Shotokan Karate Tiger Symbol
Shotokan karate was one style of karate that was created by Master Gichin Funakoshi. He was born on November 10, 1868 and died when he was 89 years old on April 26, 1957. This karate style along with other styles and martial arts often has a blurred lineage of the actual origin. However, most people accept that the origin of karate comes from China when an Indian monk named Bodhidharma brought with him a system to develop the monks of the Shaolin Temple to handle the long meditation periods. At the same time there were some formal styles of te (fighting systems) being developed on the Okinawan islands. During those times around the late 1300s there were trade routes already established between China and Okinawa and along with trade the Chinese brought culture and martial arts to the islands. The Chinese martial art styles merged with the local Okinawan “te” styles to form karate.
Gichin Funakoshi studied the first early forms of karate under two different Okinawan karate masters named Anko Itosu and Anko Asato during the 1860s. Both Master Itosu and Asato are best known as the grandfather of modern karate. Gichin Funakoshi eventually was labeled as the father of modern karate because he was the one responsible for popularizing his karate style to the rest of Japan. In 1922 he was invited by the Ministry of Education to give the first public karate demonstration at the First National Athletic Exhibition in Tokyo. He decided to stay in Tokyo after the demonstration to further promote karate and to begin teaching interested students.
Even at that time Gichin Funakoshi did not call his style Shotokan Karate. He merely referred to it as karate when he was teaching. The ‘Shoto’ part comes from his pen name that he would use in his writings. He was an avid poet and calligrapher and he would use the name ‘Shoto’ in all his work. The word ‘Shoto’ means pine waves as in the sound the pine leaves produce when the wind blows through them. The word ‘kan’ means association or hall. Eventually the students taught by Gichin Funakoshi would call the place they trained by Shotokan and so the birth of Shotokan Karate.
Shotokan karate is the most widely practiced karate style. It has organizations and clubs all over the world. This has primarily been catapulted by Gichin Funakoshi’s students who he taught at various Japan universities who took the teachings and introduced them into western countries. From there some students followed the strict traditions of Master Funakoshi’s teachings and wanted those guidelines passed down from sensei to apprentice. Other masters would create a slightly modified style. However Gichin Funakoshi’s legacy and teachings remain alive in all the variations of the Shotokan Karate styles that we see today.
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