3. Miyagi and Kyoda (A)

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By Graham Noble

The broad consensus is that Kanryo Higaonna began teaching sometime in the mid-1880s or early 1890s. Once again, contemporary references are almost non-existent, but in the September 1941 edition of the magazine “Gekkan Bunka Okinawa”, Chogi Yoshimura, who was born in Shuri in 1866, related that he had begun learning Te at about the age of eleven from a man called Ishimine who had taught him the kata Naihanchi and Passai. At age seventeen (1883/84) he had gone to learn from the famous Bushi Matsumura, training mainly in Useshi (Gojushiho) and Kushanku. A few years after that, around 1888 Yoshimura became a student of Master Higaonna. Yoshimura wrote that “In Naha, a certain Higaonna had distinguished himself . . . and in Shuri it was Itosu as the student of the honourable Matsumura”. . . . so Higaonna, who would have been thirty five then, was recognised as one of the leading experts on Okinawa even at that relatively early time. Yoshimura would travel from Shuri to Higaonna’s home in Naha about three times a month to study with the master. Yoshimura remembered that Higaonna’s home was near the beach in Naha, and he made a living selling firewood. Subsequently Higaonna would go to the Yoshimura home in the evenings to teach Chogi.

Yoshimura doesn’t mention any other students, or if there were any. Presumably Higaonna taught on a personal basis, and the teaching centred round the practice of kata, beginning with Sanchin as the basic training form. It wasn’t till quite a few years later, around Meiji 35 or 36 (1902/1903) that Higaonna’s two most famous students, Juhatsu Kyoda and Chojun Miyagi, began studying with him, so if Yoshimura is reliable, then there are thirteen or fourteen years of Kanryo Higaonna’s teaching that are completely unaccounted for. But that period too lay in the dark ages of karate history.

According to tradition, or at least the tradition we now have, Higaonna might teach his students just Sanchin and one other form. This seems to be confirmed by Yoshimura who wrote that he learned just Sanchin and Pechurin (Suparimpei) from Higaonna. Seibun Nakamoto, (1892 - 1984) another Higaonna student, told Morio Higaonna that he had learned only Sanchin and Sesan. Soke Ura (1895 - ?) said he had studied at the Shogyo High School for five years and learned only Sanchin kata, but that was training for school students and would have been limited anyway. According to Morio Higaonna, Kanryo would teach a student just one other kata, or at the most two kata, after Sanchin, but I have always found this hard to understand. Maybe some students learned only a kata or two because they trained at the public schools or simply because they stopped coming to regular training. Chogi Yoshimura wrote that he had learned Sanchin and Pechurin from Kanryo Higaonna, but he does not say how long his period of study was. His two kata from Higaonna actually fits in with his previous training with Ishimine, (who taught him Naihanchi and Passai) and Matsumura (Useshi and Kushanku), but from his own account Yoshimura was only with these instructors for five years, or maybe less. No doubt kata were given out slowly in those old days; student expectations were lower, and experts might not teach most students the full extent of their knowledge, but as a general system of instruction that “Sanchin plus one other kata” method seems flawed. With only a few students, how could Higaonna’s full art be transmitted in such a fragmentary and haphazard way? What about Juhatsu Kyoda and Chojun Miyagi, who learned more than just a couple of kata? We only know about Kyoda and Miyagi because they set up their own schools, but there may have been others who knew more than two forms. The orthodoxy among Goju Ryu practitioners is that Miyagi learned nine kata from Higaonna, but then how could his experience have been so out of line with all the other students? The usual answer of course is that Miyagi was a special student, the only student who was given Higaonna’s full teaching, but that is a kind of special pleading to legitimize Goju Ryu retrospectively and give it an exclusivity among all other schools. We don’t know enough about that period to be able to say any of this.

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