‘Karate’ in Japan was a backwater activity.
The problems karate had in gaining a foothold.
Funakoshi Gichin.
Konishi Yasuhiro, friendship and influence.
Otsuka’s technical development.
Clues found in the kata.
A few pointers to set context.
Prior to 1918 nobody in mainland Japan had ever heard of ‘karate’.
‘Chinese boxing’ may have been mentioned among sailors and merchants in Japanese ports like Yokohama, Kobe or Nagasaki. People who had travelled to China’s southern ports might have encountered some rough fighting skills in Fuzhou or Shanghai, but ‘karate’ would have been an unknown.
The karate we know today originated in Okinawa, an island outpost on the southern tip of Japan. If you were looking for a UK comparison you might say relations between Okinawa and mainland Japan were not dissimilar to those between England and Ireland. The impression I get is that the same historical condescending attitude of the English towards the Irish that existed for hundreds of years was also present in the Japanese mindset.
Apart from its trading assets Okinawa was pretty much a backwater. The Japanese mainlanders struggled to appreciate anything culturally elevated about Okinawa, nothing that matched Edo or Kyoto. This attitude permeated into pretty much any cultural import that might stray on to the Japanese mainland; it was this mode of thinking that was going to be a major hinderance to Okinawan karate establishing any kind of toehold in Japan.
There’s a complex dynamic here. As Japan emerged out of feudalism and was propelled at a headspinning rate into the modern age, one of the many secrets of success was to latch on to already well-designed foreign imports and make them even better. There are so many examples of this, right into the modern era. I remember how people laughed when a Japanese spin-off company associated motorbike manufacturer said they were going to make musical instruments. Nobody is laughing now as Yamaha make the finest most respected musical instruments in the world. It’s the same with cameras.
The Japanese even did this to conserve their older decaying cultural assets in the martial arts; this was how Jujutsu was modernised into Judo, the same with all the crumbling branches of ancient Kenjutsu schools; bring it all together, inject the sporting element and you have modern Kendo. There is a separate debate about what was left behind, and whether the price of modernisation and homogenisation is just too high – but, what’s the alternative? Unfortunately, the answer is; extinction.
Let’s see how that plays out with Otsuka Sensei’s introduction to the imported Okinawan art of Karate.
By Japanese standards Okinawan karate was a messy affair. For the Japanese establishment it was a balance sheet of positives and negatives.
On the positive side someone from the military had spotted that Okinawan karate developed strong bodies with impressive physiques, and being purely pragmatic realised that maybe this was something worth promoting. On the back of this, representatives of Okinawan karate were happy enough to put demonstrations on in front of the right people. This was a smart move.
On the negative side; the structural methodology did not mesh well with the established Japanese schools. This really needed to be sorted if they were to be accepted. The key points seem to have been: