Karate Trivia
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57 free Karate trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This karate trivia quiz starts in the Ryukyu Kingdom and ends in an Olympic arena. The history questions cover the invasion of 1609, the three towns behind Shuri-te, Naha-te and Tomari-te, the schoolboys who first showed the art to judo's founder, Motobu's fight with a foreign boxer, and the 1936 meeting that changed 'Chinese hand' to 'empty hand'. Gichin Funakoshi gets a run of questions, from his pen name to the belts he borrowed from judo and the maxim on his memorial. Then come the training and the styles: kihon, kata and kumite, the makiwara, the original three belt colours, Gōjū-ryū and Kyokushin, Mas Oyama's bulls and the 100-man kumite. The sport questions take in the World Karate Federation, the eight events of Tokyo 2020, Ryo Kiyuna and Sandra Sánchez, Karate Combat's pit, and the karateka who made it in MMA. Karate Champ, The Matrix and The Karate Kid round it off. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on karate, its founders, its styles and the Olympic competition, and each explanation adds one detail worth passing on. BrainPickle has separate quizzes on martial arts generally and on The Karate Kid films.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which island realm, now part of Japan, did karate develop?
Ryukyu
Ryukyu's fighting art is said to have been practised in secret, and mainland Japan took it up in the 1920s, after an Okinawan master was invited to show it in the capital.
Q 02What does the modern spelling of 'karate' literally mean?
Empty hand
Empty hand: kara is 'empty' and te is 'hand'. Okinawa's masters agreed on that spelling at a newspaper-sponsored meeting in 1936, and the anniversary is now the prefecture's Karate Day.
Q 03What did the original characters for karate, changed in the 1930s, mean?
Tang or Chinese hand
Tang or Chinese hand honoured the art's debt to China, which sat badly with the nationalism of 1930s Japan, so the first character was swapped for another that sounds the same.
Q 04What is a karate practitioner called?
A karateka
A karateka: the ending -ka implies a degree of mastery of an art, which is why a manga artist is a mangaka.
Q 05Which Japanese domain invaded Okinawa in 1609 and turned its island kingdom into a vassal state?
Satsuma
Satsuma's rule brought curbs on weapons, traditionally credited with spurring Okinawans to fight unarmed, though historians now question how much the two had to do with each other.
Q 06Before Japan annexed Okinawa's kingdom in 1879, karate was mainly practised by which class?
Samurai
Samurai. Okinawa's samurai families handed the art down in private, so when annexation ended their privileged position, karate came close to dying out.
Q 07Which three Okinawan towns gave their names to the three early styles of karate?
Shuri, Naha and Tomari
Shuri, Naha and Tomari. Te differed from town to town, so each version took its home's name: the old royal capital Shuri, the trading town Naha and the village of Tomari.
Q 08What is the short, sharp shout a karate fighter gives when striking called?
Kiai
Kiai. The shout is meant to startle an opponent and show fighting spirit, and it runs across Japanese martial arts: kendo fighters also shout as they strike.
Q 09Shotokan takes its name from Funakoshi's pen name Shōtō, which means what?
Waving pines
Waving pines. Funakoshi signed his poems Shōtō, after the sound of wind blowing through pines, and his students hung the name over the entrance of his training hall.
Q 10From which martial art did Funakoshi borrow the white uniform and coloured belt ranks?
Judo
Kanō Jigorō, judo's founder, originated both innovations, and Funakoshi consulted him while modernising karate for mainland Japan.
Q 11Which grades do karate students hold below black belt, counting down to first?
Kyū
Kyū. Beginners start at a high kyū number and count down to first, then the dan grades count back up; Funakoshi awarded karate's first dan ranks in 1924.
Q 12Which three belt colours did karate use before its modern rainbow of grades?
White, brown and black
White, brown and black. Ranks ran inside each colour, so one white belt covered several beginner grades, and some Shotokan groups still award only those three.
Q 13What is the Japanese term for the first-degree black belt?
Shodan
Shodan. It literally means 'beginning dan': in Japanese arts the first black belt marks a student who has grasped the basics, not a master.
Q 21Which suffix is added to the word karate to stress its spiritual side?
Dō
Dō. It means 'way': like other Japanese arts, karate traded the older suffix -jutsu, 'technique', for it in the early 20th century to mark a path of self-knowledge rather than a fighting method.
Q 22Which music star took up karate while stationed in Germany on military service?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley. He trained under German karate pioneer Jürgen Seydel during his Army posting, stayed devoted to the art for life and later put its moves into his live shows.
Q 23Which full-contact karate style did Masutatsu Oyama found?
Kyokushin
Kyokushin. Its bare-knuckle, full-force sparring gave full-contact fighting a second name, knockdown karate, after the style's own tournament rules.
Q 14Which of karate's three main training parts is sparring with a partner?
Kumite
Kumite. Funakoshi's early classes had almost none: he taught solo routines and doubted sparring was needed, until younger students in mainland Japan pushed for it.
Q 15What does the word 'kata' literally mean?
Shape or model
Shape or model. Each kata is a fixed sequence of moves, and Funakoshi renamed many of them so students in mainland Japan could pronounce and understand the old Okinawan names.
Q 16Ankō Itosu created the five short Pinan kata to teach karate to which learners?
Schoolchildren
Schoolchildren. Itosu taught at an Okinawan school and found the older kata too hard for his pupils, so he built these five as learning steps, and many karate styles still teach them.
Q 17Which karate style did the Okinawan master Chōjun Miyagi found?
Gōjū-ryū
Gōjū-ryū. The name means 'hard-soft style': Miyagi lifted it from a line in an old Chinese boxing manual about breathing hard and soft.
Q 18Kanbun Uechi, founder of Uechi-ryū karate, fled Okinawa for China in 1897 to avoid what?
Military conscription
Military conscription. Uechi slipped away to Fuzhou rather than be drafted, and the three kata he learned there became the core of Uechi-ryū.
Q 19In 1921 Funakoshi directed a karate display in Okinawa for which crown prince, who later became emperor?
Hirohito
Hirohito. The crown prince stopped in Okinawa at the start of his 1921 tour of Europe, and Funakoshi led a group of students through the display at the old royal castle.
Q 20Motobu Chōki made karate famous across Japan in the 1920s by beating which kind of foreign fighter?
A boxer
A boxer. Motobu was 52 when he won the challenge bout in Kyoto, and a story in the million-selling magazine King carried his name and karate's across the country.
Q 24Where was Masutatsu Oyama born?
Korea
Korea. Born Choi Yeong-eui in Gimje, he kept his homeland in his Japanese name: the characters for Masutatsu also read Baedal, an old poetic name for Korea.
Q 25Masutatsu Oyama built his legend on public demonstrations of fighting which animals bare-handed?
Bulls
Bulls. A film showed him bringing one down and his students claimed dozens more, though later accounts say the animals were weakened and the filmed bout staged.
Q 26In the ultimate test of Oyama's full-contact karate, one fighter spars a fresh opponent each round for how many rounds?
100
100. One fighter faces a fresh opponent every two minutes or so for hours on end; Oyama devised the test, and his own claim to have passed it three days running is disputed by former students.
Q 27What is banned in most bare-knuckle knockdown-karate bouts?
Hand and elbow strikes to the head
Hand and elbow strikes to the head. Fighters wear no gloves and may not punch the face, yet kicks and knees to the head stay legal.
Q 28Which Okinawan weapon, often taught alongside karate, is two short sticks joined by a rope or chain?
Nunchaku
Nunchaku. A popular story says it began as a farmer's flail pressed into service as a weapon, but scholars have found no evidence for that and its origin is unclear.
Q 29Shutō, karate's knife-hand strike, lands with which part of the hand?
The outer edge
The outer edge. English speakers call the blow a karate chop: the blade runs from the little finger down to the wrist, and karate fighters use it to block as well as to strike.
Q 30At which Olympic Games did karate make its debut?
Tokyo 2020
Tokyo 2020. Karate was one of five sports the hosts added for those Games alone; it was left out of Paris 2024 and, despite making the shortlist, of Los Angeles 2028.