3. Miyagi and Kyoda (D)

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By Graham Noble

At the time of Higaonna’s death Miyagi would have been twenty seven years old, and if the histories ae correct then he had thirteen years or so of training behind him, maybe. That made him an experienced karate man, but he seems to have felt the loss of Higaonna badly. A few years later he told one of his students, Genkai Nakaima, that “Studying karate nowadays is like walking in the dark without a lantern. We have to grope our way in the dark . . . There are many things in karate which do not make sense and there are a lot of things I cannot understand. Therefore, while our grand masters are still alive we have to see them and ask many questions. I think it is still very difficult to find the answers even if we did so.”

What did Miyagi have to work with when Higaonna died? He had the kata, presumably experience in using the training equipment, perhaps some practical fighting techniques, though that’s just a guess. It used to be thought – and this is still the view held by some Goju Ryu people – that Miyagi’s karate was a faithful and unchanged transmission of Kanryo Higaonna’s Te, with a few later additions made by Miyagi himself, (junbi undo, Tensho and Gekisai kata etc). This view, however, was held because of style allegiance and the lack of any alternative viewpoint. Kanryo Higaonna had just a handful of well known pupils: apart from Chojun Miyagi, the best known were Juhatsu Kyoda, Koki Gususkuma, Taizo Tabara and Kenwa Mabuni, and apart from Mabuni very little was known about these other Higaonna students.

There were probably others too. In the short article he wrote on his memories of Kanryo Higaonna (“Gekkan Karate-do”, June 1957, Joe Swift translation) Saburo Kinjo referred to a student called Kadekawa, who had stuck in his mind as “a very strong martial artist.” Kadekawa had shown the young Kinjo and his schoolboy friends how to punch the makiwara, and one day, as a kind of demonstration, told Kinjo and three others to try and strangle him with an obi, (belt). They paired up and each took one end of the belt, which was wrapped around Kadekawa’s neck as he sat, but although they pulled as hard as they could they “could not even budge him, let alone choke him.” He allowed them to punch him on the torso with their fists wrapped in a handkerchief but their fists just bounced off. “Even though we were only kids,” Kinjo wrote, “we punched the makiwara, and each of us had confidence in our own strength. It goes without saying that we were upset at our ineffectiveness.”

Kinjo wrote that Kadekawa could jump up from a sitting position and kick the ceiling, a height of six feet: “a very formidable trick.” Kinjo also recalled that for a short time he and his friends had learned Naifanchi from Kadekawa, which means that he (Kadekawa) must also have trained in Itosu-style karate. He worked at the Naha Post Office but later was sent to work at the Kumamoto communcations bureau in Kyushu – and there, like many others, he disppears from karate history.

Shosin Nagamine wrote that Koki Gususkuma turned to Christianity and devoted himself to religion, and the implication is that that limited or stopped his teaching of karate. This Nagamine reference is the only information I have ever been able to find on Gusukuma except for a photograph in Shotokan Karate of America’s thirty year anniversary book (“SKA Heritage 30 Years”) which shows him standing with Tsutomu Ohshima and is captioned “(With) Master Koki Gusukuma (Shiroma) of Goju School, Osaka Sept. 1961.” The reference to “Goju School” indicates that Gususkuma may still have been teaching then – but what happened to his school? Similarly, almost nothing has been written about Taizo Tabara, although he appears in a 1924 group photograph along with Miyagi and Mabuni. Takao Nakaya gives Tabara’s dates as 1893 – 1985, so he was actually several years younger than both Miyagi and Kyoda. His karate was said to have been be very strong but again, we do not know how much he learned from Higaonna, or what he taught, if anything.

Kenwa Mabuni, the well-known founder of Shito Ryu . . . He taught a full range of kata, including the same Naha-te kata that Miyagi taught, in fact, but his study with Higaonna may only have been relatively brief. Years ago (1970s) I was told that Mabuni had not been with Higaonna for long because he had found the training too severe, but that sounds like the kind of put-down of other teachers that is fairly common in Goju Ryu circles. Some writers have asserted that Mabuni learned only Sanchin from Higaonna.

According to “Nihon Budo Taikei” (Volume 8, 1982) Mabuni probably only trained with Kanryo Higaonna for a couple of years or so. After graduating from the Itoman Suisan (Fisheries) School in 1907 he worked as a substitute teacher at Naha grade school and it was around then that he became friendly with Chojun Miyagi. That led to him studying Naha-te with Kanryo Higaonna, but the training was cut short by his conscription into the military, (a year after Miyagi, as a matter of fact). Mabuni was discharged from the army in 1912, joined the Okinawa Prefecture Police Academy and became a police officer. In Taisho 3, (1914) he was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Divison of Naha Police Station; Kanryo Higaonna died the following year. In any case, Mabuni’s army service and police duties would have limited his contact with Higaonna.

The important point about Mabuni’s Shito Ryu is that it includes all of the kata of Miyagi’s Goju Ryu and they are pretty much identical to the forms taught by Miyagi. The assumption must be, then, that Mabuni learned these kata from Miyagi. Interestingly, Miyagi’s son Kiei, in his 1965 “Karate Do no Tanoshimi Kata”, referred to Mabuni as his father’s “young assistant”, (in fact, Mabuni was only two years younger than Miyagi). In his 1934 book “Goshin Jutsu Karate Kempo”, Mabuni referred to Kanryo Higaonna “the founder of our style Goju Ryu Kempo” who “travelled to China to study kempo” and also mentioned “My senior, Chojun Miyagi” who was teaching “Goju-ha Kempo to his juniors on Okinawa.”

Although Kenwa Mabuni is best known today as the founder of Shito-ryu, a page at the back of his 1934 “Goshin-jutsu Karate Kempo” advertises his instruction in Goju Ryu: he is described there as a Shihan of Nippon Kempo Karate Jutsu, Goju-ryu Kempo. The advert describes karate/kempo as an ideal method of self defence and an ideal means of training the spirit; it can be practised by all people regardless of age or sex; it does not need a lot of space to practice, nor does it require any special equipment; it increases health and longevity, is safe to practise and does not take up too much time; it can be practised in groups or by yourself. Two dojo are advertised: the first (the Dai Nippon Kenpo Kansai Karate Jutsu Kenkyu Honbu) (?) at 6-4 Tsurumibashi-doori, Nishinari-ku, Osaka-shi, (Keiko (practice) on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, from 8pm to 10pm), and the second, the Shoshinkan Dojo, at 1-8 Minatoku Ichiba-doori, Osaka-shi, (Keiko on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 8pm to 10pm).

Mabuni was an important figure in the propagation of the Goju Ryu forms. The first published representations of Goju kata were in “Goshin-jutsu Karate Kempo” (which showed Sanchin and Seiunchin) and another 1934 book “Sepai no Kenkyu” (which showed Sepai). In his “Karatedo Nyumon” it was mentioned that Mabuni will “introduce the Higaonna style as well as other kata styles in “Karate Studies” (“Karate Kenkyu”) magazine”, but unfortunately “Karate Kenkyu” didn’t go past the first issue, and that project of publishing the Goju Ryu kata never got off the ground . . . it’s a pity.

But anyway, if Mabuni’s kata came primarily from Chojun Miyagi, then the only avenue left to compare Miyagi’s technique to the other senior students of Kanryo Higaonna was Juhatsu Kyoda and his style of To-on Ryu; however, comparison with To-on Ryu was all but impossible because there was almost no published material on the style. Katsumi Murakami had shown the To-on Ryu Pechurin (Suparimpei in Goju Ryu) in his 1973 “Karate Do To Ryukyu Kobudo”, and Eizo Onishi had shown Sesan and Sanseru in his 1987 book “Ken-do Gaku Taiyo”, but these were fragments and otherwise there was almost nothing.

A rare reference to Kyoda’s style appeared in an article by Goju Ryu karateka Seishin Koyama in the February 1981 edition of “Karate Do” magazine, (translated by Mario McKenna). Koyama wrote that he had once met Choko Iraha, at the time the Chairman of the Okinawa PTA, and a former student of Juhatsu Kyoda. Iraha had shown Koyama the Sanseru that he had learned from Kyoda and Koyama was surprised by the kata, which, he thought, “had an elegance that was completely different to what we (Goju Ryu) have.  Its way of using leg and hand techniques were so different.  I would have to say that it was very much like Chinese Ch’uan-fa.  It was not a hard or stiff kata like a mainland Japanese karate man would do, but more ‘soft’ and ‘flowing’ “ Iraha said that Kyoda had passed on this kata exactly as he had learned it from Kanryo Higaonna. “I cannot help but think that this is what ‘Naha-te’ is,” wrote Koyama. “There is something special to it.”

After meeting Choku Iraha, Koyama changed his view on Naha-te history. He came to believe that it was Kyoda who had passed on Higaonna’s karate unchanged, while Chojun Miyagi had continued to research and develop his own style after Higaonna’s death. Koyama wrote: “In the Okinawan karate world since the 1930s, it has been more or less assumed that Chojun Miyagi’s martial art was that of Kanryo Higaonna. However, I think that Kyoda’s martial art is orthodox and that indeed Kyoda passed on Higaonna’s martial art unchanged . . . Regardless of this statement, it is obvious that the leg movements, stepping and hand techniques are different. Therefore a problem arises as to whether it is proper to conclude that ‘Goju Ryu is Naha-te.’ “

This was an important article, because it was the first to indicate that there was another, distinct version of Kanryo Higaonna’s Naha-te which was rather different to Chojun Miyagi’s style. It suggested in fact that Miyagi’s Goju Ryu might not be a direct transmission of Higaonna’s old Naha-te.

Choko Iraha lived from 1901 to 1986. Like Kyoda he worked as a school teacher and became a school principal; he was Mayor of Ishikawa for six years and a twelve–year member of the Okinawan legislature in the post war period. Iraha said that he had trained for fifteen years with Kyoda and that he sometimes acted as substitute teacher at the Okinawa Kenritsu Dai Ni Junior High School when Kyoda couldn’t attend. Towards the end of that fifteen years Kyoda had told him ‘I have nothing more to teach. I am fully satisfied.’ But what happened to Choku Iraha’s line of karate? Checking through the exhaustive lineage charts given by Takao Nakaya in his “Karate Do History and Philosophy”, there are no students listed under Iraha’s name; presumably his karate died with him.

Kyoda had taught at various schools, but what he could teach there was necessarily limited, and basic, and otherwise he seemed to have had few karate students. Iraha said that, at the time he was studying with him, he was Juhatsu Kyoda’s only pupil, and so, although Kyoda himself was quite well known, his karate style was always small in terms of the numbers practising it. Even today, there is no textbook on To-on Ryu and its forms and techniques.

Kyoda was born in 1887, the fourth son of Juko Kyoda. He began training with Kanryo Higaonna, “West Higaonna”, around the age of fifteen, and it’s said that he also studied for a time under “East Higaonna”, a relative of his mother according to Katsumi Murakami. Murakami believed that Kyoda had also learned karate under Chomo Hanshiro at the Middle School and Kentsu Yabu at the Teachers College.

There is a story that he failed the height requirements for the army and so, unlike Chojun Miyagi, he never did his military service – although, actually, in the photos we have of the two men together they look about the same height, and another account says that as a school teacher he was exempted from military service. After graduating from the Teachers College (around 1908/09?) he took up a position as an elementary school teacher and continued to work as a teacher for many years, becoming a school principal at schools in Tomari, Koushin and other places. During this time he kept up his karate practice and he taught the art at various schools and establishments during his teaching career.

The first record we have of him teaching karate at schools seems to be from 1919, when he was thirty two and became instructor at the Second Okinawan Prefectural Junior High School. Of course, he was one of the members of the Okinawan Karate Kenkyu Club in the 1920s, and he was involved with the 1936 meeting of masters which discussed the naming of karate, and with the 1937 meeting held to discuss the development of new basic training kata.

His karate life, then, ran parallel to Chojun Miyagi’s, but although he was a well respected expert on the art, he was generally less prominent and influential than Miyagi. His teaching remained little known, and in fact there seems to be no trace of it left on Okinawa.

According to Katsumi Murakami, after his retirement from teaching Kyoda worked at the education department of the Oumi Airline Company and Oumi Silk Company during the war. Around 1944 he moved to Takeda City, Oita Prefecture, and a few years later relocated to the hot springs resort of Beppu in Oita. He outlived Chojun Miyagi by fifteen years, dying in 1968 at the age of eighty one.

Kyoda continued to teach karate in Beppu, but in a small way; he didn’t have a formal dojo but taught in his home or back garden. He would have been in his sixties then. His two main students during this time were his third son Juko (1926 – 1983) and Shigekazu Kanzaki (b1928), but at some point Juko stopped teaching and Kanzaki became the senior student and the inheritor of the school. The transmission of Kyoda’s style always seemed fragile, and if it wasn’t for Kanzaki then To-on Ryu may well have been lost. In 1999 Mario McKenna, a Canadian Goju Ryu student, began training under Kanzaki; and it is only because of Mario and his writings and translations that we have any material knowledge of To-on Ryu at all.

Mario had practised Goju Ryu for several years and his enquiries about To-on Ryu had gone back to 1992, without any success at all. Then he had trained with Katsumi Murakami in Fukuoka and found that Murakami had learned from Juhatsu Kyoda years back. Murakami had actually shown the To-on Pechurin (Suparimpei in Goju) in his 1973 book “Karate Do to Ryukyu Kobudo”, however, he “flatly refused” to teach Mario any To-on Ryu and wouldn’t even demonstrate any kata of the style for him. He did though give Mario the address of Shigekazu Kanzaki. It wasn’t until 1999 that Mario was able to meet Kanzaki, and after that he spent three years learning To-on Ryu in Oita.

In the memoir he wrote about his time training with Juhatsu Kyoda (To-on Ryu website), Kanzaki remembered the difficult years after the end of the Second World War when the Japanese people were strugglng to make a living. Kanzaki himself was working at Camp Chikamauga, an American forces base in Beppu, and around the time of the outbreak of the Korean War (1950) he and a friend got involved in a bar fight with several American soldiers and were badly beaten. After that, Kanzaki recalled, “I seriously thought that I had to be physically strong, to be tough, not to be laughed at; to be respected. I thought about how I could fight them, be on an equal footing with them. Looking back now, it was a silly thought; however I was very serious about it then.

“ . . . A friend of mine had heard a story about karate. It was about a man who had beaten several yakuza in front of Oita train station. I looked everywhere for this man as I wanted to become his student. I finally tracked him down and went to see him. His name was Kimihiro Teruya. He was living on the second floor of a house in the seedy market district in Beppu. As you can tell from his last name, Teruya, he was from Okinawa, and he was a student of Kyoda Sensei. I cannot recall what he did for a living then. He said, ‘There is a very well-known Sensei in Beppu. You may be better off studying under him. I will introduce you to him.’ Then he took me to Kyoda Sensei’s house. I was slightly bewildered when I met Kyoda Sensei as he was a thin old man of small stature. As I knew nothing about karate then, I had absolutely no idea he was a renowned expert. Sensei did not accept my request to study under him for some time. After my nearly daily visits to him for about a month, he finally said, ‘Alright, let us start from tomorrow. The practice will not be easy.’

“There is another thing I should mention, and that is that Sensei had never actually said ‘to teach me.’ Sensei’s approach was, being a modest person, more of ‘Let us study together’ rather than giving me the permission to learn from him. I had later found that Sensei did not approve of my reason to study karate. I was lectured by Sensei: ‘Studying karate is not for street-fighting nor to hurt others.’

“I began my karate practice after I finally received Sensei’s permission. I had no idea, however, what my initial practice was for: the entire practice consisted of learning to walk. It was about how to walk for the kata called Sanchin: learning the steps, the stance, the posture, and so forth. It was the same repetitious practice day after day. I was told that ‘Karate begins with Sanchin and ends with Sanchin. Your Sanchin can reveal how much training you have done.’ I practiced only Sanchin every day. It should be noted that even after we reached the level of studying the more advanced kata, our practice still began with Sanchin and ended with Sanchin.

“At that time Sensei was living with his third son, Juko at the company-assisted housing of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corp. Their room was in the second floor. We practised on the tatami (mat) floor and we had to be careful not to make too much noise, so as not to bother the residents who lived downstairs. Because of our continuous Sanchin practice, the tatami was completely ruined and had to be replaced frequently. . . . I learned naturally how to ‘move quietly like a cat and forcefully and swiftly like a tiger.’ Of course, the practice did not end there. Along with the Sanchin practice, I also practiced all the kihon (basics) such as tsuki, keri and uke in the second floor room. We did tsuki and keri from zenkutsu and kokutsu dachi and and ido keiko (moving practice) with nekoashi. We did all that practice in the second floor matted room, and tried not to make a noise.

“After three months of Sanchin stepping practice, we began adding the hand movements to the steps. The instructions consisted of how to breathe, how to tighten your body strongly, to straighten up your back and lower your stance, tighten your inner thighs by putting forth effort on both legs, how to tighten your behind, and how to place your feet firmly and steadily on the ground as if you were sucking up the air from the ground and pulling the testicles into the stomach. Those were the things for us to constantly keep in mind

“Hitting the shoulders was the way to discipline us. It was called ‘Shimeru’. Whenever you lost our concentration even slightly, the impact was felt down to the knees. If we were not able to fully focus on the practice because of how we carelessly spent the previous night, Sensei could immediately sense something was not right such as drinking the night before. ‘Shime’ was indeed very hard on us. The pain from getting hit in the shoulders was tolerated because of the shoulder muscles. However, there were finger marks on our shoulders when getting hit. This was how Sensei trained us.”

After Sanchin came Seisan, and then gradually, over the years, the other kata. Kanzaki told Mario that it had taken him around ten years to learn all the six kata of the system, training three or four times a week. In his memoir Kanzaki repeated the old maxim that it takes three years to master a kata: the first year is spent learning the kata movements, the second year on self-practice, building up the speed and power of the movements, and the third year includes practical training of the kata with a partner: in Kanzaki’s case this was with Juko Kyoda. “We studied and analyzed the kata on our own,” Kanzaki wrote, “how the particular technique should be done, how it was to be executed, to study and to understand what the kata really meant. We were extremely happy when we realized that our own understanding of kata was the same as Sensei’s teaching.”

Kanzaki began learning the second kata, Sesan, in the second floor room, but then Kyoda bought a new house which had a small back yard and practice moved there. Kanzaki remembered that “We put up a makiwara, made kakiya (wooden dummy), and trained very hard.” It was around this time that Juhatsu Kyoda began to stand on the side and teach, watching the practice. Juko Kyoda then became assistant teacher.

Kanzaki told Mario McKenna that the regular training sessions under Kyoda would begin with warming up exercises and then practice of the basic blocks, kicks and punches. Next would come Sanchin practice and then the other kata. There might be blocking training on the wooden man (kakiya) and sparring (with Juko Kyoda) before finishing with Sanchin. Although Kyoda was supposed to have passed on the kata unchanged he had introduced some new exercises and drills into his training. He had brought together the basic techniques into an exercise called Shiho Uke (Four Directions Blocking); had introduced a Basic Kata 1 and 2, and he had also developed some prearranged sparring sets for basic techniques. And in addition to the four Naha-te forms – Sanchin, Sesan, Sanseru and Pechurin – Kyoda had also brought two other kata into his teaching: Jion, which he had learned from Kentsu Yabu, and Nepai (“Twenty Eight”) which he had probably earned from the Chinese tea trader Gokenki. The use of the kakiya (wooden man) had been retained from the old days and later, in his own teaching, Kanzaki would get his students to drill sections of the kata on it over and again. Kanzaki recalled that Kyoda would be quite severe in training but outside of the class, just in normal conversation for example, he was kind and thoughtful.

Jumping forward over forty years - Mario McKenna found the training with Kanzaki to be “old style”. “I don’t mean it was overly harsh or severe,” Mario told Juan Luis Cadenas in a 2012 interview, “but practice was much more about self-training. We would warm up and do some basic strikes, blocks and kicks, followed by Sanchin kata. After that the student was left on his own to practice whatever he felt like. It may have been conditioning, impact training, partner work, kakie, footwork etc. Seniors would give advice to juniors, and Kanzaki Sensei would call students over one by one and correct technique, kata etc. At the end of class we would perform Sanchin kata. That was generally how classes would run.”

As Mario’s own training went on, he was struck by how different the two styles – Goju Ryu and To-on Ryu – were: “Almost at odds with each other” in some respects, even though both had come from the same source. In To-on Ryu, although Sanchin practice was essential, he found that there was less emphasis on rooted stances in the other kata, and that overall To-on ryu had lighter and springier footwork. He thought the To-on Ryu techniques were executed in a smoother and more flowing pattern, and there was little or no stress on “muchimi”, the “heavy and sticky” movement sometimes emphasized in Goju: in fact, “muchimi” was never mentioned at all in his training. Mario also found that the style had no snapping kicks but rather used low thrust kicks, stomps, or straight legged kicks.

Although the To-on Ryu Sanchin was outwardly similar to the Goju kata, there were “subtle differences and nuances.” Kanzaki would often comment on the bad habits Mario had brought over from Goju Ryu: stepping, posture, breathing, tightening the correct muscle groups. “He would never say this disparagingly,” Mario recalled, “it was always in passing, almost in a matter of fact way.” Essentially he had to unlearn the Goju form, particularly in the breathing. In Goju Sanchin you inhale as you bring your fist back to the hikite position to make the thrust, exhale on the thrust, inhale as the fist is brought back, and then exhale as you stop the movement in Sanchin kamae. In the To-on Ryu Sanchin, Mario explained, you inhale as the arm is retracted, then exhale continuously as the punching arm is extended and returned to Sanchin kamae. “After the hand is returned to the Sanchin kamae a very brief, short exhalation is performed, akin to blowing dust from one’s hand. Therefore, To-on Ryu does not use two stages in its breathing like Goju Ryu.” Nor does To-on Ryu use the loud, rasping breathing of Goju.

I have never seen the To-on Ryu Sanchin but some years ago Mario very kindly sent me a disc showing all the other kata of the style: Sesan, Sanseru, Pechurin, Jion and Nepai, performed by one of the younger seniors at the Kanzaki dojo. The first three, “Naha-te”, kata are particularly interesting, but nothing in this history is straightforward, and there are background stories to all of these forms. The To-on Ryu Sesan, for example, is said to come, not from Kanryo Higaonna but from Kanyu Higaonna, “East Higaonna”: according to Kanzaki, Kanyu Higaonna had received permission from Kanryo to teach Kyoda this form of the kata. We don’t know dates for that instruction but Kanyu Higaonna’s dates are given as 1849 to 1922 and presumably it would again have been in the early 1900s. Kanzaki wrote “Juhatsu Sensei always stated that there were many variations of Seisan; Seisan by Kanyu Sensei and many others. Therefore, there were no right or wrong versions of the kata. He advised us to study and master the Seisan that was best suited to our body. Juhatsu Sensei at one point was considering whether to call Kanryo-style Seisan as Seisan 1 and Kanyu’s Seisan as Seisan 2, or to make one kata by integrating each Seisan kata’s characteristics. However, that did not become a reality.” According to Mario McKenna, Kyoda taught Kanzaki just the Kanyu Higaonna Sesan, which seems a little odd, considering that he was dedicated to passing on Kanryo’s teaching unchanged.

The To-on Ryu Sanseru was mentioned in Seishin Koyama’s 1982 magazine article. According to Koyama – presumably this came from Choku Iraha, and Kyoda before him – when Chojun Miyagi returned to Okinawa after completing his military service he was shocked to discover that during his two year absence Juhatsu Kyoda had learned the kata Sanseru, a kata that Miyagi didn’t know. The article supposed that “most likely” Miyagi was envious, but actually, do we know that? Unless Higaonna had stopped teaching, Miyagi could have easily learned the kata after he returned to Okinawa, so I don’t understand why this should have been such a big deal; the story may have been built up to be more than it actually was. Allowing for stylistic variations, the Goju Ryu Sanseru is pretty much the same as the To-on Ryu form, so Miyagi did learn the kata; I can’t see why he wouldn’t have learned it from Higaonna too.

Shigekazu Kanzaki also referred to this Sanseru story. Kanzaki wote that Sanseru was specific to To-on Ryu and that Kyoda himself had said that Sanseru had been taught only to him. Kanzaki also wrote that when Kyoda was living in Oita after the war he had taken part in an event organised by the Okinawan community there. The programme included Ryukyu dance and music, and Kyoda demonstrated karate. He was asked to show Sanseru and as he went through a forceful performance of the kata he put his foot through the floor, injuring his leg. He never sought medical help and the injury caused him trouble in his later years: Kanzaki noticed it. “Kanzaki-kun,” said Kyoda, referring to this incident, “I should have gone to see a doctor then. Never be over-confident or over-estimate your strength.”

As for the To-on Ryu Pechurin shown on the disc, although there are technical differences, this and Goju Ryu’s Suparimpei are the same kata. But why the difference in name? In his memoir of Kyoda, Kanzaki remembered watching a demonstration of Suparimpei by a Goju Ryu expert named Mori. Kanzaki had been surprised by the similarities and differences between the Goju Suparimpei and To-on Ryu’s Pechurin and mentioned this to Kyoda. “Sensei looked annoyed for a moment and said ‘Higaonna Tanme taught the kata as Pechurin. No matter what Goju Ryu’s Suparinpei is like, Pechurin is Pechurin.’ I clearly remember what Sensei said.”

Why would Kyoda feel strongly about this? Possibly he felt that Miyagi had made changes to the original form and Suparimpei no longer represented a true transmission of Kanryo Higaonna’s Te. At any rate, Kyoda never used the name Suparimpei, and it’s interesting that Chogi Yoshimura too, in recalling his early training with Higaonna around 1890 said that he had learned Sanchin and “Pechurin.” The early karate books of the early 20th Century, however, by Funakoshi (1922), Motobu (1926) and Mabuni, (1938), refer to “Suparimpei” (“One Hundred and Eight”), although Mabuni noted that the kata was also called Pechurin. The use of the name Suparimpei may reflect the influence of Chojun Miyagi, but then what is also odd is that the 1867 Ochayagoten demonstration programme lists a kata Suparimpei. Most likely Miyagi would not have known about the 1867 event, so there must have been an old transmission of this name. Of course, we have no way of knowing whether the 1867 form had any relationship with the Suparimpei kata we have today.

Anyway . . . the three Naha-te kata on Mario’s disc are clearly the same forms as in Goju Ryu, but with noticeable differences in technique and feeling. In Seisan, for example, rather than use the kansetsu-geri of Goju Ryu, the To-on Ryu practitioner raises the foot quite high and then brings it down in a pressing motion, as if against the opponent’s knee. The kata follows the same embusen as in Goju Ryu but after the final turn there are a couple of extra steps forward with open hand movements, and the form does not end with the characteristic kick and mawashi uke of Goju but with a simple open hand kamae. Sanseru again has a similar embusen to the Goju kata and has the right rising elbow strike/ left chudan punch/right kansetsu geri combination repeated four times, but the To-on Ryu version of the kata leads into the technique with an open hand block rather than the forearm block of Goju Ryu, and the elbow strike is delivered with a simple step forward without the preceding front kick of Goju. At the end of the To-on Ryu kata there is one just one double punch (Goju has two), and the preceding defensive movement is smaller. The three mawashi ukes done in cat stance in Suparimpei feature in Pechurin as three softer flapping movements (snapping, rising blocks with the back of the hand, according to Mario), and the accompanying, characteristic Suparimpei backward sliding steps into cat stance are absent in To-on Ryu: in Pechurin you stay on the spot while doing the movements in three directions. In Suparimpei there is a technique (repeated four times) where you turn and do a double punch followed by a step forward and a right downward block and left chudan punch, both techniques done in Sanchin stance. This sequence also features in Pechurin but the double punch is done after you make the step forward, and you remain in stance as the downward block and chudan thrust is delivered. This, and the use of a natural forward stance rather than Sanchin gives the Pechurin technique a rather different feel. In Pechurin too, the closing stages of the kata are slightly different to Goju: Suparimpei has an extra jumping kick and Pechurin lacks the follow-up elbow-backfist technique after the kick, (I had actually thought of this elbow – backfist combination as a signature technique of Naha-te, since it appears also in Uechi Ryu, and a similar movement appears in some Fujian forms). Neither the To-on Ryu Sanseru or Pechurin end with the characteristic inu-no-kamae of Goju Ryu, the so called “dog posture” with both hands held in the front in the bent wrist position: like the To-on Ryu Seisan they end in a simple open hand kamae.

Overall, too, the feeling of the three kata is different. The technique in To-on Ryu seems a little lighter and in the kata there is less stress on Sanchin stance and the stances and footwork seem a little looser. Whether the three forms look more Chinese is disputable since years ago, at the time Seishin Koyama saw Choku Iraha’s Sanseru and thought it “looked Chinese”, karate people weren’t aware of what Chinese kempo styles actually looked like, especially styles from Fujian province. Iraha’s idea may have simply been a releflection of the the different appearance and feel of the To-on Ryu forms.

As Mario McKenna noted, there are no snapping kicks in these To-on Ryu kata . . . but that seems a little puzzling: how then can we explain what looks like a front kick counter thrown by Miyagi against Kyoda in that old, early 1900s photo? Kanryo Higaonna was said to have been known for his fast kicks, and ignoring the front (snap) kick, the basic kick of Okinawan karate, would have taken an effective technique out of his teaching. The idea that he taught no snapping kicks is a little hard to take.

From the comparison of the To-on Ryu and Goju Ryu kata it’s clear that although Miyagi and Kyoda both learned from Kanryo Higaonna, their karate styes diverged subsequently, presumably after Higaonna’s death. We still can’t be sure that Kyoda’s To-on Ryu is a full and unchanged transmission of Higaonna’s Te – if the Sesan kata does come from Kanyu Higaonna, then by definition it cannot be – and in the complete absence of historical records it can’t be proved one way or the other. But if you do accept that Kyoda pretty much preserved the style of Kanryo Higaonna then it’s apparent that, with Higaonna’s Te as his base, Chojun Miyagi continued to develop his karate, and as well as adding new teaching methods, that involved making changes to the traditional Naha-te forms that he inherited. In the 1936 meeting of Okinawan karate experts sponsored by the “Ryukyu Shimpo” Chotei Oroku asked “Did they have the traditional or native ‘Te’ in this prefecture?” and Miyagi replied, “In this prefecture, just as judo, kendo and boxing, ‘Te’ has been progressed and improved,” implying that the karate he was then teaching had been developed someway beyond the te that he had originally learned in Okinawa. It’s intriguing too that in his short 1932 essay “Goju Ryu Kempo”, (translated by Joe Swift), after noting that a style of Fujian Boxing (kempo) had been brought to Okinawa in 1828 and “subsequently studied deeply”, Miyagi wrote that “My personal interpretation of this Boxing ultimately led to the development of Goju Ryu Karate Kempo.”

“Karate Do Nyumon” (1935) by Kenwa Mabuni and Genwa Nakasone (Mario McKenna translation) also includes the following observations on styles:

“The most famous karate masters remembered in modern times are Master Itosu of Shuri and Master Higaonna of Naha. Their two lineages are the most influential today. The kata taught by these two men were different with unique characteristics. For example, the three kata usually referred to as basic kata today are Naifanchi, Sanchin and Tensho. Tensho kata was created by Chojun Miyagi and the other two are kata passed down from long ago.

“When Mabuni and I were students at Okinawa Prefecture First Middle School (around 1907), both masters were still in good health. Itosu Sensei was the karate instructor at First Middle School and taught Naifanchi kata. However, Higaonna Sensei trained his students in Sanchin kata as the foundation for his karate and seemed not to have taught Naifanchi kata. In short, these two basic kata were the starting point for the study of other kata, each with its own characteristics which formed the difference between the two styles each master taught.

“. . . . The current master who inherited Higaonna’s lineage is Chojun Miyagi, and the true successor of Itosu’s linesge is Kenwa Mabuni. Mabuni also studied with Higaonna and together with Chojun Miyagi, put a great deal of importance on this style. When Miyagi combined his studies with those of his former teacher to create a new style called Goju-ryu, Mabuni also adopted the name. However, Mabuni is also an expert in the orthodox style of Itosu Kempo and unlike Goju-ryu he teaches the Itosu style first and then teaches the Higaonna style later. He now refers to his style as Shito-ryu, which is derived by taking the first character of each teacher’s name (Itosu and Higaonna) which clearly shows his position on karate.”

These are just short references, but it sounds fairly clear that Chojun Miyagi’s Goju Ryu was not simply a straight transmission of Kanryo Higaonna’s, or anyone else’s, style, but incorporated his own ideas and developments. In that respect Miyagi was both a traditionalist and a moderniser, and Goju Ryu is a version of Higaonna’s old Naha-te revised and updated for the early twentieth century.

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