durig, 1994: 256): because words and other representations
are central to Western thought and are accorded primacy over emotion and other
felt experiences. Consequently, the non-dual in our lives is consequently
subdued, even neglected. According to Langer, non-discursive semantics as a way
of conveying complex understandings is found in art, myth, ritual, music and, I
would add, movement in general.
Kime as movement is a means of both collecting data and of doing, perhaps a
condition for intentionality as Kapferer uses this notion in anthropology (2000:
28, note 1; see also Kapferer, 1997):
I use the concept of intentionality minimally as referring merely to the directedness of human
beings into the world of their existence. Such a directedness is a faculty of human existence.
Human beings are already immersed in the world and come to a self-consciousness within it.
Consciousness is emergent from this directedness and not vice versa. It is as a consequence of
this directedness that human beings become reflectively conscious of the meaning and motiva-
tions of their activities.

The notion that ‘[c]onsciousness is emergent from this directedness and not vice
versa’ recalls Langer, again as glossed by Durig who states, ‘Language is not a
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86 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

medium of meaning; meaning is the medium of language’ (Durig, 1994: 258,

emphasis in original). As I understand it, Kapferer’s emphasis on directedness
indicates movement.
Kime perceives while it is enacted and unfolds while it is informed. It exists
in the interactive body un-detailed, un-located, a fully mature, whole entity
encompassing both perception and action un-differentiated. Eli the karate
instructor’s conundrum for the students was how to achieve the seemingly
impossible exercise. Using meticulous verbal as well as somatic instructions, he
demonstrates the solution following a logical pattern: if the instant of attack is
hidden, that fraction of a second while the opponent is unaware will allow the
attacker to gain time and thereby redress the imbalance between the long and the
short movements. This is purely physical, objective, almost scientific. The actual
implementation of this logic, however, its practicality, depends on construing the
body as an un-detailed whole, as a non-discursive entity following a non-linear,
non-objective logic. The word kime designates just this, an undefined entity that
is actualized through somatic experience, setting representation on its head, as it
were, because (Young, 2002: 28):
What we think of as mental phenomena: thoughts, memories, emotions, turn out to be
corporeal phenomena; what we think of as bodily phenomena: postures, gestures, body habits,
turn out to be emotions, memories and thoughts . . . The body is the medium of both thoughts
and things.

Furthermore, somatic codes challenge the relation between the felt and the
said. Somatic codes undermine the dichotomy between body and word, sense
and thought, perceiving and doing; they present a non-dual potentiality that
permits smooth passage from sense-data to thought to action, from body to mind
and vice versa. They emanate from the foundation of a somatic understanding of
the body-self and of the potentialities within it, connecting muscle to eye to
emotion, blending kinesthetics with perception and self-perception, fusing
somatic and emotional control into one. Their existence is embodied in
movement, in the initial stance and in its actualization.
Turning thought into movement and movement into a sensory tool collecting
information from the environment – all this in an intricate culturally transmitted
practice. Kime is fundamentally a social capacity, learned, concealed and revealed
though interaction; what, then, is kime saying about the potentialities of the
social body?
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 87

The Body in Movement – ‘Mind the Gap’

The body, claims Merleau-Ponty ([1945]2002, 1968), is already in-the-world
from birth. It is the tool of perception, the pre-condition in the pre-verbal, pre-
objective infantile state. The body enables discernment of objects in its environ-
ment, through the world-building process of objectification (see also Csordas,
1994a, 1994b, 1994c). At the outset, the horizon-of-being – everything a person
knows and can imagine – is restricted to the tool of data collection she was born
with, namely, the body. The world is void, so to speak, it makes no sense, it is
ungraspable but, immediately, a gap is created between the body-self and the
world of objects as it begins to make sense of the world, name the objects it
discerns, imagine how they are organized and so on. This growing gap between
the body as a tool of perception and the world of objects, this enlarging of the
horizon-of-being, is the process of objectification, including the objectivization
of the body itself, making it an object among objects. The horizon-of-being, the
limit of a person’s objectified world of reality and potentiality or imagination,
comes to include increasingly more objects, words and representations. Thus the
body itself has a double identity: as the first tool of perception, it is on the
extremity of a person’s objectified world, the horizon-of-being; but the body is
simultaneously in the world as a discernable object within the horizon-of-being,
a representation, since the body can be looked at and spoken of from an outside
‘objective’ point of view.
Kime, like the body itself, is both on and within the horizon-of-being. Both
kime and the body are tools of apprehension as well as of action and, at the same
time, named, designated, apprehended objects (Csordas, 1993, 1994b; Merleau-
Ponty, [1945]2002). Merleau-Ponty understands this gap of objectivization to
include all the world in its entirety. Csordas (2004) adds that it is the source of
our sense of alterity and of religion in general. Accordingly, the somatic pre-
verbal abilities of perceiving the world become redundant and primitive
compared to words, representations and objects. In a world where alterity is so
intimately within ourselves, as Csordas indicates, duality is the only possible way
of grasping the world.
But this is, in fact, not the case. Unlike the process of objectification described
by Merleau-Ponty and Csordas, in kime no gap opens between the body –
which comprehends the characteristic of kime – and the understandings it actu-
alizes. There is not even a gap between kime itself and the word kime, the
somatic code used to indicate the phenomenon. The gap by which words and
other representations are created is not the only option for understanding the
relation between soma and words. The non-verbal and the non-representational
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88 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

are not only pre-verbal and pre-objective, they continue their rich trajectory
throughout life as interactive, social and cultural options alongside representa-
tions. And they too can lead to spirituality, albeit one of a different kind (see, for
example, Handelman and Shulman, 1997).
Karateka practicing kime are using their body movement to grasp the
environment and to form the world-of-meaning of karate. Their bodies are not
merely tools to glean information; they are not receptacles that permit the storage
of some other content made up of ideas and words. Kime is a body-object: not
idea and not flesh, yet both idea and flesh. It pulls the karateka towards the
extremity of her somatic potentiality and pushes that extremity even further to
somatic capacities she could not imagine existed. The somatic horizon-of-being
is no longer fixed in the flesh we happen to have and to be; the body and its
potentialities – both of perception and of action – enlarge and with them the
world itself. Perhaps this is the more profound meaning of the word kime as
represented by the kanji meaning ‘extremity’.

Conclusion
The Sino-Japanese way of viewing the body coincides to some extent with the
phenomenological view: the body as it is experienced. The Japanese philosopher
Yuasa (1993) elaborates on this comparison in detail, and Ozawa-de Silva (2002)
suggests that a new anthropological view of the body can stem from Yuasa’s
philosophical perspective. The present article is an attempt in that direction.
Ultimately, kime is a tactile-kinesthetic entity born in and of practice, coming
into being in a social setting through the specific organization of the body-self,
fusing body and self into one stance and movement. Kime is entirely embodied,
yet can only be used and recognized inter-subjectively. While tactically
performed in combat, kime also embodies a new spiritual potentiality that
depends on the eradication of emotion and volition, perhaps annihilating the
‘self’ itself. If volition is menaced by another’s act of violence, the somatic answer
is to renounce volition altogether. Here the word kime in fact functions as a
non-verbal utterance.25
Movement is the prime way of making sense of the world, claims Sheets-
Johnstone, following Husserl. Movement is the first and basic means of perceiv-
ing the world, encompassing verbal potentiality as well, since ‘In discovering
ourselves in movement and in turn expanding our kinetic repertoire of “I cans”,
we embark on a lifelong journey of sense-making’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 136).
Furthermore, she claims that (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 253):
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 89

We are a moving-in-the-world being . . . Whatever the initial way of motivations and incipient
intentionalities might be, they develop by way of a tactile-kinesthetic body. That body is itself
the object of motivations and intentionalities – in the form of head turning, stretching and so
on. In such ways the tactile-kinesthetic body is itself constituted: we put ourselves together;
we learn our bodies. We do so through movement.

The practical philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari also points at the social,
non-dualistic use of the body; they pose the question ‘How do you make
yourself a body without organs?’ (2005: 149).26 What they mean can be under-
stood as the holistic body, that which is left when ‘you take everything away.
What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifica-
tions as a whole’ (p. 131). Gil describes the coming into being of the ‘body
without organs’ through the choreography and dance of Merce Cunningham, a
dance of pure movement with no other referend but itself. Gil proposes a ‘new
osmosis whereby thought and body become one, and whereby a new fluidity, a
new kind of movement, may circulate on this plane of immanence that is dance.
This new osmosis comes about through body consciousness’, or through a ‘body
of thought’ (2003: 122, emphasis in original).
When thought and body are one, words become somatic codes, echoing the
body in movement, deferential to its dynamics. So if movement is the source of
‘I cans’ and ‘I dos’, and if we can and do make a ‘body without organs’, then
somatic codes are central to the way we discover the world and act in it. They
link our bodies together and permit the social passage of body, form, culture, and
meaning; they thereby also fluidly link the qualities of innerness and outerness
of our somatic existence.
Potentialities such as kime and many daily somatic attitudes have a complete
life informing us of our social and physical environment, inducing action and
intentionality. Furthermore, as unlikely as it may seem, dual and non-dual points
of view are not mutually exclusive; we can (and do) hold both views at one and
the same time. Both duality and non-duality it would seem are culturally
constructed. The body, with its potentialities of perception and of action, is
formed throughout life, enabling a non-objectified process of discovering the
world through the body and of learning to be that body: a lifelong apprentice-
ship to become our own body set in movement.

Notes
1. Although Don Handelman’s work is not widely cited in this article, his thinking stands at the
outset – see for example Handelman, 1998. I would like to thank my teachers Erik Cohen, Michiko
Ōta and Asaf Hazani for their most valuable help, and the readers of Body & Society for their remarks
and encouragement. I would also like to dedicate this article to my karate teacher Meir Iahel.
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90 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

2. Kime – even in Japanese, the origin of the word is not clear. One explanation is that the
word comes from the verb kimeru – to decide ( Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000); the other expla-
nation was sent to me by the main dōjō (school) of Shotokan-karate-dō in Santa Barabara in the form
of a kanji (Chinese ideogram used in Japanese) denoting ‘extremity’ or ‘polarity’ – see below. The
quoted text is from field notes describing a training session held in Jerusalem in November 2003
(translated from Hebrew).
3. Karateka – both plural and singular.
4. Ots describes the subversive potential of Chinese cathartic healing. In Chinese understanding,
emotion is understood as residing in the body and not in the mind, so students of oriental practices
may change their view of the location of emotions.
5. Shotokan means the house of Shoto, which is the pen name used by Funakoshi when he
composed Chinese poems, and also the name of the first karate training site (dōjō) in Tokyo. At least
two schools are called by that name; my ethnography concerns the teaching of Oshima’s school of
karate. Oshima himself continued the trend of introducing into karate elements from other samurai
martial arts, especially kendo (sword play). A student of kendo in his youth, he switched to karate and
studied with Funakoshi after the Second World War, when kendo was prohibited under McArthur’s
administration (private communication).
6. Some karate schools include bunkai (verbal explanations of the tactical reasons for each
movement) in their training. Those are mainly used in order to detail the meaning of kata movements,
exercises that are preformed against imaginary opponents and therefore need explanation. However,
those do not explain the more profound meaning of the somatic experience or the spiritual potential-
ities embedded in the martial art and are, in that sense, not exegesis.
7. This could be said to be a spiritual aim, especially since karate, like other Japanese martial arts,
is a Zen practice.
8. This has been addressed by the contributors to Embodiment and Experience (Csordas, 1994b),
as well as by others.
9. Langer calls them non-discursive ‘semantics’, but that notion might be confusing.
10. Conducted as part of my doctoral research (in anthropology) on Japanese martial arts in Israel
(Bar-On Cohen, 2005).
11. I hold a black belt, second dan (out of five), in Shotokan.
12. One, two, three.
13. Hara as in harakiri – the location used for disembowelment in the ritual Samurai suicide,
situated a few centimeters below the navel, also called tanden.
14. It is a corner because it is at the angle created between the upper and the lower stretched body,
thus forming a new ‘limb’ comparable to the hands and feet.
15. Note that the perception and the strengthening of kime is one and the same thing. Being able
to feel it cannot be separated from its constitution.
16. Although in actual training the word ‘see’ is used in a general sense, I use the word ‘perceived’,
because not only do the eyes perceive these slight signs, but movement itself is used for data collec-
tion (see also Zarrilli, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). While the limbs change position in space, that space is
learned and this potentiality is developed over years of training. In this sense, movement is also a
sensory organ. Karateka can train to perceive an attack coming from behind, and at times also train
blindfolded.
17. According to Bateson (1972), boasting can be a source of symmetrical schism, of schismogen-
esis. Karate and other fighting arts encompass a non-belligerent end; they are constructed in such a
way as to eradicate violence, refraining from boasting is part of that effort. However, the topic of the
martial arts and non-violence is beyond the scope of this article.
18. There are two sorts of meditation in Zen: seated meditation, and meditation in constant
walking. The Zen aspect of martial arts is a development of meditation in constant walking (King,
1993).
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Kime and the Moving Body ■ 91

19. An important part of karate training – the kata, a set series of combat movements – is
performed against imaginary opponents. Even in kata training, kime is exteriorized against a moving
opponent, albeit an imaginary one.
20. The passage of the kime from concealment to revelation is, in Handelman’s terms, ‘braided’
(Handelman, 2001, 2005a).
21. Chinese medicine is based on this way of looking at the body (see, for example, Yuasa, 1987,
1993; Ots, 1994).
22. Ma is the empty space between two opponents, the exact amount of space needed for them to
attack each other without taking a preliminary step. In general in Japanese culture, the ma is the empty
space that gives significance to objects, the white of the paper in a drawing for example. Ohnuki-
Tierney (1994) calls the ma a zero signifier. It is not a somatic code but a semiotic notion putting things
in relation.
23. Yuasu calls this capacity coenesthesis.
24. The sites of concentration are used for healing in acupuncture and in shiatsu.
25. Like the words of Japanese master Awa, who taught archery to German scholar Harrigel
(perhaps the first Westerner to ever learn a Japanese martial art, at the beginning of the 20th century),
‘the master’s words, through their practice together, which serves as a nonverbal channel of communi-
cation’ (Shun, 2006: 210).
26. Deleuze and Guattari take this discussion beyond the purview of this article. See also Feather-
stone, 2006.

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Einat Bar-On Cohen is an anthropologist. Her PhD research dealt with Japanese martial arts as a case
of traveling culture; she also holds a second Dan black belt in Shotokan Karate-do. Currently she is
conducting research on Israeli close-combat as a site where the social somatic understanding of
violence is formed.