Karate

• 1. Introduction

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  Karate began not as a sport but as resistance. In the Ryukyu Kingdom, young aristocrats who were banned from carrying swords under samurai rule built unarmed combat methods in secret. They blended Chinese and local Ryukyuan styles into something they called kara-te, which translates to Chinese hand. There were no uniforms then. No colored belts, no ranking systems, no standardized styles. Many of the things that now seem essential to karate were added only about a century ago. How did a banned island fighting method become an Olympic sport claimed by as many as a hundred million practitioners? How did the meaning of its very name shift from Chinese hand to empty hand? And why do two Japanese organizations disagree, by fifty million people, on how many practitioners exist? The answers run through invasions, kings, monks who studied in China, and a magazine story about a fight with a foreign boxer.

• 2. The Banned Sword Myth

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  King Sho Shin, who reigned from 1477 to 1527, is often credited with collecting weapons across the Ryukyu Kingdom. The popular belief holds that disarmed Ryukyuan samurai developed karate to fight Satsuma's samurai. For a long time this was repeated as if it were historical fact. Recent researchers have questioned that whole chain of cause and effect. An inscription on the parapet of Shuri Castle's main hall, dated 1509, says swords, bows, and arrows were to be piled up as weapons of national defense. Scholars of Okinawan studies now argue the correct reading is that these arms were collected and used as weapons of the state, not sealed away in a warehouse. The Satsuma Domain's 1613 notice was looser than the legend suggests. It banned only guns outright and required swords to be reported and approved. Princes, magistrates, and samurai were still permitted privately owned weapons, and practice was never prohibited. Even after subjugation, Ryukyu produced known masters of swordsmanship, spearmanship, and archery. Some researchers now dismiss the disarmament origin story as a rumor on the street with no basis at all.

• 3. Many Names, One Hand

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  On the 25th of October 1936, a roundtable of karate masters met in Naha and formally resolved to write the art's name as empty hand. The decision settled a long drift in spelling and meaning. In 2005 the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly designated that date as Karate Day. Originally there was an indigenous Ryukyuan art called te, meaning hand. In the 19th century a Chinese-derived art called tode emerged alongside it, and as the older te declined, the two blurred together. Around 1905, when the art entered Okinawa's public schools, tode came to be read in Japanese style as karate, written with the character for Tang, or China. Rising tensions between China and Japan made those Chinese origins suspect. The earliest documented swap of the Tang character for the homophone meaning empty appeared in Karate Kumite, written in August 1905 by Chomo Hanashiro, who lived from 1869 to 1945. In 1929 the Karate Study Group of Keio University tied the new spelling to the concept of emptiness in the Heart Sutra. A further change added the suffix do, meaning the way, marking karate as a path of spiritual discipline rather than only fighting technique. Since the 1980s, Kyokushin Karate, founded by Masutatsu Oyama, has written the name in katakana, the script Japan reserves for foreign words.

• 4. Masters Of Okinawa

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  Choken Makabe earned the nickname Makabe Chan-gwa because he was like a fighting cock, and the ceiling of his house is said to have been marked by his kicking foot. He was a man of the late 18th century, one of several named masters of te whose stories survive. Nishinda Uekata and Gushikawa Uekata were active under King Sho Kei, who reigned from 1713 to 1751, the first skilled with the spear and the second with the wooden sword. The name tode is said to have been popularized by Kanga Sakugawa, who lived from 1786 to 1867 and was nicknamed Tode Sakugawa. A samurai from Shuri, he traveled to Qing China and brought back arts that were new and different from te. Matsumura Sokon, born in 1809 and dead in 1899, was by one account his student and became the origin of many Shuri-te schools. Matsumura's own student, Itosu Anko, who lived from 1831 to 1915, created the simplified Pin'an forms for beginners and in 1905 helped introduce karate into Okinawa's public schools. His students included Gichin Funakoshi, Kenwa Mabuni, Motobu Choki, and others, earning Itosu the title Grandfather of Modern Karate. A separate lineage came through Higaonna Kanryo, who returned from China in 1881 and founded Naha-te, and through Uechi Kanbun, who lived from 1877 to 1948 and studied in Fuzhou to escape Japanese military conscription.

• 5. Crossing To The Mainland

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  In May 1922, Gichin Funakoshi displayed pictures of karate on two hanging scrolls at the first Physical Education Exhibition in Tokyo. The following month he gave a demonstration at the Kodokan in front of judo founder Jigoro Kano and other experts, the real start of karate's full-scale arrival in the capital. Funakoshi published the first book on karate that same year, and in 1926 Motobu Choki published the first technical book on sparring. In November 1922, Motobu took part in a judo versus boxing match in Kyoto and defeated a foreign boxer. A magazine with a circulation of about one million reported the fight, and karate and Motobu's name became known across Japan almost overnight. To make the imported art feel Japanese, Funakoshi borrowed from judo the training uniforms, the colored belts, and the ranking system, all originated and popularized by Jigoro Kano. Funakoshi had consulted Kano directly in his efforts to modernize. By 1935 Funakoshi had renamed many kata, arguing their old Chinese-style names were unintelligible for teaching karate as a Japanese art. In 1936 he built a dojo in Tokyo, and the style he left behind became known as Shotokan, after his pen name Shoto, meaning pine wave, and kan, meaning hall.

• 6. From Kata To Combat

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  There are no contests in karate, Gichin Funakoshi once stated flatly. In the early years on the mainland, kata training was the main focus, there was almost no sparring, and there were no matches at all. Yet judo and kendo were already holding bouts, and young people in Japan grew dissatisfied with practicing forms alone. Shigeru Egami recalled that on a 1940 visit to Okinawa, he heard of karateka being ousted from their dojo for adopting the sparring they had learned in Tokyo. Leading judo practitioners pressed the point, asking why karateka would not make their art understandable to the general public beyond kata. Young men such as Hironori Otsuka and Yasuhiro Konishi devised their own forms of kumite, the prototypes of today's sparring, drawn partly from Motobu's emphasis on it. In pre-war Okinawa, practitioners had sparred under the name iri kumi, allowing strikes, choke holds, and joint locks, but in a controlled way to avoid injuring vital areas. Pre-arranged sparring came in the early 1930s, and free sparring followed a few years later for Shotokan students. A fully full-contact path arrived in 1957, when Masutatsu Oyama formally founded Kyokushin, a synthesis of Shotokan and Goju-ryu built on physical toughness and full-force sparring. Born a Korean named Choi Yeong-Eui, Oyama gave rise to a style now often called knockdown karate.

• 7. The Way And Its Philosophy

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  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form itself. Funakoshi quoted that line from the Heart Sutra in Karate-Do Kyohan, drawing on a text prominent in Shingon Buddhism. He read the kara of karate-do as a call to purge oneself of selfish and evil thoughts, since only a clear mind could understand what the art offered. He insisted a practitioner be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, open to criticism, and devoted to courtesy above all. Karate, he said, is properly applied only in those rare situations in which one really must either down another or be downed by him. He thought a true devotee might use it in a real fight no more than perhaps once in a lifetime, and warned that practitioners must never be easily drawn into a fight. Many schools codify such ideas in a set of guidelines called dojo kun, emphasizing perfection of character, the importance of effort, and respect for courtesy. The do suffix carries the same weight that separates judo from jujutsu and kendo from kenjutsu. It marks karate as a path to self-knowledge, not merely a study of technique. Funakoshi also prized personal conviction, teaching that in a time of grave public crisis one must have the courage to face a million and one opponents, and that indecisiveness is a weakness.

• 8. Out Into The World

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  In 1945, Robert Trias opened the first dojo in the United States, a Shuri-ryu school in Phoenix, Arizona. After World War II, Okinawa became an important United States military site, and servicemen stationed there carried the art home. The martial arts films of the 1960s and 1970s, especially kung fu films and Bruce Lee pictures from Hong Kong, launched a craze that pushed karate into mass popularity, though Western audiences often failed to tell karate, kung fu, and tae kwon do apart. The Karate Kid, released in 1984, and its sequels carried the art deeper into American popular culture, with the television sequel Cobra Kai reviving that interest in 2018. In arcades, Karate Champ popularized the one-on-one fighting game genre in 1984, and Capcom's Street Fighter followed in 1987 with multiple karateka characters. The art spread unevenly across borders. In the Soviet Union it appeared in the mid-1960s, was banned in 1973 in favor of sambo, briefly federated in 1978, banned again in 1984, and only fully freed after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. In Korea, masters trained under Funakoshi during the Japanese occupation later shaped taekwondo, whose original forms were identical to karate kata. In August 2016 the International Olympic Committee approved karate as an Olympic sport, and it made its debut at the 2020 Summer Olympics with sixty competitors in kumite and twenty in kata. It was left off the 2024 program, but has made the shortlist for possible inclusion in the 2028 Summer Olympics.