The history of the martial arts is like any other history – lots of stories, some written, some embellished, some omitted, some altered, some forgotten. For me, the history of something is not so much about all the “facts” but about the trajectory of the people. So as you might read in any of the numerous books on the subject, a guy named Bodhidharma traveled from India to China where he found the Buddhist monks thin and sickly. He then introduced them to moving meditation – yoga.

As they developed this moving meditation into partner based drills, somehow, no one can explain this, these drills started to form the beginnings of Kung Fu. If anyone has found a great explanation for why Buddhist monks would ever have a worldview that supported violence when they would go to extremes not to harm even worms, I’d love to read/hear about it.

But as the story goes, somehow, they did. They created what is now called a “martial” art. That art continued to evolve into two main branches Wu-shu and Shaolin. One soft and flowing, the other hard and ballistic. Then later some traveling emissaries from China shipwrecked on a small island called Okinawa, one of the chain of islands called the Ryukyu – called the “Land of Happy Immortals” – recorded in 753 AD. After some undetermined amount of time and through various cultural interactions,  somehow Kung Fu became digested into Okinawan culture and emerged as Te, an Okinawan fighting style. Te was divided by three regions in Okinawa and named such: Shuri-te, Tomari-te, and Naha-te. Te meaning hand or fist.

At some point later, much later, in 1868 the father of modern “kara” “te” or “Chinese” “Fist” was born in the Shuri district of Okinawa. His name was Gichin Funakoshi and his story is worth telling! He was a Confucian scholar and trained under Master Itosu and Master Azato. However, despite some anti-Japanese sentiments in Okinawa, Funakoshi was asked to come to Japan by the Crown Prince to demonstrate “Chinese Fist” from Ryukyu. These demonstrations occurred from April 30 to May 30 in 1922 at the All Japan Athletic Exhibition.

Over the next few years, such demonstrations both in public and privately continued and Funakoshi eventually moved to Tokyo. The character for “kara” meaning Chinese was changed to “kara” meaning empty. Yes they are written the same. But incorporating a Chinese art in Japan just wasn’t pallatable. There is much speculation on this even today.

And so kara-te do, the Japanese art, was born.

There are entire books written about almost every preceding sentence and so I hope this very, very brief summary will encourage you to attend our seminar where we will go into much greater depth regarding the history of the techniques, the influence of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other influences including French educational methodologies which greatly changed how Karate-do would be taught…and more. The differences between the modern martial arts of judo, jujitsu, karate-do, aiki-do, ken-do, and others.

Join us for an enlightening session.

Date TBA

This seminar counts for extra credit for Dojo students and is open to the public.