2. The Mysteries of Naha Te (J)

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By Graham Noble

This was all so long ago, in the the dark ages of karate history. The idea that Kanryo Higaonna’s Te originated in Okinawa and not China was gradually forced upon me as I tried to work through all the material on the history of his style. But there had been others before who had hinted at this. Takao Nakaya for example, in the 2011 edition of his “Karatedo History and Philosophy” suggested that Kanryo Higaonna may have learned some of his kata in Okinawa. Three years later, in the 2014 edition of the book, Nakaya’s doubts seemed to have grown, and he wrote “Anyway, it is uncertain that Higaonna learned from someone when he was in China.” And reading through the various forums and web sites I found that Mario McKenna, an excellent researcher in both Goju Ryu and To-on Ryu, had come to something like this conclusion previously: it appeared that Mario too had been puzzled by the available historical material. In his 2007 article on the structure of Goju kata, he suggested that the four “core” Naha-te kata (Sanchin, Seisan, Sanseru and Suparimpei) “represent an Okinawan boxing method.” And in a 2005 interview for the online “Meibukan Magazine”, he told Lex Opidam: “I feel that fundamentally Kanryo Higaonna’s system was a complete form of village karate that he had learned in Kunida (Kumemura) as a young man.” In one of his blogs about weapons training in To-on Ryu Mario also referred to “the supposed ‘Chinese origins’ of Naha-te.”

On the “Traditional Fighting Arts Forums” thread “Re Xie Zhong Xiang”, “Fredo” (26 January 2011) noted of the various theories about Higaonna’s studies in China: “We may be barking up the wrong tree entirely. We don’t have a real name for Ryuru Ko (Why is that he (Higaonna) did not know how to write his teacher’s name?), the forms line up more with extant forms before he left, he did not speak Chinese, the power generation and other basics of Ming He (Whooping Crane) are clearly different from Goju, and even the account of the time he spent in China is being debated . . . On returning, there is a strong incentive in Okinawa for him to have a Chinese background (due to the weight given to Chinese culture) and a clear lineage, for both social and simple convenience reasons (it’s easier to explain). Isn’t it possible that Ryuru Ko is simply a symbol for the various people he learned from and with in China, perhaps with one teacher influencing him more than others, but still not really one person at all. He clearly did not pass on a Chinese system, and in my opinion was not a lineage bearer in one. Maybe he simply used a single name to represent ‘those that came before’, and that the uncertainty in who this person was has a pretty simple explanation.” (Posting 26 January 2011).

That seems a wise post . . . except that, the question arises, if Kanryo Higaonna did not pass on a Chinese system and wasn’t a lineage holder in one, did he actually learn any Chinese system at all? Was he ever actually in China?

The question “Why is that he (Kanryo Higaonna) did not know how to write his teacher’s name?” seems to be easily answered - He was illiterate, or said to have been. But the issue of language is a real problem. There is no mention of Higaonna speaking Chinese or using any Chinese terms in his teaching, and this is strange for someone who is supposed to have lived in China for ten to fifteen years or more, or even just three years.

There are elements of Chinese styles that seem to have been absent in Higaonna’s teaching. There are no two-man sets, for example, though these are a feature of Chinese styles, and as several people have noted, there are no weapons, and yet all Chinese boxing systems include the use of various weapons. Li Zai Luan’s “Hao Ch’uan”, the book that first stirred my interest in Fujian Crane style, for example, has illustrations showing the staff, the trident, the halberd and the sword. The exclusive use of empty hand forms is a feature of Okinawan Te, not Chinese Quan fa. There have been occasional statements that Higaonna did know a couple of weapons, but there is no proof of that, and no Chinese weapons forms have been passed down. Shigekazu Kanzaki, the inheritor of Juhatsu Kyoda’s To-on Ryu, taught three weapons forms, Tsuken Shitahaku no Sai, Chatanyara no Sai, and Soeishi no Kon – but these are established Okinawan, not Chinese, forms.

Maybe, as Miyagi himself said, the whole story began back in 1828 in Okinawa, but we have no idea how, or who was involved. And how could Miyagi be sure about events that may have taken place over a hundred years before he was writing, and sixty years before he was even born? We have no idea what sources he may have used, or how reliable they might have been. We can never know anything about this, but if the Chinese origins of Higaonna’s style did indeed go back that far then it’s likely that over time the Okinawan practitioners of the art made their own changes to produce a distinctive style of “Naha-te.” I don’t think there is any evidence that Kanryo Higaonna learned from Aragaki; we don’t know who might have taught him, but after going through all this I have come round to thinking that Kanryo Higaonna learned his Te in Okinawa – not China - and then made changes to suit his own ideas and experience. His supposed stay in Fujian, if he ever was there, may have influenced his teaching, but the distinctive Fujian forms don’t come through strongly in his karate. Although it is the “tradition”, we don’t seem to have any hard evidence that he actually was in Fujian for any length of time, or at all.

The inclusion of a form of Sanchin, albeit at several removes from the various forms of that name that we know from Fujian styles, indicate an original link with China somewhere back in history. Interestingly, Sanchin is one kata where it is generally agreed that Kanryo Higaonna made changes. The consensus is that the original Sanchin was something like the Uechi Ryu version, but that Higaonna changed the open hands to fists, slowed the performance of the kata, and formalised the breathing. Interestingly, some karateka remembered the old performance of Sanchin with open hands. Writing in 1938 in “Karate Do Taikan” Shinpan Shiroma noted that “In Sanchin kata both hands are held at mid-level and simultaneously strike using yoko-nukite”, (the spearhand strike with the fingers held horizontally), and Meitoku Yagi once said that “my grandfather also knew a little karate and I saw him practice Sanchin kata with his hands held open.” What’s intriguing about Shiroma’s statement is that, since he can’t have been writing about the Uechi Ryu Sanchin (if we accept that Uechi Ryu was not taught in Okinawa until the 1940s), it suggests that some karateka were still using the open hand Sanchin into the 1920s or even 1930s.

It’s possible, or even probable, that Higaonna made changes in the other kata. Perhaps it was he who standardised the three forefist thrusts in Sanchin stance that begin each of the other three “core” Naha-te kata, (Sesan, Sanseru, and Suparimpei/Pechurin), and emphasized signature techniques such as the right elbow - left chudan thust - kansetsu geri sequence that appears four times in Sanseru.

It’s just a thought, but I was intrigued by a suggestion on the “Traditional Fighting Arts” Forum by “Deshi” (24 January 2011), that Higaonna had “spliced together Sanseru himself from something”. If you take on board the idea that his Sanseru is in someway related to Niseishi, then you can see that Higaonna’s re-engineering must have been substantial. He could have added the three opening punches that are the mark of his other “core” kata, and in particular he seemed to have favoured that stepping forward - right elbow - left chudan thrust technique, with the addition of a kansetsu geri to complete the sequence, including it four times in the kata. That stamp/thrust kick itself seems to have been special to Higaonna’s teaching since neither Uechi Ryu nor the various Shorin Ryu forms appear to have had that technique. But again, all this is just supposition. We have no proof one way or the other.

If we take a limited view of what he taught, then from what we can judge, Higaonna’s kata were distinctive, containing an even mix of the fist and the open hand, and a rather close-in technique: moving in to strike with the elbow, and the use of low kicks, often stamp kicks to the knee; also the use of double punches, and open hand blocks including the distinctive mawashi uke. Those features must have given his Te quite a different flavour to the more popular Shorin Ryu styles of Itosu and others.

So perhaps Kanryo Higaonna was transmitting an old line of Te, to which he then made changes to produce his own unique style. If that is right, then he would have learned his karate in Okinawa in the 1860s and 1870s, when the art was still secret. He would have continued practising and developing his technique and begun teaching only when the art was becoming a little more widely practised in the later years of the century. According to the recollections of Chogi Yoshimura (1866 – 1945), Higaonna was known as an expert in Te by the 1880s and he was teaching in the later part of that decade. He must have had some reputation as an expert teacher to have become instructor at the Commercial School when he was in his fifties. But even then the transmission of a master’s teachings in Okinawa was always fragile and the tradition he represented would have been lost had it not been for two of his students who carried on his teaching and established schools of their own: Chojun Miyagi and Juhatsu Kyoda.

This is from an email by Mario McKenna to Pat McCarthy’s KSL study group, (5 April, 2001): “And now something even more blasphemous. What would people say if I thought Miyagi and Kyoda received an incomplete Tode system and both of them knew this? They realised that what they had learned from Higaonna was a simple ‘village’ Tode. And that this system would have disappeared into obscurity if it hadn’t been for the efforts of Miyagi and Kyoda?”

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