Gichin Funakoshi

The founder of modern karate.

To History

Introduction

Martial arts were kept extremely secret and were used to assassinate anyone who stepped out f line. Martial arts can be traced back over a thousand years ago and is thought that karate w as developed using two styles taught by the Chinese.

How karate was invented.

Originally martial arts were taught to monks by a Buddhist in the shae lin temple in china. t was found that the monks were too weak and so a system was developed to strengthen them. Martial arts was kept extremely secret.

Martial arts eventually developed to what we refer to as:

Karate
Judo
Tiquando
Ju Jitsu
Akeido

Each type of martial art has a huge history behind it.

We are going to talk about karate which I teach. Now there are many styles within each martil art for example: Shotokan, wado ryu, tang so do.

In kung fu there are styles known as: Wing Chung, Praying Mantis etc.

For hundreds of years the Chinese were great martial artists. People from Japan who learnt the Chinese fighting method knew it as karate; kara (which means Chinese) and te for hand.

There was a boy who was born in 1868 who was taught by two famous masters at that time. This was kept secret as the Okinwawa government banned martial arts. Each master trained him in a different martial art. The two arts were Shuri-te and Naha-te. It was the molding of these two arts that were to form Shotokan karate in the future. When the boy grew up he introduced karate to Japan in 1917 when the government lifted the ban on martial arts. He then became the founder of shotokan karate. Now remember that karate still meant 'Chinese hand', at this time the meaning of karate changed to'empty hand'. The reason why it was still called karate today was because Kara also meant 'empty' as well as 'Chinese'. Karate had spread throughout Japan by 1935. By 1957 the founder of karate died but his students went on and traveled the world promoting shotokan karate. It was only in the last few 40 years that karate came to Britain.