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Millions Hear Physical or Spiritual Wake-Up Call in Asian Martial Arts : Culture: Training studios can be found in church basements, suburban shopping malls, YMCAs. No longer is it forbidden to teach the skills to foreigners.

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The young man crouches, arms up, feet wide apart and knees bent as if riding a horse, motionless as a statue except for slow, rhythmic breathing. He is slightly built, all lean muscle and sinew, shirtless in baggy black pants and sash and black slippers.

Seconds tick by in the leafy midday shade of the Martyrs’ Shrine war memorial overlooking the city.

Then, abrupt as lightning, a blur of motion: He whirls, strikes, blocks, kicks, in a fluid, dance-like chain of precise movements intended to lay low a host of invisible enemies, with no wasted motion and no weapons except his fists and feet.

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“It’s good exercise,” he said later, almost apologetically, slipping his dress trousers back on and buttoning his waiter’s white shirt. “It helps focus the mind.”

The shy young man, who refuses to give his name, is among millions of people of virtually every nationality who practice some form of Asian-style martial arts.

Some practice as wake-up exercises, some for physical or spiritual conditioning, some against the day when such skills might be summoned to save their lives against an attacker on the streets of Shanghai--or New York City.

Once-secretive ethnic sanctums hidden away in the Chinatowns of the world’s major cities, martial-arts studios now are scattered through YMCAs, church basements and suburban shopping malls.

“It’s gotten to the point where martial arts are an accepted thing to participate in,” said Gary Hestilow, president of Century Martial Arts Supply Inc., a $40 million-a-year Oklahoma City-based company that imports and manufactures uniforms, weapons and other equipment. “It’s not on the fringe any more.”

Based on sales of both U.S.-produced and imported uniforms, Hestilow estimates that over the last year about 1.5 million new participants have signed up for martial-arts classes in the United States--about a 12% increase over the previous year.

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“Typically, they’ll do it for three or four months, attain a reasonably good level of proficiency and then continue on their own,” he said. “Those who stick with it longer often become experts and go off and teach classes on their own as a hobby.”

Numbers are hard to come by: There is no single international federation of all the Asian systems, whose major branches include Japanese and Okinawan karate, Korean Tae kwon do, Filipino Arnis or Escrima and the progenitor of virtually all systems, Chinese kung fu.

Over the centuries, each of these basic systems, along with other indigenous ones in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan and Tibet, has sprouted what one authority describes as a mind-boggling number of offshoots.

“In the United States alone, it’s estimated there are 10 million people studying various styles,” said Dave Cater, editor of Inside Kung Fu, a 110,000-circulation magazine. “It’s a massive, massive industry.”

In the last decade or so, a gentler form of martial arts has become popular, especially among people over 30. So-called “internal” styles such as tai chi emphasize slower movements, breathing and meditation rather than the explosive, combative “external” ones like karate.

“Ten years ago, everybody wanted to fight,” Cater said. “Now, everybody wants to breathe.”

Besides offering a sure-fire subject for the seemingly limitless Asian B-movie market, martial arts occupy a substantial niche in Western pop culture. Children lobby for toys based on television’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Grown-ups flock to films featuring their favorite high-kicking combatants.

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All the actor-athletes owe substantial debts to the late Bruce Lee, who pioneered the film genre in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Lee was also one of the first to break the strict Chinese code that forbade teaching indigenous fighting methods to foreigners.

Part of martial arts’ mystique lies in their magical aspect, which combines folklore and what many Westerners regard as superstition. Summoning internal energies based partly on breathing techniques, some martial-arts masters allegedly are able to leap tall objects, move things and people without touching them, and even dodge bullets.

“Some of it is trickery, just for show, but a lot of it is real,” said Deric Mims, a Washington, D.C., bank executive who volunteers his time to operate Jow Ga Kung Fu, a school in suburban Langley Park, Md. “You can learn how to call upon energy and channel it, like the power a mother can generate if she sees her son being crushed by car. She can go and lift that car.”

Jow Ga (meaning the Jow family) originated in China about the time of the 1899-1900 Boxer Rebellion. Five brothers combined several northern and southern Chinese systems into their own family fighting style.

Like many kung-fu systems, Jow Ga traces its roots back to a legendary Buddhist monk from India who introduced the form to Chinese monks as a means of physical conditioning and self-defense.

A University of Maryland electrical engineering student, Chan Yuk Cheung, brought Jow Ga to the United States from his native Hong Kong in 1964. Since then, it has spread to several other states and to Canada, Germany and Poland.

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On a recent evening at the Jow Ga school in a small shopping center on the outskirts of Washington, about 20 students huffed and puffed through a challenging series of calisthenics, stretching exercises and punching-and-kicking drills before settling down to the evening’s lesson from Troy Williams, one of the all-volunteer staff of instructors.

Afterward, Williams coached Penny Martin, a 47-year-old medical librarian. She was to be examined the next weekend for her proficiency at “Small Tiger,” a combination of defensive and offensive movements built around the animal’s supposed fighting style.

“That was pretty good,” Williams told Martin after she had finished the exhausting routine, punctuated by savage shouts. “Remember to keep your back leg locked when you punch.”

Martin later explained that she was drawn to martial arts partly for exercise and self-defense, the usual reasons, but also because she finds a certain rugged glamour in it.

“When I was growing up, I watched a lot of Errol Flynn movies,” she said. “But I never saw myself as the beautiful princess being rescued. I always wanted to swash a few buckles myself.”

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