2. The Mysteries of Naha Te (F)

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By Graham Noble

It wasn’t unexpected that Xie Zhong Xiang, the supposed Ryu Ryu Ko, would turn out to be a White Crane practitioner. Crane style had become a quite popular choice for the root style of Naha-te and Goju Ryu, but that identification too creates a whole set of problems of its own.

Similarities between Crane style and Goju Ryu had been noticed by several people. For example, in a letter to “Inside Kung Fu” magazine, September 1983, reader Mark Mason of St. Petersburg, Florida noted: “I recently attended a tournament where I saw a demonstration by a Goju Ryu stylist, and I was struck by the similarity between some of his stances and movements and the stances and movements of White Crane style kung fu. Was Goju ever influenced by the Shaolin kung fu styles?” The magazine’s response was limited by the knowledge of the time and so it mentioned Kanryo Higaonna’s study in China, Chojun Miyagi’s study of Chinese styles and the influence of the “kung fu style called Kingai, which contains movements directly related to the five animal styles of Shaolin.” The response also mentioned that the name “Goju” came from the Bubishi, “the ancient Chinese classic,” but beyond these vague assertions it could add nothing at all about any specific technical similarities or links with Crane style, or any other system from Fujian. The reference to Kingai would have come from George Mattson’s 1974 “Uechi Ryu Karate Do”, in which Kanei Uechi referred to Kingai as a popular Southern Chinese style of kempo which became Goju Ryu in Okinawa. But no Chinese style called Kingai has ever been found.

Kanei Uechi, in fact, referred to the Chinese tea trader “Mr. Gokenkein” (Go Ken Ki) as a student of Kingai, although in fact Go Ken Ki practiced Crane style boxing, and Crane style is not Goju Ryu. The fact that Uechi also referred to Kingai and to Pangainoon - the supposed Chinese forerunner of his own Uechi Ryu, and which also has never been traced - as being two of the most popular styles in Fujian showed that he actually had no real knowledge of Fujian boxing at all.

Before mainland China began to open up a little in the 1970s and 1980s there doesn’t seem to have been much curiosity about what style Kanryo Higaonna had learned in Fujian. That was largely because of the lack of information on Chinese styles at the time: under Communist rule the mainland was closed off and there was almost zero material available on Fujian styles: no film footage, and almost no literature. In the early 1970s, when I had begun to take an interest in karate history, I would make frequent visits to London’s Chinatown to buy Chinese martial arts books and magazines, which were then plentiful and cheap. I also ordered books from Hong Kong, from Unicorn Press for example, which reprinted many of the earlier texts from the Republic (1912 – 1949). There were quite a lot of books available, but many were on the internal styles, Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Pa Kua, and the majority were on Northern systems. There were almost no books on Fujian styles, so although I set out with high hopes of finding some direct Chinese links with karate, I found very little, almost nothing in fact.

There was one book, though, “Hao Ch’uan” (He Quan) Crane Boxing, by Li Tsai Luan. This was a 1970s reprint by Unicorn Press in Hong Kong, from an original publication (1950s?), and the Crane style in this book seemed to show some distant relationship to Goju Ryu: there were similar hand positions to the Okinawan Sanchin and an occasional technique reminiscent of Goju, such as an elbow strike and backfist (?), and in particular there was a group shot showing students in various postures which looked like the Goju Sanchin in the hand positions and stances. There was another book published by Unicorn Press on Five Ancestors Boxing, “Wu Tsu Ch’uan Fa Tu Shuo” by Yeh Ch’ing-hai and Hsu Chin-tung, (1973), and that too showed a form called Sanchin. It wasn’t the Goju Sanchin, but it seemed to be related, albeit in a distant way.

As for magazines, there were many published in Hong Kong at that time, such as “New Martial Hero”, “Martial Magazine”, “Kung Fu”, and “Mo Do”. I liked these magazines, and I would scan them too for anything that looked like a Chinese antecedent of karate. In fact, apart from an occasional technical sequence from Wu Tsu Ch’uan (Five Ancestors Fist), or White Crane (a Sanchin form – and apart from a general basic similarity, this was quite different from the Okinawan Sanchin), I could find no trace of karate forms there either. A little later I also subscribed for several years to the mainland Chinese martial arts magazines, ”Wu Lin”, “Chung Hua Wu Shu”, and “Wu Shu Jian Shen”, and the results were the same – there wasn’t anything like a karate kata.

I still thought that maybe if you went deep enough into the Fujian styles you might find some old trace of Goju Ryu (and Uechi Ryu) but for the moment material on Crane and other Fujian systems was almost impossible to find. That changed maybe from the 1980s as more books, and even footage, became available. Over the years I tried to check out every book and article I could on Fujian styles and especially Crane/White Crane, but once again this search didn’t really go anywhere. Although there might be a few, occasional similarities, the basic principles, techniques, and forms of Crane Boxing were quite different from Goju Ryu. It seemed a hopeless search.

There was in fact one Crane form that could be traced directly to karate – but not to Kanryo Higaonna, or Chojun Miyagi’s Goju Ryu. This was the “Twenty Eight Steps” shown in one of the best Chinese books, the 1982 “Hao Ch’uan” (“Crane Boxing”) put out by the Fujian Peoples Publishing House. Except for a couple of sequences, this form can be matched, step by step, to the karate kata Nipaipo (“Twenty Eight”). Nipaipo, though, did not come from Kanryo Higaonna’s Naha-te, and nor is it practised in Goju Ryu. It is practised in Kenwa Mabuni’s Shito Ryu (as Nipaipo) and Juhatsu Kyoda’s To-on Ryu, (as Nepai) and the weight of opinion is that both Mabuni and Kyoda learned the kata in Okinawa from the Chinese tea merchant Go Ken Ki, who settled in Naha from around 1912. Go was a practitioner of Crane Boxing, and he was part of the 1920s Okinawan Karate Kenkyu Club which also included Mabuni and Kyoda as members. Kyoda student Shigekazu Kanzaki wrote that Nepai kata was “from the days of the Karate Kenkyu Club in Wakasa-cho. There was a fellow Karate Kenyku Club member named Go Ken Ki, a tea-seller at Higashi-cho, Naha. He was a Hakaku Ken (Crane Fist) expert from Fujian and was very skilled in Chinese Kempo Nepai Kata. Juhatsu Sensei was a successor of Nepai from him. Naha-te originally came from Fujian Province in China. It had been told that a Chinese kempo master called Lu Lu taught Kanryo Higaonna, and that became Naha-te. Therefore Juhatsu Sensei incorporated Nepai as another aspect of Naha-te.”

So anyway, this “Twenty Eight Step” form probably came into karate long after Kanryo Higaonna was supposed to have arrived back in Okinawa from Fuzhou, around forty years after, in fact. This later, identifiable transmission of a Chinese kata, though, reinforces the questions around Kanryo Higaonna’s study in Fuzhou and the lack of any recognisable Chinese forms in his teaching.

Over time, various pieces of film of Fujian styles have also became available. Maybe the first piece of relevant footage was taken by the Uechi Ryu group when they visited Taiwan on a research trip in 1966. At that time mainland China was completely closed off to foreigners but Taiwan was open to visitors and it was home to many different styles of Chinese boxing, both Northern and Southern schools, including Fujian styles and Crane boxing.

This footage lasts about twenty minutes and it shows a variety of styles and masters such as the well-known teachers of the Northern internal styles, Hung I-hsiang and Chang Chun-feng. Some Southern, probably Fujian-based forms are also shown. We don’t know the names of the masters or the specific styles, but although momentarily you may see a movement which reminds you of karate you don’t see anything like a karate kata, or even a short string of movements that looks like a karate kata. However, bearing in mind the profusion of Chinese styles and the distance in time from late 19th century China, maybe that isn’t surprising.

As the mainland opened up, more footage of Fujian styles gradually became available and from the 1980s groups of interested karateka were able to make the journey there to research links between Fujian kempo and karate. These visits produced their own articles and footage and now, with You Tube, there are numerous clips of Fuzhou styles available, especially Crane style. Going through all these many hours of footage is an interesting but frustrating experience: again, you will occasionally catch a movement or two that reminds you of a Goju (or Uechi Ryu) kata technique, but this never extends into a recognisable sequence, let alone a whole kata. There is nothing like a karate kata in any of these hours and hours of footage. It appears that, (with the exception of Nipaipo mentioned earlier), despite all the research of the last thirty years or so, not one karate kata has ever been found in China. Morio Higaonna, for example, who is convinced of the Goju Ryu kata’s direct and unchanged transmission from Fujian boxing, wrote in his “History of Karate, Goju Ryu” that on his first trip to Okinawa in 1987 he attended a meeting with fifteen teachers of various Fujian styles, including Crane, Dragon, Tiger, Dog, Tiger, Tai Qi Quan, Golden Lion, and Lohan. All the masters showed the Sanchin of their schools, and none was the same as the Goju Ryu Sanchin, although Higaonna thought that he discerned similarities in the Sanchin of Crane and Tiger styles in terms of “power of movements and harmony of breathing.” He noted however that “there were also clear differences marked by the more pervasive intermittent quick movements which are more typical of Goju Ryu’s kaishugata.” As for the other forms demonstrated, apparently there was nothing resembling a Goju kata. At the time of writing his book, Morio Higaonna had been to Fujian four times (1987, 1988, and twice in 1993) but seemed to have made little further progress in finding any direct links with the Goju Ryu forms. He wrote that he had asked many questions in an effort to discover which style Goju ryu could have come from, as well as more general questions regarding Ryu Ryu Ko, Kanryo Higaonna, and Chojun Miyagi, but he had been “unable to come to any definite conclusions” . . . . that is, the Chinese experts had nothing to tell him.

Apart from the existence of Sanchin forms there are a couple of other intriguing correspondences between Fujian boxing and Okinawan karate. In the technical exchanges on his visit Morio Higaonna also showed some kakie, and here both the Crane and Tiger teachers said that they had a similar training exercise which they called koki. There is a 1980s mainland video, “Fujian Nan Quan”, which shows this pushing hands practice – it’s done with a forceful thrusting movement – and also, briefly, the use of the “stone padlock” weights (the ishi-sashi of Okinawa) in training. This video shows excerpts from many Fujian boxing styles, both solo and two-man forms, and with a variety of weapons as well as with the empty hand, but again, although there are occasional moments when you might see a movement which reminds you of karate, there is nothing that looks like a karate kata.

Morio Higaonna wrote that, apart from the makiwara and kongoken, all the other items of training equipment used in Gou Ryu were also found in Fujian boxing, but that is not quite true. The ishi-sashi (the Chinese stone padlock) is found as a training tool throughout Chinese styles, and the gripping jars too are sometimes shown in articles on kung fu training, but the chishi, the use of heavy geta in training the legs, and such items as the tou (the bamboo sheaf used to train finger strikes) don’t seem to be found in Chinese boxing. The brief training hall footage shown on the video “Fujian Nan Quan” shows trainees hitting a canvas punchbag, punching with the stone padlocks, and lifting heavy stone weights (in the form of a rectangular cube with hand slots on either side), but otherwise there is nothing like the specialised training equipment of Okinawan Goju Ryu. In addition, unlike Goju Ryu textbooks, the various books on Fujian styles do not include material on the use of equipment. The emphasis on that form of training, and the methods used, seem to be Okinawan developments, although there may have been Chinese influences at some point.

There are relationships between Fujian and Okinawan styles, but the original nature of the links remains quite unknown. And despite all the research in Fujian, nothing close to a root style of Higaonna’s Naha-te has been found. Yes, there are occasional similarities and apparent connections: the use of a Sanchin form for one thing, but it seems clear that you can search all you want, but you will not find any of the Kanryo Higaonna kata, or anything resembling them, in the Chinese systems we know. Occasionally, going through the hours of available footage, you see a set of movements, and you can imagine that, many years and generations back, something like this could have been the beginning of an Okinawan kata. But such links may well go back in history beyond Kanryo Higaonna.

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