History of Karate
Nowadays it is almost universally accepted that Karate has its origins in the meditative fitness systems of India. While devoted monks travelled taking their religious beliefs to the outside world, in particular China, they also took with them a range of elementary exercises designed to assist in their religious practices. Under the social pressures of the day these exercises slowly became more systemised and the emphasis was shifted towards the practice of movements relevant to self defense. In China the first ancestor of Karate, the martial art, was born.
Over hundreds of years these movements spread throughout China, attracting the interest of many talented people whose names are lost to us now, but with each one adding his own small contribution and eventually giving rise to a number of contrasting systems across the Chinese empire. During this period the practice of these systems was always linked with other fields such as religion or medicine, and it was rare to find an expert practitioner interested solely in a system for its martial content. The land incorporated into the Chinese Empire at this time was so vast that it is difficult to imagine it as one entity. Regions had distinctly different characters due in some part to those other countries nearby which would participate in trade and consequently social interaction with the Chinese. The martial art was, of course, one of the areas experiencing an interchange of ideas, and knowledge developed in China, slowly filtered outwards and was grafted onto the indigenous systems of its neighbours.
Ginchen Funakoshi
Of particular interest to us in Karate is the small island of Okinawa lying off the south coast of China where the people practiced a system known as To-de
. Thanks to the influence of the many visitors and immigrants from China and from Okinawa residents spending time as residents on the mainland the main schools of Okinawan Karate developed. These were known as Shurite, Nahate and Tomarite after the three towns around which they sprang up. As in any useful practical tradition Karate knowledge diffused over Okinawa with the three styles becoming less distinct until eventually they blended into the complimentary schools of Shorin ryu and Shorei fyu. During this period the leaders of the Okinawan schools met and adopted the name of Karate
for their art. The name came from two words, Kara
meaning China and Te
meaning Hand. Along with the word Jutsu
implying the study of the technical nature of a practical art, the name Karate Jutsu was first applied.
Between the years of 1917 and 1922 significant developments took place when a highly respected teacher Gichen Funakoshi, known to us by his pen name Shoto
, performed a number of public demonstrations in front of, among others, Crown Prince Hirohito, later Emperor of Japan. He gave up his job as a primary school teacher to teach Karate professionally, giving him more time to travel. On a visit to Tokyo he met and became friends with Jigoro Kano who had developed the Grappling art of Jiu-Jutsu into the combative sport of Judo. His first book Ryukyu Kempo Karate
was published, becoming the art's first widely available technical reference work. All of this influenced him to in his decision to move and live permanently in Japan to develop and teach Karate in his dojo, the Shotokan
. At this time he decided to change the meaning of Kara
from China to Empty (much the same as in English we have words like 'where' and 'wear' meaning different things but sounding the same). He also substituted the word Do
, a way
, for Jutsu, changing the aim of Karate from a practical system of self-defense to a character building pursuit. Karate Jutsu had become Karate Do and the Japanese era of Karate had begun.
Mas Oyama
While Karate continued to be practiced as it had been on Okinawa, the pace of its development increased rapidly as new masters matured in Japan. With the varying influences of their own traditional martial arts they formed schools such as Wadoryu,Shitoryu, Gojukai, Shotokai and Kyokushinkai but for many the emphasis was now changing from a martial art to a combative sport. In this guise and with new training methods it was only a matter of time until Karate was introduced to the rest of the world.
Now that Karate is firmly established in Europe it is natural that a regional approach, tailored to those people practicing it, should become adopted. In particular Europeans seem to have accepted Karate in its sporting guise very easily, to the consternation of some oriental masters who see this as a watering down of Karate's traditional aims. There are those westerners who still fight to keep Karate as a Japanese art, seeing the traditional Japanese attitudes and practices as the factor which makes Karate so unique, and it cannot be denied that some Japanese masters are to be respected totally for their abilities and integrity, (the same being said about many living Okinawan masters). It takes a truly gifted and dedicated man to firstly recognise the necessity to practice Karate in a fashion fitting his birthplace, then to have the insight to understand what to reject of oriental attitudes and what to keep to preserve true Karate spirit. This is why most Karate groups in the west are nothing more than a collection of fellow sportsmen representing their clubs, or like minded people trying to capture the flavour of being a living samurai
! Karate has always moved forward due to the influences of such men, not afraid to question, reject and change where they felt it necessary. Truly original styles following the teachings of these men are nowadays rare and express the cutting edge of Karate. We have such a man in Hanshi Creton, the founder and President of Great Britain's only truly original style to date, Karate Jutsu Kai
.