When asked about the aesthetics of a certain martial arts bout, Helio Gracie  once replied gruffly, “A fight is a fight.” It wasn’t that he didn’t see beauty in the art of jiu-jitsu. He merely thought it was imperative to emphasize that fighting is a serious affair with potentially dire consequences for the loser — and sometimes for his or her family. Judging whether a martial art is good is very different from judging whether a dance or a painting is good. Dancing and painti

Given the proliferation of social media in the martial arts community, one sees all sorts of posts nowadays related to Japanese budo and...