Karate — The Empty Hand of Okinawa

Karate (空手, “empty hand”) is the best-known unarmed martial art in the world — and one whose name is younger than the thing itself. It did not originate in Japan but on Okinawa, the main island of the former Ryūkyū Kingdom, from the fusion of an indigenous close-combat tradition called Te (“hand”) with Chinese systems that arrived over centuries of trade. Only in the twentieth century did it become a Japanese martial art: in 1922 Gichin Funakoshi demonstrated karate on the Japanese mainland, Japanised its terminology and its written characters, and opened the path into schools, universities and eventually the entire world.

What characterises karate is the primacy of percussion: punches, kicks, elbows and knees, delivered from defined stances with the aim of concentrating the power of the whole body into a single point. Locks, throws and chokes exist but remain secondary. Its curriculum rests on two pillars: kata, the fixed forms in which the technical inheritance is preserved, and kumite, partner work and competition. This double structure — preservation and application — still shapes every karate class today.

History

As the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Okinawa sat on a trading hub between China, Japan and Southeast Asia. The decisive influences came from there: Chinese boxing systems from Fujian met the indigenous Te. Two weapons bans — one under King Shō Shin in the early sixteenth century, another after the Satsuma domain’s conquest in 1609 — are popularly told as the birth of an unarmed art. Historically that connection is considerably weaker than the legend suggests: the bans were largely about controlling the nobility, and a pronounced weapons tradition developed in parallel as Okinawan Kobudō.

Into the nineteenth century, Tōde (唐手, “Tang hand”, meaning “Chinese hand”) was transmitted in secrecy. It crystallised into three local traditions:

Tradition	Town	Character
Shuri-te	Shuri, the royal city	fast, long range, linear attacks
Naha-te	Naha, trading port	close range, breath work, power-oriented
Tomari-te	Tomari, harbour town	hybrid of the two

The decisive break came around 1900 with Anko Itosu (1831–1915), who brought karate into the curriculum of Okinawan schools. To do so he defused the system: he simplified dangerous techniques, created the Pinan series as a set of beginner kata, and turned a close-combat art into a school subject. Almost everything now considered “traditional karate” has passed through this pedagogical filter.

In 1922 Itosu’s student Gichin Funakoshi demonstrated karate in Tokyo at the invitation of the Japanese Ministry of Education — and stayed. He replaced the character 唐 (“Tang/China”) with the homophone 空 (“empty”): “Chinese hand” became “empty hand”. The move was politically astute in a period of rising Japanese nationalism and philosophically compatible with the Zen concept of emptiness. Along with the gi, coloured belts and the dan system, karate simultaneously adopted the outward form Jigoro Kano had created for judo.

After 1945, US servicemen stationed on Okinawa carried karate to the United States; from there and through the Japanese federations it spread worldwide.

Technical Foundations

Karate organises its technique around three elements: stance (dachi), hip engagement (koshi no kaiten) and focus (kime) — the instantaneous tensing of the whole body at the moment of impact.

Area	Term	Content
Stances	立ち方 tachikata	Zenkutsu-dachi, Kiba-dachi, Kokutsu-dachi, Neko-ashi-dachi
Thrusting punches	突き tsuki	Oi-zuki, Gyaku-zuki, Kizami-zuki, Ura-zuki
Striking (open/other)	打ち uchi	Shuto-uchi, Uraken-uchi, Empi-uchi
Kicks	蹴り geri	Mae-geri, Yoko-geri, Mawashi-geri, Ushiro-geri
Blocks	受け uke	Age-uke, Soto-uke, Uchi-uke, Gedan-barai
Breathing	呼吸 kokyū	Ibuki (forceful), Nogare (silent)

Training is classically divided into kihon (fundamentals), kata (forms) and kumite (partner work). The belt runs from white through the coloured kyū grades to the black dan; the sequence of colours varies by federation and is a recent invention.

Core Techniques

Kata are fixed sequences against imaginary opponents and the memory of the style. Every movement has a level of application — the bunkai — which is not self-evident and is traditionally revealed only as rank increases. What looks like a block in the kata is often a grab, a lock or a throw in the bunkai. This interpretive work is one of the liveliest disputes in modern karate.

Central kata families:

Pinan / Heian — the five basic forms after Itosu
Naihanchi / Tekki — forms in horse stance, lateral movement
Bassai, Kanku / Kūshankū — intermediate forms, powerful openings
Sanchin, Tenshō — breathing kata of the Naha lineage, the core of Gōjū-ryū and Uechi-ryū
Seienchin, Sanseiru, Suparinpei — advanced Naha forms

Kumite ranges from the heavily prearranged gohon and ippon kumite, through semi-free jiyū-ippon kumite, to free jiyū kumite. Whether contact is controlled and pulled (sundome) or delivered fully divides the major camps of karate more sharply than any technical detail.

Philosophy

Funakoshi’s formula “karate ni sente nashi” — there is no first attack in karate — stands second among his Niju Kun, the twenty guiding principles, and marks the claim to run a fighting art as a path of education.

“The ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of its participants.” — Gichin Funakoshi

The shift from jutsu (technique) to dō (way) is not merely a change of label but a programmatic decision: karate is understood as lifelong formation in which technique is the means and not the end. Concepts such as zanshin (alert awareness after the act), mushin (mind without attachment) and rei (respect, expressed in the bow) are not ornament but training content. The dōjō-kun — four or five sentences depending on the school, recited together after training — keeps this claim present in everyday practice.

Styles and Schools

Karate is not a single system but a family. The four main styles recognised by the Japanese umbrella body:

Style	Founder	Lineage	Characteristic
Shōtōkan	Gichin Funakoshi	Shuri-te	deep stances, long range, most widespread
Gōjū-ryū	Chōjun Miyagi	Naha-te	hard/soft, breath work, close range
Shitō-ryū	Kenwa Mabuni	Shuri + Naha	largest kata repertoire
Wadō-ryū	Hironori Ōtsuka	Shuri-te + jūjutsu	evasion rather than blocking

Alongside these stand the Okinawan lineages Shōrin-ryū and Uechi-ryū, and the full-contact school Kyokushin, which Mas Oyama formed in 1964 from Shōtōkan and Gōjū roots and which represents the sharpest break with the point-fighting tradition.

Connections to Other Martial Arts

Chinese systems — the Naha lineage is closely related to southern Chinese boxing from Fujian; Sanchin has direct counterparts there
Okinawan Kobudō — Okinawa’s weapons art, transmitted historically alongside karate and still taught in many dōjō
Taekwondo — several founding figures trained Shōtōkan during the Japanese occupation; the early hyeong correspond to the Japanese kata
Kickboxing — arose directly from Japanese karateka’s dissatisfaction with point fighting
Jeet Kune Do — Bruce Lee’s critique of form-bound training was aimed substantially at the karate of his day

Today

Karate is the most widely practised unarmed martial art in the world; the World Karate Federation reports over 190 member federations. In 2021 the sport made its Olympic debut at the Tokyo 2020 Games in the disciplines of kata and kumite — and was then dropped for Paris 2024, with no public reasons given by the IOC. Karate is likewise absent from the Los Angeles 2028 programme. The disappointment within federation karate is considerable, not least because the host nations are themselves strong karate countries.

The discipline’s persistent conflicts are older than the Olympics:

Point fighting versus full contact — WKF rules reward controlled, pulled strikes; Kyokushin tournaments allow full contact but prohibit hand strikes to the head. Each format produces its own distortions relative to an actual confrontation.
Kata interpretation — the bunkai movement around authors such as Iain Abernethy argues that competition karate has lost the original close-combat meaning of the forms in favour of aesthetic execution.
Sport versus way — whether karate is primarily competitive sport or character formation determines training content, and the answer differs from dōjō to dōjō.

Karate remains practically significant as a mass participation sport with a low barrier to entry, as a children’s and youth sport, and as a foundation from which many athletes later move into kickboxing or MMA — where the distance management of karate-trained fighters in particular has proven durable.