60 Fun Facts About Karate

In which island realm, now part of Japan, did karate develop?

The islands are today's Okinawa; the art grew out of a local fighting system called te, meaning 'hand', under Chinese influence.

What does the modern spelling of 'karate' literally mean?

The older characters meant 'Tang hand', a nod to China; the homophone was adopted officially at a 1936 meeting of masters in Naha.

What did the original characters for karate, changed in the 1930s, mean?

Rising Japanese nationalism and tension with China made a martial art named after a Chinese dynasty awkward, so a homophone was swapped in.

What is a karate practitioner called?

The suffix -ka simply denotes a person who practises something, as in judoka.

Which Japanese domain invaded the island kingdom in 1609 and turned it into a vassal state?

The islanders were later banned from carrying swords, which is traditionally credited with encouraging unarmed fighting methods.

In which year was the island kingdom formally annexed by Japan as Okinawa Prefecture?

The Ryukyuan samurai who had carried the art lost their privileges, and karate nearly died out before it was taught in schools from 1905.

Which three Okinawan towns gave their names to the three early styles of karate?

Each area's teachers had their own kata and principles; Naha-te was founded by Higaonna Kanryō after years of study in China.

Who is known as the 'father of modern karate' and founder of Shotokan?

He gave a demonstration at Kanō Jigorō's Kodokan in 1922 and published the first book on karate the same year.

Shotokan takes its name from Funakoshi's pen name Shōtō, which means what?

Kan means training hall, so Shōtōkan is 'the house of Shōtō'; Funakoshi himself never named his style, calling it simply karate.

From which martial art did Funakoshi borrow the white uniform and coloured belt ranks?

Kanō Jigorō, judo's founder, originated both innovations, and Funakoshi consulted him while modernising karate for mainland Japan.

In which year did Funakoshi adopt the kyū/dan rank system?

Originally karate had only three belt colours, with ranks inside each.

Which three belt colours made up the original karate belt system?

Many Shotokan schools still use that scheme; the rainbow of colours came later.

What is the Japanese term for the first-degree black belt?

It literally means 'beginning dan'; beginners start at a high-numbered kyū, such as tenth, and count down.

Karate training is commonly divided into three parts. Which is the sparring part?

The word literally means 'meeting of hands'; kihon is basics and kata is forms.

What does the word 'kata' literally mean?

A kata is a formalised sequence of movements; demonstrating its applications against real opponents is called bunkai.

Which Okinawan master created the simplified Pinan (Heian) kata for schoolchildren?

He helped get karate into Okinawa's public schools in 1905, teaching the forms at elementary level.

Which style was founded by Chōjun Miyagi, a student of Naha-te's founder?

Miyagi went on using the old word te in conversation until the Second World War, long after the name karate was settled.

Kanbun Uechi, founder of the fourth great Okinawan influence, went to China at 20 for what reason?

In Fuzhou he studied under Shū Shiwa, a leading figure of a southern Shaolin style.

What did the founder of judo witness in Kyoto in 1908 that first exposed him to karate?

Students from the Okinawa Prefectural Middle School performed at the Butokuden; Funakoshi's own demonstration at the Kodokan followed in 1922.

What event made karate suddenly famous across mainland Japan?

The fight took place in Kyoto; until then karate's popularity on the mainland had been sluggish.

Which martial arts term, meaning roughly 'the way of', is added to karate to stress its spiritual side?

The same suffix appears in judo, aikido, kendo and kyūdō; jutsu, by contrast, means art or technique.

What is Karate Day, marked by the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly?

It commemorates the 1936 roundtable in Naha at which the masters agreed on the art's modern name.

Which full-contact style did Masutatsu Oyama formally found in 1957?

It blends Shotokan and Gōjū-ryū and, since the 1980s, has written 'karate' in katakana to seem modern.

Where was Masutatsu Oyama born?

Born Choi Yeong-eui, he took a Japanese name transliterating Baedal, an ancient Korean word for Korea.

What did Oyama famously do in public demonstrations to prove his power?

He sometimes grabbed them by the horns first; he also claimed to have completed the 100-man challenge three days running.

What is the ultimate test in Oyama's full-contact style, the '100-man challenge'?

It takes two and a half to four hours; former students dispute Oyama's claim to have done it three times in a row.

What is prohibited in most knockdown-karate competition?

Kicks to the head and knees to the body are fine, which produces the style's distinctive punishing bouts.

Which international body is recognised by the IOC as governing sport karate?

It admits only one national federation per country and runs the senior and junior world championships.

Roughly how many member countries does the World Karate Federation have?

It grew out of the World Union of Karate-do Organizations, which passed 150 members in the 1990s and renamed itself.

At which Olympic Games did karate make its debut?

It was one of four optional sports added just for that Games and was not kept for Paris or Los Angeles.

How many karate events were held at the Tokyo Olympics?

Three sparring weight classes each for men and women, plus one kata event each.

How many sparring weight classes did the Olympics use, compared with the five normally used by the WKF?

The two lightest WKF divisions were merged into single Olympic categories of -67 kg for men and -55 kg for women.

Who won the first Olympic gold in men's kata, at the 2020 Games?

The Okinawan is also a four-time individual world champion, a fitting winner in the art's birthplace.

Which Spanish athlete won the first Olympic women's kata gold?

She was 39 at the time and had won seven consecutive European titles.

Which was the first video game to popularise one-on-one fighting in arcades, in 1984?

Heavyweight Champ from 1976 was the first fist-fighting game; Capcom's Street Fighter followed in 1987 with several karate-fighter characters.

Who opened the first karate dōjō in the United States, in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1945?

It taught Shuri-ryū; a wave of ex-servicemen who had trained in Okinawa and Japan followed in the 1950s.

Which UFC fighters listed as training in Oyama's style include a Canadian welterweight legend?

A future UFC light-heavyweight champion fights out of Shotokan and Robert Whittaker trained in Gōjū-ryū.

Which former UFC light-heavyweight champion is the best-known Shotokan stylist in MMA?

His elusive, counter-striking style made 'karate' a live word in the cage again.

What is the makiwara used in Okinawan supplementary training?

This hojo undo equipment is mostly wood and stone; the nigiri game is the jar used to build grip.

Which 1984 film about a bullied teen and an Okinawan handyman popularised the art in America?

Its 2018 television sequel Cobra Kai set off another wave of interest; BrainPickle has a separate quiz on the films.

To which Los Angeles neighbourhood does Daniel LaRusso move at the start of the 1984 film?

Writer Robert Mark Kamen was asked by Columbia for something like Rocky, and based the story partly on a young Tum Pai student in Hawaii.

Which animated series featured Chuck Norris delivering a moral lesson at the end of every episode?

It rode the 1980s martial-arts craze that also filled arcades with fighting games.

Which style of karate does Neo learn as part of his downloaded combat training in The Matrix?

Keanu Reeves did four months of real training under Yuen Woo-ping before filming.

Which pen-name-bearing document lists Funakoshi's twenty guiding principles for karate?

Karate-Do Kyohan is his master text of Shotokan; the twenty precepts draw heavily on bushido and Zen.

What does the famous maxim on Funakoshi's memorial, 'Karate ni sente nashi', mean?

The monument stands at Engaku-ji temple in Kamakura and was unveiled in 1968.

In which year were the first All Japan Karate Championships held, the same year Funakoshi died?

Funakoshi had insisted 'there are no contests in karate', but his JKA students pushed for standardised competition anyway.

What is Karate Combat, launched in April 2018?

Bouts take place in a square pit with 45-degree sloping walls, three rounds of three minutes each.

Roughly how many practitioners worldwide does the World Karate Federation claim for karate?

Japan's foreign ministry puts it at 50 million; either way it is one of the most practised martial arts on earth.

What are the rules posted in many karate schools, stressing character, effort and courtesy, called?

Karate-do is meant to be about spiritual cultivation as well as fighting technique.

Which 1392 migration is one theory for how Chinese boxing reached Okinawa?

The professional families from Fujian settled at Kume Village in Naha and brought advanced learning with them.

Which Shuri samurai nicknamed 'Tōde' is credited with popularising the name 'Tang hand'?

He was a samurai from Shuri who travelled to Qing China to learn Chinese martial arts.

Which practitioner first wrote the modern characters for karate, in a 1905 text?

The new spelling only spread across mainland Japan through Funakoshi's and Motobu's writings in the 1920s.

Which Tokyo institution's karate study group in 1929 linked the 'empty' in karate to the Heart Sutra?

Funakoshi was its instructor; the Buddhist reading helped the new name catch on in Tokyo.

The 18th-century master Chōken Makabe was nicknamed 'little fighting cock' for what reason?

His kicking foot is said to have left marks on the ceiling of his house.

Higaonna Kanryō founded what became Naha-te in 1881 after years studying in China under whom?

His student Chōjun Miyagi went on to found Gōjū-ryū.

Who published the first technical book on kumite (sparring), in 1926?

Funakoshi had published the first book on karate of any kind four years earlier.

In Okinawan hojo undo training, what is the nigiri game used to develop?

It is a large jar; the makiwara striking post is the other famous piece of wood-and-stone equipment.

The word udundī, in the surviving old te style handed down by one aristocratic family, means what?

It has been handed down within the Motobu family since the days when te had few formal styles.

One theory says te grew out of which ancient Okinawan martial dance performed to sanshin music?

The dance survived in the Okinawan countryside until the early 20th century.

The 1613 Satsuma notice to the Ryukyu court is now seen as a lax rule because it banned only what?

Researchers now question the old story that a weapons ban drove the rise of unarmed combat.