Does anyone here know how much influence Mas Oyama and Kyokushin karate have had on Japanese pop culture? I remember hearing there was a comic book series about him that was pretty popular, which in turn gave rise to Sonny Chiba's movies about him in the 1970's (Karate Bullfighter, etc.). More recently, I've noticed in a couple martial arts anime (Dragonball Z, the terrible Street Fighter anime) training sequences that seemed very karate-esque. Both featured a number of solitary wilderness training sequences which reminded me of the stories about Oyama training in the mountains. The killing of dinosaurs in Dragonball reminded me of Oyama's bullfights. I notice very little practicing of kata/forms/patterns during training montages in Japanese films/anime, though these tend to dominate training sequences in Chinese martial arts films. Instead, lifting boulders, climbing mountains, and punching trees tends to be the order of the training sequence in Japanese MA films. Am I making erroneous conclusions? Can anyone with more knowledge of Japanese popular conceptions of martial arts way in on this?
