Goju Ryu History

While the art of Karate originated on the island of Okinawa off the southern coast of mainland Japan, a great many fighting systems had existed in Asia for thousands of years. The various Chinese-based martial arts that were practised on Okinawa were collectively known as ‘Tode’, or ‘Chinese Hand’. However, Okinawa already had its own native combat systems, known simply as ‘Te’.

The name ‘Karate’ only came into being in 1936 when the masters of the various systems of Te (Naha-te, Shuri-te and Tomari-te) met to discuss how the Okinawan martial arts might best be moved forward into a new era. At that meeting it was agreed that the combat systems they were currently practising should come together under the umbrella name of ‘Kara-Te’ - empty hand.

Karate was therefore never meant to be a ‘style’ in its own right; rather a global term to represent all unarmed fighting arts. Therefore, although the name ‘Karate’ is relatively new, the fighting art that we practise has a heritage of several thousand years.

Oral tradition has it that late in the 19th Century an Okinawan Naha-te exponent called Kanryo Higaonna travelled to Southern China where he trained under a White Crane master named Ryu Ryu Ko. On Higaonna's return to Okinawa he continued to teach where one of his students began to emerge as exceptional. This student's name was Chojun Miyagi.

After Higaonna Sensei's death in 1915, Chojun Miyagi combined his knowledge of the Chinese systems with that of his own native Te. Miyagi Sensei went on to transform Naha-te into a system of Karate instruction, which he later named Goju Ryu - the system of martial combat which we still practise today.

When Miyagi Sensei passed away in 1953, Ei'ichi Miyazato took over as head of the Okinawan Goju Ryu system, setting up the Jundokan in Naha City on Okinawa, to continue, and further, the teachings of his teacher, Miyagi Chojun Sensei.