About fourteen hundred years ago Daruma (Bodhidharma), the founder of Zen Buddhism, left western India...
About fourteen hundred years ago Daruma (Bodhidharma), the founder of Zen Buddhism, left western India, penetrating mountain ranges including the Himalayas, and crossing unabridged rivers through complete wilderness, to travel to China to present lectures on Buddhism. Since even present roads between India and China would not be described as good, one can imagine the greatness of Daruma's spirit and physical strength so great that he should have been able to conquer with such courage this difficult, several thousand mile way alone. In later years, as he travelled to the Shaolin Temple (Shorin-ji) in Hunan Province in China to lecture there on Buddhism, a great multitude of followers fell one by one in exhaustion from the harshness of his training. Daruma then set forth a method of developing the mind and body, telling them, "Although the way of Buddha is preached for the soul, the body and soul are inseparate. As I look at you now, I think it likely that you will not complete your training because of your exhaustion. For this reason, I shall give you a method by which you can develop your physical strength enough to enable yourselves to attain the essence of the way of Buddha." The method he set forth is contained in the Ekkin Kyo (Ekkin "sutra"). With it, the monks were able to recover their spiritual and physical strength, and it is said that these monks of the Shaolin Temple came to be known throughout China for their courage and fortitude.
In later times, after teaching of this method originally proposed by Daruma spread to many other places, it came to bear the name of its origin and was called Shorin-ji Kempo. It was this method that eventually reached the Ryukyu Islands and developed into Okinawa-te, the forerunner of present-day karate.
In the southern part of Japan are located the Ryu-kyu Islands of which Okinawa is the largest. These group of islands is located 550 km. from mainland Japan-Kyushu and 700 km. from China.
Around the 12th century the famous hero King Sh Hashi united all the islands under his rule. In order to assure the position of the ruling class, the possession of arms by the common people was forbidden. Later on about the 16th century all weapons in the islands were confiscated by the ruling Satsuma clan of Japan. At the same time there were many practitioners of martial arts who travelled to China to learn martial arts, that were brought back to Okinawa. It is probably for these reasons that the development of martial arts took a tremendous impulse forward and developed in the Okinawan martial art that we know today. At the beginning of the 19th century, Karate was accepted by the Okinawan authorities as an official physical education program and thus the future of karate was secured. Karate spread rapidly in Japan and slowly but surely in continued its spreading around the globe.
The father of modern karate and creator of the Shotokan style Sensei Gichin Funakoshi, the father of modern karate and founder of the Japan Karate Association was born in Shuri-Okinawa in 1868 and died in Tokyo-Japan in the 26 of April 1957. In the year 1922 Sensei Funakoshi was requested to give a karate demonstration in Japan. Until then this fighting art was known as "Chinese hand", but Sensei Funakoshi renamed karate and change the characters to read "empty hand". With this change he indicated that with the practice of karate it would be possible to develop the character of the practitioner. At this time he coined the famous sentence "karate ni sente nashi....there is no first to attack in karate".
To Sensei Funakoshi karate was a system of self-defence physical conditioning, not of competition.
By the time Sensei Funakoshi died, he had seen the completion of the first instructor's course and also the first request for an Official J.K.A. Instructor, it came from the Far East University in the Philippines. Takayuki Mikami, one of the only three original graduates from the training program was given this post and he remained there for 2 years, teaching karate on a full time basis. In 1958 Hawaii was honored to count with the services of another great instructor Hirokazu Kanazawa, Mikami's classmate, and there it began the emigration of karate to the world.
In May 1961 Teruyuki Okazaki, then revered by many as the best karate man ever born, arrived to the City of Philadelphia as the first official J.K.A. instructor in the USA. The same year Hidetaka Nishiyama went back to the USA to oversee the building of a new empire in North America and counted among his instructors men like Takayuki Mikami who went to Kansas City first and later on to New Orleans, Yutaka Yaguchi was assigned to Denver in Colorado after a long period in Los Angeles. Masataka Mori replaced Kanazawa in Hawaii and later on in 1967 moved to New York City. Tetsuhiko Asai and Takehiko Nozaki stayed respectively in Hawaii. Shojiro Sugiyama not an official instructor, but nevertheless a respectable karateka founded a strong organization in Chicago. Masaaki Ueki and Shigeru Takashina went to Florida, Katsuya Kisaka to New Jersey and Shojiro Koyama to Arizona. In Europe was placed Taiji Kase with his headquarters in Paris, France. Satoshi Miyazaki in Belgium, Hideo Ochi in Germany, Hiroshi Shirai and Takeshi Naito in Italy, Keinosuke Enoeda in England.