Educational Technology and Change Journal

By    Jim Shimabukuro    (assisted by    ChatGPT)
Editor

[Related: Introduction+Part 1]

Did Okinawa have an indigenous fighting art? The official chronicle Kyūyō contains a violent story from the reign of King Shō Shin. A court figure known in Japanese as Kyō Ahagon Jikki (京阿波根実基) appears under the Sinitic-style name 虞建極 in the chronicle. He is attacked by a youth carrying a dagger. The text says that Jikki had “no inch of iron in his hand” and, using only kūshu (空手), broke both of the attacker’s thighs before staggering from the castle and dying of his wounds (1).    

Read through  modern karate, the characters  空手seem electrifying:  karate, in an eighteenth-century compilation recounting a sixteenth-century fighter. But the sentence is not naming an art. In classical usage,  空手  means empty-handed or unarmed. The passage documents a story about formidable personal combat; it does not document a system called karate, still less an indigenous school called  ti. Kadekaru Tōru’s source survey makes the distinction explicit (2).  

That gap between an act and an art, between a hand and a named tradition, is the problem at the center of this installment. The evidence strongly supports the proposition that Okinawans struck, wrestled, restrained, guarded, trained with weapons, and cultivated personal combat skills. It does not follow that those practices formed a single, commonly recognized pre-Chinese martial system called  ti.  

The history becomes clearer when those two propositions are kept apart.  

One character, too many meanings  

The word normally  romanized  ti  is written 手, “hand.” In the Shuri variety of Okinawan, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics records the headword as  tii, with a long vowel. Standard Japanese reads the same graph  te. The dictionary gives four broad senses: the bodily hand; a handle; skill, technique, method, or means; and, finally,  tōde  or the art of boxing. It separately records  唐手  as  toodii—usually written  tōdī  in English-language karate literature—and says it may be shortened to  tii  (3).  

This is  useful  linguistic evidence, but it has a date. The dictionary was first published in 1963 and revised in 2001. It documents how the word was known to twentieth-century speakers and scholars. It cannot, by itself, prove that seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Okinawans used  tii  as the formal name of an organized martial art.  

The semantic range is the trap. “Hand” can also mean dexterity,  a technique, a way of doing something, a dance movement, or an individual’s skill. English does something similar when it speaks of a hired hand, a hand at cards, or a musician’s touch. A statement that someone “knew  ti” could have meant that he had skill, knew boxing, or could perform a particular set. Without a dated context, translating every martial occurrence as the proper name  Ti  converts an ordinary and flexible word into an institution.  

Nor are  ti,  te, and  di necessarily  three  arts.  Tii  is the Okinawan reading;  te  is the standard Japanese reading;  dii  appears as the voiced second element in  tōdī. Mandarin Chinese would read 手 as  shǒu  and  唐手  analytically as  Tángshǒu, but the Ryukyuan records do not show Okinawans using that Mandarin expression. Assigning a precise historical Fuzhou reading to these Okinawan labels would add  certainty  the sources do not  contain.  

The safest conclusion is modest. It is documented that  tii became a colloquial Okinawan word for karate and boxing. It is plausible that this shorthand was in oral use before  the surviving  dictionaries and modern books. It  remains  disputed that  Ti  was the ancient proper name of one bounded, indigenous system.  

Combat before  ti  

The premodern record is not empty. It is simply untidy—and its vocabulary refuses to line up behind the modern narrative.  

The  Kyūyō story gives us an unarmed fighter but not an art name. In 1762, the  Ōshima Hikki  described the Chinese visitor  Kūsankū’s skill as  kumiai-jutsu  (組合術), an “engagement” or grappling-and-countering  art, and  linked it to Chinese  kenpō  (拳法). As Part 1 showed, that is evidence for a reported Chinese performance, not for indigenous  ti.  

A Ryukyuan aristocrat’s testament supplies another revealing cluster of terms. Aka  Chokushiki  (阿嘉直識, 1721–1784) advised his son on the accomplishments expected of an elite family. He recommended training in the Satsuma sword tradition Jigen-ryū  and referred to inherited scrolls for sword, spear, and naginata. He also wrote that  karamutō  and  yawara need not be practiced.  Yawara  is a familiar term for Japanese grappling or jujutsu.  Karamutō  is unresolved. It has been interpreted as  唐武道, “Chinese martial way,”  唐無刀, “Chinese unarmed [art],” or in other ways. Motobu Naoki argues that it denotes karate or an ancestral art, but the reading is disputed and the document does not equate it with  ti  (4).  

What the testament does  establish  is more important than any speculative spelling. An eighteenth-century elite household knew several martial practices with  different sources  and purposes. Japanese swordsmanship, long weapons, grappling, and an obscure unarmed or Chinese-associated practice could coexist in one family’s educational world. That is a martial culture, but not evidence of one standardized curriculum.  

The sharpest description of Okinawan striking appears in the anonymous  Satsuyū  kikō  (薩遊紀行), a travel diary from 1801. The writer, a visitor from Higo, recorded what a Satsuma official with Ryukyu experience told him. Ryukyuan swordsmanship and  yawara  were said to be unimpressive, but the islanders had  attained  unusual skill in punching. The account calls the practice  手ツクミ,  te-tsukumi, and says an adept summoned to the Satsuma office in Naha shattered six of seven stacked roof tiles; experts could also thrust with extended fingers (5).  

This is documented evidence for an 1801 report, not an eyewitness description by the diarist. It nevertheless supports specialized striking and conditioning. It also exposes a common error.  Te-tsukumi  in this passage is not described as wrestling. The surrounding sentences are about punching, penetrating, tile breaking, and finger thrusts. The term occurs nowhere else yet  identified  in the premodern karate record, and  Kadekaru notes a possible relation  to an Okinawan expression meaning “to strike with the hand” (2). Turning it into  tegumi, the later name attached to grappling, changes the evidence to fit the story.  

Other fragments broaden the picture. Basil Hall, whose British expedition stayed at Okinawa in 1816, watched Ryukyuan officials amuse themselves with “a sort of wrestling game.” One participant then copied the defensive pose of British boxers he had seen aboard ship, only to be stopped by another official, who insisted that “Loo-choo man no fight” (6). The scene documents playful grappling among officials and a politically useful performance of peacefulness. It does not tell us the rules of the game, its name, or its  ancestry.  

In 1874, Ernest Satow published a report that Ryukyuans were expert mounted archers and matchlock shots and that a trained boxer could break a large earthen jar or kill with one punch (7). Satow’s account was not a direct observation of every practice; it drew heavily on Japanese geographical writing. Even so, it fits the 1801 report closely enough to strengthen the case that powerful striking had become a recognized Ryukyuan specialty by the nineteenth century.  

The illustrated  Nantō  zatsuwa  (南島雑話, 1855) shows men conditioning their fists against a post or solid object under labels including  拳法術,  kenpō-jutsu. Yet the work concerns Amami Ōshima, not Okinawa Island, and its captions are difficult to read. It is plausible evidence for related conditioning practices within the wider island world, not proof of a kingdom-wide Okinawan system (8).  

Finally, a program associated with an 1867 court celebration  contains  the expression  棒并唐手, “staff and  tōde,” along with  kōshu  (交手), forms whose names resemble  Seisan  and  Sūpārinpē, and weapons demonstrations. The program survives through a later reproduction in Shimabukuro  Zenpatsu’s  1956 collection, so its transmission must be acknowledged. If accurately copied, it is the clearest late-kingdom evidence that  唐手  had become a recognizable performance category alongside other martial and theatrical arts (2).  

Its setting also matters. This was a court celebration, not a midnight lesson hidden from the authorities. The program contradicts the strongest version of the secrecy legend, in which an illegal art could never be named or displayed publicly. It does not prove that instruction was open to everyone; a select performance before the king is compatible with restricted teaching. It does show that by the kingdom’s final years, at least one circle could present  tōde  as an intelligible accomplishment. What it does not reveal is whether the performers understood that accomplishment as Chinese, Okinawan, or already inseparably both.  

Across these sources we meet  kūshu,  kumiai-jutsu,  kenpō,  yawara,  karamutō,  te-tsukumi, wrestling,  tōde, named forms, staffs, blades, archery, and firearms. We do not meet a premodern text that plainly says: “The Ryukyuan unarmed martial system is called  tii.”  

That absence does not prove the term was never spoken. It does prevent historians from treating the term as documented.  

Wrestling,  tegumi, and  mūtō  

Okinawa undeniably has a wrestling culture. Okinawan sumo  remains  a distinct jacketed grappling sport, and Hall’s 1816 scene shows that wrestling-like play existed among officials more than two centuries ago. The harder question is whether later words and origin stories can be carried backward into the kingdom period.  

Tegumi  is usually written  手組, literally “hand-grappling” or “joining hands.”  Mūtō  or  mūtū  is another regional term attached in later accounts to rough grappling, wrestling, or combative play. Modern karate writing sometimes presents  tegumi  as Okinawa’s primordial fighting method: children wrestled, the activity  acquired strikes, Chinese boxing supplied more sophisticated hand and foot techniques, and the blend became  ti  and then  tōde.  

As a reconstruction, this is plausible in the broadest human sense. Children wrestle; adults adapt play to combat; striking and grappling mingle. But the specific historical chain is a traditional account, not a documented sequence. The practitioner source most often cited for it is Nagamine  Shōshin’s  1986  Tales of Okinawa’s Karate and Sumo Masters Based on Historical Fact and Oral Tradition.  Its title accurately signals its mixed evidentiary method; it is not a premodern witness (9).  

More recent ethnographic work supplies firmer dates but not ancient origins. Itani Yasuhiko’s study of  mō-ashibi, rural youth gatherings centered on courtship, music, and dance, records memories of prewar and early postwar village life. One account describes  mūtō  as a kind of fighting game made by loosening or  modifying  karate kata. Other communities held Okinawan sumo or staff contests. These recollections document a twentieth-century social world in which grappling, karate, weapons, dance, and courtship occupied the same nighttime spaces (10). They do not  establish  that  mūtō  existed under that name in the eighteenth century, or that it was karate’s original substrate.  

The responsible finding is therefore two-layered. Local wrestling and grappling are strongly supported and almost certainly older than their surviving descriptions. The antiquity, fixed meaning, and developmental role of the labels  tegumi  and  mūtō  remain uncertain. Most important, the 1801  te-tsukumi passage cannot be recruited as the missing early citation for  tegumi: it describes striking.  

The armed world around the empty hand  

The image of a weaponless kingdom has made  ti seem like a necessary substitute: if Okinawans lacked arms, their native genius must have migrated into the fist. The record examined here points in another direction.  

Aka Chokushiki’s family possessed Japanese martial scrolls and practiced Jigen-ryū. Satow’s source described mounted archery and matchlocks. The 1867 celebration placed  tōde beside staff and other weapons. The  Satsuyū kikō  compared punching with swordsmanship and  yawara, which implies that all three were intelligible categories. Research on Ryukyuan weapons controls likewise shows regulation shaped by rank, office, occasion, and political authority—not the absolute disappearance of arms assumed by the popular “ban created karate” story (11).  

This matters for the social setting of  ti. Royal and aristocratic households, Kume Village scholar-official families, interpreters, envoys, guards, local administrators, and men who traveled to Satsuma or China did not all have the same duties. Some needed ceremonial accomplishment; some handled policing or personal protection; some trained for status, health, display, or reputation. A court guard’s restraining technique, an envoy’s self-defense, a village wrestling match, a family’s sword scroll, and a specialist’s kata could all be locally Okinawan without belonging to one system.  

The sources are especially poor at connecting an office title to a precise curriculum. A man remembered as a guard may also have been an administrator, diplomat, or household retainer.  Later  genealogies can document his rank and journeys while saying nothing about how he fought. Conversely, a family story may preserve his martial reputation without  identifying  his official duties correctly. It is plausible that protection work encouraged close-range striking, seizing, escorting, and weapons retention. It is not documented that “the palace guards” shared one art called  ti. That phrase often  turns  a social group inferred from biographies into a school for which no register, syllabus, or appointment record has been found.  

Nor does “elite art” mean “standard elite art.” The surviving sources show plural skills transmitted through households and personal networks. They do not reveal a royal academy of  ti, a common syllabus, ranks, examinations, or a kingdom-wide teaching office. Calling the whole field  ti  may be convenient for modern discussion, but convenience is not evidence that historical practitioners classified themselves the same way.  

Did karate hide in the dance?  

The dance hypothesis has an unusually early and respectable advocate. In a 1914  Ryūkyū  Shimpō series, Asato  Ankō—speaking to his student Funakoshi Gichin—suggested that  tōde  was an indigenous Okinawan martial art and that the vigorous rural dance called  maikata  or  mēkata  (舞方) preserved it in an undeveloped form (2).  

That is  important  testimony. Asato was born in the Ryukyu Kingdom and belonged to the generation trained before karate entered public schools. But the statement was recorded decades after the world it purported to explain, and its grammar is conjectural: Asato was offering what he thought the origin might be. It documents a 1914 theory, not a premodern transmission record.  

Technical resemblance deserves investigation. Okinawan dances can  contain  low stances, turns, hand formations, stepping patterns, feints, and forceful accents familiar to karate practitioners. The ethnographic material is even more suggestive. Itani cites a description of  maikata  as a “free form” incorporating karate kata, performed with heavy footfalls and ending in pushing and throwing rather than dangerous punching (10). This is strong evidence  of exchange between martial and performative movement in the recent past.  

It does not  identify  the direction of borrowing. Dance may preserve older combative  gesture. Karate may have entered  dance. Both may have drawn on a shared vocabulary of masculine display, rhythm, balance, and competitive play. A movement can also look martial because the human body has a limited number of efficient ways to step, turn, brace, push, or strike.  

The dance claim is therefore plausible as a case of cultural overlap and disputed as a claim of direct descent. Similarity is a clue. It is not a family tree.  

A native art after centuries of contact  

The word “indigenous” creates a second historical trap. It can mean locally made, locally owned, or deeply embedded in Okinawan society. It can also imply untouched by outsiders. The first meaning fits karate far better than the second.  

By the time the records become even moderately descriptive, Ryukyu had lived for centuries in contact with China and Japan. Chinese investiture missions stayed for months. Ryukyuan students and envoys traveled through Fuzhou. Kume Village  maintained  Chinese-derived scholarly and diplomatic traditions. After 1609, Satsuma imposed political control and Japanese martial practices entered elite life. Southeast Asian trade and movement among the Ryukyu and Amami islands added further channels. Separating an original Okinawan layer from every acquired element may be impossible even in principle.  

Local innovation does not require cultural isolation. Okinawans could adopt a Chinese form, alter its rhythm and applications, connect it with local wrestling, teach it inside an official family, and make it Okinawan within a generation. They could also carry older island practices into a Chinese-influenced curriculum without preserving their former names. “Indigenous” is best treated as a question about local transformation and social ownership, not as a claim of martial purity.  

This is where the strongest revisionist scholarship refines rather than erases Okinawan agency.  Kadekaru  does not argue that Okinawans had no combat skills. He argues that the familiar umbrella concept—an  ancient unarmed  art called 手 (tii)—is not found in the premodern records surveyed and may have been assembled in the  Taishō period as teachers explained karate’s origins (2,12). The documentary record supports a locally distinctive martial culture. It does not support a sealed native system waiting intact for Chinese boxing to arrive.  

When the familiar story appeared  

The modern origin narrative can be dated more closely than the ancient art it describes.  

In 1908, Itosu Ankō submitted his “Ten Precepts of  Tōde” to Okinawan educational authorities. Its opening says that two streams,  Shōrin-ryū  and  Shōrei-ryū, had come from China.  Itosu  describes fists and feet, conditioning, kata applications, entering and receiving, releases, and seizing methods. He does not explain  tōde  as the fusion of Chinese boxing with a named indigenous  ti  (2).  

In 1914, Asato’s recollection supplied a native hypothesis through  maikata. Then, in  Ryūkyū  Kenpō Tōde  (1922), Funakoshi gave the fusion model its clearest early printed form. He proposed that an Okinawan art called  te  had existed first; Okinawans who studied Chinese martial arts compared the two, selected strengths, and attached the character 唐, “Tang” or “Chinese,” to the resulting  tōde. Crucially, Funakoshi introduced this as something that “may be surmised,” not as a fact  established by a cited kingdom document (12,13).  

By 1941, Okinawan scholar Shimabukuro Gen’ichirō could summarize what had become the recognizable consensus: a local art called simply  te, later joined by Chinese boxing and further developed under weapons restrictions. Yet he opened by admitting that karate’s origins still had no settled theory and that the scarcity of documents had forced him to revise his own earlier account (14). The modern formula was becoming  conventional  at the same time careful writers were acknowledging how little directly supported it.  

That formula  remains  visible in present-day official explanations: Okinawa’s ancient  tii, Chinese martial influence, fusion, and eventual karate (15). As cultural genealogy, it is elegant and may capture an important truth. As a literal chronology of two clearly bounded systems, it is more confident than the surviving premodern evidence.  

What can be claimed  

Okinawa possessed local combat traditions before karate became a modern public art. That conclusion is strongly supported. The record includes unarmed personal violence, powerful punching, finger thrusts, wrestling-like play,  yawara, weapons training, mounted archery, firearms, family martial scrolls, kata-like performances, and a late-kingdom category called  tōde. These practices existed in village, court, official, and family settings, and Okinawans made choices about what to learn, preserve, combine, and display.  

It is also plausible that  tii served informally as a broad word for boxing skill or “the hand” before it entered modern print. Oral vocabulary rarely waits for historians to record it.  

What cannot presently be claimed as documented is an ancient, unified, commonly recognized indigenous martial system called  Ti  that existed before substantial Chinese influence and later fused, as a complete tradition, with a separate complete tradition of Chinese boxing. No surviving premodern source located in the strongest modern survey uses 手 (tii) that way. The sources instead name particular skills and practices in changing language.  

The mystery of  ti  is therefore not solved by choosing between “Okinawan” and “Chinese.” The more defensible picture is a field of local fighting, wrestling, weapons, performance, and official skills repeatedly altered through contact. Okinawa did not merely receive karate from elsewhere. Nor can its early art be isolated from the maritime world that helped form it.  

Part 3 will enter that world directly: the shipping lanes, tribute missions, study residences, merchants, interpreters, and port institutions that connected Ryukyu to Fujian—and made Fuzhou the most important external city in karate’s early history.  

References  

1. Zheng, Bingzhe, et al., compilers.  Kyūyō  (球陽), vol. 1, completed 1745. National Archives of Japan Digital Archive.  https://www.digital.archives.go.jp/file/1239759  

2.  Kadekaru, Tōru. “Kindai ni  okeru  karate no  rekishi: Karate no  meishō no  hensen ni  tsuite, senzenki no  tankōbon, shinbun,  zasshi nado no  kiroku  kara  yomitoru” [History of Karate in the Modern Period: Reading Changes in Its Name from Prewar Books, Newspapers, and Magazines].  Research Journal of Budo  44, no. 3 (2012): 175–183.  https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/budo/44/3/44_175/_pdf  

3. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.  Okinawa-go Jiten  [Dictionary of the Okinawan Language], Shuri dialect data, entries “tii” and “toodii.” First published 1963; revised data edition 2001.  https://mmsrv.ninjal.ac.jp/okinawago/  

4. Motobu, Naoki. “‘Aka  Chokushiki  Yuigonsho’ ni  miru  18-seiki no  Ryūkyū no sho-bujutsu: Jigen-ryū,  jūjutsu,  karamutō” [Ryukyuan Martial Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Aka  Chokushiki  Testament: Jigen-ryū, Jujutsu, and  Karamutō].  Research Journal of Budo  42, supplement (2009): 10.  https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/budo/42/Supplement/42_10/_pdf/-char/ja  

5. Ono, Masako, Keiko Kanna, Megumi Taguchi, and Chika Tomita. “Kishi Akimasa Bunko ‘Satsuyū  kikō’” [The Kishi Akimasa Collection’s  Satsuyū  Travel Diary].  Shiryō  Henshūshitsu  Kiyō  31 (2006): 215–258.  https://sitereports.nabunken.go.jp/121018  

6. Hall, Basil.  Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island. London: John Murray, 1818. Project Gutenberg.  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/29051/pg29051-images.html  

7. Satow, Ernest Mason. “Notes on  Loochoo.”  Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan  1 (1874): 1–30.  Wikisource  transcription.  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Transactions_of_the_Asiatic_Society_of_Japan/Series_1/Volume_1/Notes_on_Loochoo  

8. Koyama,  Masatatsu. “Karate.”  Nipponica: Encyclopedia of Japan.  Shogakukan, updated December 13, 2019.  https://japanknowledge.com/contents/nipponica/sample_koumoku.html?entryid=1318  

9. Nagamine,  Shōshin.  Shijitsu  to  Kuden ni  yoru  Okinawa no Karate, Sumō  Meijinden  [Tales of Okinawa’s Karate and Sumo Masters Based on Historical Fact and Oral Tradition]. Tokyo: Shin  Jinbutsu  Ōraisha, 1986.  CiNii  Books bibliographic record and contents.  https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BN0255789X?l=en  

10. Itani, Yasuhiko. “Okinawa no  mō-ashibi ni  miru  ‘shūzoku  to shite no  kyōiku’” [Education as Custom Seen in Okinawa’s  Mō-ashibi].  Japanese Journal of Adult and Community Education  50, no. 1 (2020): 1–10.  https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jssace/50/1/50_1/_pdf/-char/ja  

11. Bittmann, Heiko. “Karatedō-shi  to  kinbu seisaku ni  tsuite no  ichikōsatsu” [A Consideration of Karate History and Weapons-Control Policy].  Kanazawa University International Student Center Bulletin  17 (2014): 1–22.  https://kanazawa-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/31385  

12. Kadekaru, Tōru.  Okinawa Karate no Sōzō to Tenkai: Koshō no Hensen o Tegakari ni Shite  [The Creation and Development of Okinawan Karate: Through Changes in Its Designations]. Doctoral dissertation, Waseda University, 2017.  https://waseda.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/40324  

13. Funakoshi, Gichin.  Tōde: Ryūkyū Kenpō  [Tōde: Ryukyu Boxing]. Tokyo: Būkyōsha, 1922. National Diet Library Digital Collections.  https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000039-I971654  

14. Shimabukuro, Gen’ichirō. “Karatedō no kigen to sono enkaku” [The Origin and Development of Karatedō]. In  Ryūkyū Hyakuwa. Ryūkyū Shiryō Kenkyūkai, 1941. Aozora Bunko transcription.  https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001526/files/51946_60912.html  

15. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. “Okinawa Karate no Shōkai” [Introduction to Okinawan Karate].  https://www8.cao.go.jp/okinawa/okinawakarate/shokai/karate-shokai.html  

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