Okinawan Karate — a Trade Route, Not a Lineage

Almost every account of karate names three roots: Shuri-te, Naha-te and Tomari-te, the three schools of Okinawan te from which today’s styles emerged.

The list is right and the reading is wrong. The three names are not school names — they are place names. Shuri, Naha and Tomari are three towns on Okinawa, and there is no clear evidence of separate schools with distinct curricula.

What actually distinguishes the three places is something else, and it is more revealing: they stood for three social strata. Shuri was the royal residence and the town of the nobility. Naha was the port and the town of merchants. Tomari was the smaller harbour, the town of farmers and fishermen.

Hence the thesis of this article:

The transmission of Okinawan karate follows no teaching lineage but a trade route and a system of social rank. What you knew depended on which harbour you lived in and which class you belonged to.

The documented channel: Kumemura and Fuzhou

The Ryūkyū Kingdom was a tributary state of China for centuries, and that circumstance is the actual channel — it is on record, whereas no founding lineage is.

In 1392 the first Ming emperor dispatched families from Fujian to settle in Ryūkyū; tradition gives the number as 36 families, with surnames such as Cai, Zheng, Jin and Lin. In 1393 this became Kumemura, a settlement of Chinese scholarship near Naha. Its weight is hard to overstate: almost the entire administration of the kingdom came from there, and posts were awarded by examination rather than by birth.

To this came the tribute missions. They ran via Quanzhou, later Fuzhou, and from there overland to the capital. Ryūkyūan envoys studied in Fuzhou, and for some it is recorded that they received instruction there in Chinese boxing and in medicine.

That is a different kind of origin finding from the usual one: no monastery, no monk, no founder — an administrative quarter and a shipping connection. Anyone wanting to know why Okinawan kata carry Chinese names, and why the technical closeness to Fujian is so marked, finds the answer here rather than in a legend.

The three towns

Town	Who lived there	What came of it
Shuri	king and nobility (pechin)	via Matsumura Sōkon and Itosu Ankō, the Shōrin lines
Naha	merchants, harbour trade	via Higaonna Kanryō, Gōjū-ryū
Tomari	farmers and fishermen	absorbed into the others

The classification is retrospective and it is coarse. It is reported that ordering by place only became customary in the 20th century — among other things in connection with Kanō Jigorō’s visit to Okinawa in 1927, where he is said to have used the place names to organise what he saw. That attribution is widespread but poorly secured; only the negative part is solid: there is no clear evidence of three separate schools.

Related to this is the division into Shōrin and Shōrei, made known through Funakoshi. It too is a Meiji-period classification rather than a transmitted school boundary, and its historical basis is weak.

1879: the practising class loses its function

The first of the two decisive dates.

Te was practised predominantly by the pechin, the kingdom’s warrior-official class — men with administrative and security duties. In 1879 the kingdom was abolished and annexed as Okinawa Prefecture.

With that this class lost its standing, its duties and its income. An art that belonged to the equipment of a social rank suddenly had no rank to carry it. That Okinawan te survived this break at all is not self-evident, and the reason can be named.

1901: saved by being rebuilt

Itosu Ankō brought karate into the physical education curriculum of Okinawa’s public schools from 1901. That is the process to which the subject owes its continued existence — and it is the same process to which it owes its largest gap.

For school teaching demands something other than the training of a social class. Itosu created the Pinan kata (Japanese Heian) for it, and the reason is recorded and unambiguous: the older kata were too difficult for schoolchildren.

That is an honest pedagogical reason. But it also means simplification happened at this point — and that the application layer did not survive the transfer into mass instruction in many lines. That is exactly the subject of Kata and Kumite: what is taught as bunkai today is to a considerable extent reconstruction. The moment the gap opened lies here.

Taken together this yields an uncomfortable balance: karate survived because it became a school subject. And it lost part of its content because it became a school subject. Both are the same decision.

1936: the Chinese hand becomes the empty one

The third date concerns the name.

The art was called tōde (唐手), “Chinese hand” — the name acknowledged its origin. In 1936 an assembly of Okinawan karate authorities in Naha resolved to use karate (空手), “empty hand”, instead.

The reason was not technical. It was to establish the art in Japan and have it officially accepted there — in a decade in which a Chinese origin was no help with that.

This is the same mechanism that brought dan grades to Okinawa twelve years earlier: the Japanese umbrella body required uniform grades, belts and training dress for recognition (see Grading Systems Compared). The name, the grades and the uniform came from the same direction and for the same reason.

Technical features

What connects the Okinawan systems across all stylistic boundaries:

Feature	Expression
Distance	closer than in post-war Japanese karate
Stances	more natural, less deep than in Shōtōkan
Hands	a large proportion of open hand, grabbing, tearing
Breath	audibly directed; in Gōjū-ryū a subject in its own right (ibuki)
Kata	few, but over years; Sanchin and Naihanchi as basic forms
Equipment training	hojo undo as a matter of course
Weapons	kobudō practised in parallel, often by the same people

The difference from Japanese karate is not a question of age or authenticity but of purpose: what arose on Okinawa as the training of a small group became, in Japan, a school and university subject — and mass instruction demands deeper, more visible, more examinable movements.

Connections to other martial arts

Karate — the subject as a whole, with its development after adoption in Japan
Shōrin-ryū — the Shuri line, via Itosu and Matsumura
Gōjū-ryū — the Naha line, via Higaonna Kanryō and Miyagi Chōjun
Uechi-ryū — the third main Okinawan line, via Kanbun Uechi’s training in Fuzhou; the most directly traceable Fujian connection
Shōtōkan — what became of the Shuri line after it left Okinawa
Kata and Kumite — where the application layer was lost
Kung Fu / Wushu — the other end of the trade route

Today

On Okinawa karate is maintained as a tradition in its own right and expressly distinguished from Japanese competition karate; there are federations, a karate museum, and for some years a deliberate promotion of Okinawa as the place of origin. The old lines continue, in small dōjō and with few kata.

For practitioners outside Okinawa the useful distinction is not “Okinawan equals authentic”. It is: was this kata developed for a small group of adults or for a school class? Both are legitimate, both are old enough — but they answer different questions, and the Pinan series says for itself who it was made for.

Karate
Shōrin-ryū
Gōjū-ryū
Uechi-ryū
Shōtōkan
Kata and Kumite
Grading Systems Compared
Kata and Bunkai Programme — what was lost after 1901, and how to test what has been re-derived
Pangai-noon — the special case: the one transmission datable to a single man and a single decade
Ankō Itosu — the man who institutionalised the subject in 1901 — and what that cost the applications
Kenwa Mabuni — the man who collected from this context what other lineages have lost
Kanbun Uechi — the returnee from Fuzhou whose line is the only one that can be dated precisely
Chōki Motobu — the practitioner who denied the subject belonged in a classroom
Matsumura Sōkon — the documented counter-case to the China → Okinawa direction: he brought Jigen-ryū from Satsuma