Post War (A)

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By Graham Noble

In late 1946, a little over a year after the war ended, and after twenty years in Wakayama, Kanbum decided to move back to Okinawa, accompanied by several of his Wakayama students. While the conditions on mainland Japan were terrible, they were probably even worse on Okinawa, which had just about been blasted to pieces during the American invasion. But Kanbum was now coming up to seventy years old and maybe he just wanted to return home. In early 1948 he fell ill with nephritis and died in November of that year.

The founder of Uechi Ryu was gone, but all those years of teaching in Wakayama had left some strong students and they were determined that his art should carry on. They too returned to Okinawa after the War and crucially, Kanbum’s first son Kanei had been back on the island since 1942. The other seniors gathered around him and he became the central figure in the next stage of Uechi Ryu development.

Kanei (b1911) had gone over to join his father in Wakayama in 1927. In the 1961 “Okinawa Times” article he stated that he had begun studying his father’s kempo at the age of eighteen and after ten years training had moved to Osaka and opened a dojo there. In that article he recalled one time in Osaka when he demonstrated his art at an Okinawan-style sumo tournament and a big fellow called Akamine asked to test his karate. According to Uechi, Akamine weighed about 220 pounds and “could break seven boards with his fist.” Akamine asked Uechi if he could punch him five times in the stomach and solar plexus. The tournament director wanted to refuse his request but Uechi simply said that he didn’t mind, and Akamine, “holding nothing back, punched. Akamine’s punch was powerful. It cut my skin and I started to bleed. The audience became alarmed at the sight of me bleeding, but the punch itself did not affect me. I thought Akamine had had enough and decided to bring the demonstration to an end . . . . I can’t express how happy I felt after the demonstration.”

Afterwards, Uechi was praised by Mabuni Sensei, who said that he had obviously trained very hard in karate. He was featured in the following day’s newspapers and several people also came to see him, fearing he might have been injured by the punches he had received, but he assured them he was fine. It wasn’t actual fighting, but that experience of taking a much heavier man’s punches must have given him confidence in his father’s karate, and no doubt he credited his impressive physical conditioning to the long practice of Sanchin kata.

In this same article, Kanei recalled that “Later on, the famous Karate master Chojun Miyagi asked me to show him kata. Miyagi sensei watched intently as I performed five kata. After the performance Miyagi Sensei also praised me by saying that there were few even in China who could perform kata the way I had.”

Shortly after he returned to Okinawa Kanei had set up a dojo in the back yard of his home in Nago where he taught young men from the village. It was wartime but that dojo seemed to have attracted some attention. According to Shigeru Takamiyagi’s Uechi history (1977), when Shuki Izumi, the newly appointed (July 1943) governor of Okinawa, toured the island, an accompanying journalist recommended that he visit Kanei Uechi’s karate school in Nago, which he did. Uechi and his students demonstrated karate for the Governor, who also saw another demonstration a little later at a local girls’ school by Kanei Uechi and Chojun Miyagi and their pupils. Apparently Izumi referred to karate in the official report of his tour.

The Nago dojo had to be closed after a couple of years as the War moved closer to Okinawa and Kanei was drafted into the army. He was originally assigned to the garrison on Iejima, but was transferrred back to Okinawa to the Kunigami ground support unit where he remained until the end of the war. He had been lucky because according to an article by Ron Ship, (“Fighting Arts International” Vol 7 No 3) the whole division on Iejima island was subsequently wiped out in the fighting with American forces.

James Thompson, the senior American Uechi karateka wrote in “Dojo” magazine that at the time of his father’s death Kanei Uechi was not teaching. I’ve never read that anywhere else, but in any case, Kanei did soon begin to teach at the request of others, particularly Ryuko Tomoyose, the twenty year old son of Ryuyu Tomoyose. In 1949 Uechi established the “Uechi Ryu Karate Jutsu Kenkyujo” in Ginowan, Nodake. It was a small but important start.

There had been some interest in Uechi style karate a little before that, apparently. In June 1947, the chairman of the Okinawa City conference, Tamaki Katsuya, invited the Uechi school to perform at their annual meeting which was to be held in Motobu in the north of the island. The following year the Kunigamigun Nakijin Village Firemen’s Association also requested the group to demonstrate karate at their January 1 opening. John D. Mills, who gave this information in his thesis on Uechi Ryu history, also noted that “Still later in the difficult post war period, when there were virtually no public facilities for cultural activities, outdoor theatre troupes of dancers, singers, and drummers enjoyed great popularity. Some of the students of the Uechi school joined one such troupe and went on karate performance tours with them. Thus, as in these examples, the native cultural legacy of karate continued, despite immense hardships, and contributed to the post war reconstruction of Okinawa.”

Things seemed to go well and in 1957 Kanei moved his school to Futenma, and essentially that became the head dojo of Uechi Ryu. Before that, other dojo had been set up in the early 1950s: the Oroku dojo had been opened by Saburo Uehara and the Kanzatobaru (Naha) dojo by Seiki Itokazu. In 1955 Seiyu Shinjo set up the the Asato Uechi Ryu Dojo, also in Naha, and so by the 1950s Uechi Ryu was well established in Okinawa, and in fact by Okinawan karate standards it was a rapidly growing style. The seniors were enthusiastic and worked hard to build the style. “I farm during the day and teach at night from 8:00 to 11:00,” Kanei Uechi told the “Ryukyu Shimpo” in 1961. “Every morning I wake up early and never get enough sleep, but I never think of giving up. That’s how much I love karate, so I don’t regard it as something harsh.” A July 1965 “Black Belt” article on Uechi Ryu noted that there were eight Uechi Ryu dojos on the island, and that had come from nothing twenty years before. George Mattson’s 1974 “Uechi Ryu karate Do” stated that as of 1973 there were fifteen dojo. The Uechi Ryu directory section of the 1977 “Okinawa Karate Do Sono Rekishi to Giho” covers 100 pages of dan grades and includes listings for Uechi groups in Argentina, Brazil, North America, Australia, New Zealand, France, Great Britain and Yugoslvia: by that time Uechi Ryu had become international.

In the early post war period the training continued in the traditional way, based on the practice of kata. “All those years ago when I started training we were taught individually, not in a group,” Ryukyu Tomoyose recalled. “We would perform the three main kata, three times each: Sanchin, Seisan, and Sanseru. First we would perform Sanchin very slowly so that the instructor would correct us in great detail. Then the second Sanchin we would perform at normal speed, and the instructor would still correct us if really necessary. The third kata we would perform as fast as we could. That’s the way we trained.”

In the post war world, though, a system consisting of the simple repetition of three kata looked old-fashioned and limited, and Uechi Ryu training methods gradually began to develop. The core – Sanchin, Sesan, Sanseru, and conditioning – remained, but elements were added common to the other modern karate styles: the practice of warm-up and strengthening exercises, the formal practice of basic techniques (punches, strikes, kicks and blocks), pre-arranged and free-style sparring and the use of supplementary equipment such as the makiwara. The use of the fist also became an essential part of basic practice and kumite. New kata were added too and bunkai, the application of the kata movements, was also explicitly developed. During the Wakayama, and early post-war Okinawa periods, training was carried out wearing the fundoshi (loin cloth), or shorts, but from about the mid-1950s the use of the gi (judo gis at first) became standard and in 1958 the first formal dan grading was held. This once rather secret and isolated style, then, gradually moved towards the general stream of karate practice, albeit with its own individual and recognisable characteristics. The new kata added to the style in the 1950s and 1960s for example - Kanshiwa, Serui, and Kanchin (created by Kanei Uechi), Dai-ni Sesan, (Seiki Itokazu), and Seichin, (Saburo Uehara) – were distinctly Uechi Ryu in appearance, (they were pretty much made up of techniques in the three traditional kata), and fitted in smoothly with the progression through the new grading system.

Uechi Ryu also seemed to get respect fairly quickly from the established schools of Okinawan karate. And in 2006 I had several quite long phone conversations with Tsutomu Ohshima, the well-known Shotokan teacher. One thing I asked him about was his 1961 visit to Okinawa with the Waseda Universtity karate team. He talked a little about the experts he had met, and he described Kanei Uechi as “very powerful, very humble”. The Japanese, he said, had been very impressed by Uechi Ryu, even though the technique was so far from their own Shotokan. In particular he mentioned an Uechi teacher called Shinjo (Seiyu Shinjo presumably), who had once been a student of Kanbum Uechi, and who was “marvellous, most impressive.” He demonstrated a strong kata, and Ohshima thought, “This is authentic martial arts.”

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