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Page 2 of 2 The dying of the belts became part of the karate tradition and was also adapted in other countries. In Australia, Sensei Terry Lyon of Lyon-Karate.com reports that in the early 70s, Australian karate students also dyed their belts to their new color. The “White-Belt-Getting-Dirtier” TheoryAnother explanation for the colored belts, that appears more like a karate myth than reality, is the notion that the belts simply went from white to black because the original karate founders never washed their belts. They started off with white belts and after years of training ended up with black belts. The proponents of this theory assert that the belt, which was initially white, gets gradually dirtier and dirtier and so goes from white to yellow to green to brown to black in that way. Many people argue that this theory is cute but has little truth. The dirtiest belt will never go black, and although the color change from white to yellow to brown can easily be imagined, other colors like green would be harder to achieve, unless the belt is host to a culture of particularly nasty and colorful bacteria, not unlike those that live in the back of my fridge. (Not to worry, I finally cleaned out the green goo. One day, from the corner of my eye, I saw it move. Now THAT was too much). Repeated sweat and dirt from the typically wooden floors can indeed make the whole Gi become yellow and eventually brown. However, it is pretty tough to actually get a significant amount of sweat into the belt, which is more evidence against the “White-Belt-Getting-Dirtier” theory. There is also real evidence for this theory. Many Karate dojos in Japan have a change room where students are able to leave their gi ready for when they return to train again. As a consequence they don’t get washed and end up very dirty and smelly(!) with sometimes years of not being washed. These gi go through the same color change as the colored belts. This practice might have been born from either laziness, cost-cutting, and perhaps also a bit of male machismo. After all, an old and dirty gi must mean that its owner has used it a lot, and thus must be highly skilled. In that sense, the yellow/brown gi functions exactly like a colored belt! In summary - maybe the colored belt system was created with the color change of dirty gi in mind. But maybe the colored belt system was just well thought-out and used because dying the belts was a simple, cheap and effective way of displaying rank! http://www.all-karate.com/125/history-of-karate-belt-colors Source: all-karate.com
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