The style of karate we practice is Shotokan. Its founder was Gichin Funakoshi (pictured above), who was born in Shuri, Okinawa, in 1868,and died in Japan in 1957. Shoto was the pen name Funakoshi used when writing Chinese poetry. It means pine wave or wind in the pines, and Shotokan means house of Shoto. In 1922, Funakoshi participated in a karate demonstration in Tokyo, and afterward was persuaded to remain in Japan and teach karate. Eventually the karate style that bears his name spread throughout Japan. In 1949, Funakoshi's students from university karate clubs and private dojos all over Japan organized themselves into the Nihon Karate Kyokai (Japanese Karate Association, or JKA). Not long after its formation, disagreements arose among the JKA leadership, and many of the top black belts broke away to form their own organizations.
Meanwhile, Americans serving in the military in Japan and Okinawa after World War II were exposed to various forms of karate, and some studied it. One of these was Grandmaster Robert A. Trias, who founded the United States Karate Association (USKA) in 1948.
In 1957, Tsutomu Oshima, who had trained under Funakoshi at Waseda University and later was one of the first black belts to split from the JKA, brought Shotokan to the United States, establishing the first Shotokan karate club in this country at Caltech. He also founded the Shotokan Karate of America organization (SKA). Later, in 1972, he translated one of Gichin Funakoshi's books, Karate-do Kyohan, into English.
A few years after Oshima arrived in the United States, the head of the JKA instruction committee, Hidetaka Nishiyama, decided in 1961 to train instructors and send them allover the world to spread JKA-style Shotokan karate. He established a dojo in Los Angeles, while he sent other instructors to places in the U.S. cities that included Philadelphia, Kansas City, Denver, New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Florida, and Hawaii.
Of course, Shotokan karate and its Okinawan roots did not develop in a vacuum. Legend has it that in about 500 A.D. a Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma traveled from India to the Shaolin Temple in China, where he taught the Buddhist monks either a set of calisthenics that developed into an unarmed fighting system or an unarmed fighting system that he had developed by copying the movements of animals, insects, and the forces of nature. It's also possible that he taught them an empty-handed fighting method called vajramushti practiced by the warrior Kshatriya class in India, or that he and the monks adapted a form of chu'an fa, an empty-handed fighting method that existed in China long before Bodhidharma's time. In any event, over time the Shaolin styles spread throughout China, eventually evolving into hard and soft, or external and internal, systems.
From China, the Chinese fighting styles eventually made their way to Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu Archipelago that lies about halfway between Japan and China (and is now part of Japan), probably as early as the 7th or 8th century A.D. From the late 14th through the 18th centuries, contact between China and Okinawa continued, and Okinawans began to learn the techniques of Shaolin chu'an fa, or Shorin-ji kempo as it was first know in Okinawa. Over time, kempo evolved on Okinawa. It came to be known as Okinawa-te (Okinawa hand), to-te or kara-te (Chinese hand), or simply te (hand). Its study gained impetus from two major historical events, King Sho Hashi's conquest and unification of the three separate kingdoms of Okinawa and the occupation of Okinawa by the Japanese in 1609, both of which resulted in ownership of weapons by the Okinawans being banned and in weapons being confiscated or destroyed.
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