Karate @ FightUK.com

Read Part one.

The name Goju-Ryu.

The naming of Goju-Ryu came about more by accident than design. In 1930, one of Chojun Miyagi’s top students, Jin’an Shinzato was attending a Martial Arts convention in Tokyo. He was asked by numerous martial arts masters as to what school of martial arts he practiced. As Naha-te had no formal name he could not answer this question. Feeling his art would be looked down upon and given amateur status, he quickly picked Hankry-ryu, which means the Way of Half Hard. On his return to Okinawa he reported this incident to Chojun Miyagi. He liked Shinzato’s idea and took it one step further. After much consideration, Chojun Miyagi decided on the name ‘Goju-Ryu’ (hard and soft school) as a name for his style. He took this name from a line in the Bubishi (a classical Chinese text on martial arts and other subjects). This line, which appears in a poem describing the eight precepts of the martial arts, reads “Ho Goju Donto” (the way of inhaling and exhaling is hardness and softness). The whole poem reads as follows:
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India.

Based on mans’ instinct of self-defense, different fighting arts were developed in most cultures, especially in central Asia, Egypt and Turkey. The principles of the Asian martial arts are believed to have spread from Turkey to India, where they were further developed to sophisticated arts (”kalaripayt”).

The history of Karate as we know it today can be taken back to India, perhaps two thousand years before the Christian Era. India was the birthplace of a bare-handed martial art called, in Sanskrit, Vajramushtthi. Evidence seems to indicate that it was commonly practiced by the Kshatriya, which was the Warrior Class of that time, and which can be compared to the Japanese Samurai and the medieval Knights of Europe.
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