Martial Arts Teach Kids to Avoid Conflict?

Re “Kick Backs” (Sept. 26): I can’t help feeling suspicious about the conflict-avoidance qualities supposedly being instilled in children who are students of Japanese martial arts as they are taught violent ways to exercise power and control over other people.

How can power and peace be compatible except in the sense of the Cold War? Artistic activities (and some sports) that must be learned and practiced also develop discipline, grounding and centering, but without the antagonistic underpinnings.

The clincher for me is the concluding comment by the karate instructor who, having stated that he has never been in a fight in his life, remembered how as a child he would employ a painful wrist manipulation technique to retrieve a pencil taken from him by another child. “ ‘I never thought of it as a fighting technique,’ ” he says, chuckling. “ ‘I always wondered why the other child always was in such pain. I got him crying. But I always got my pencil back.’ ”

This is peaceful resolution?

JEAN BROUSSEAU

North Hills