Choki Motobu, Boxing, and Jen Kentel - 3 (B)

[emattson]

Table of Contents
Previous chapter

By Graham Noble

There are a couple of curious historical wrinkles to this story. In his short survey of Chinese martial arts (“Chinese Kung Fu”, Cambridge University Press, 2012) Wang Guangxi included a section on challenge fights between Chinese stylists and foreigners, who “were often arrogant and contemptuous.” Wang wrote that “Han Muxia (1867 – 1947, Xingyi style), won a fight against Russian strongman Kang Tyre in Beijing and Wang Ziping (1881 – 1973) also defeated the same Russian strongman in 1918 in Beijing, as well as an American and a German strongman in 1919 in Qingdao and the Japanese fighter Sato in 1919 in Japan.”

Wang Ziping (Wang Tzu-ping) was a famous martial artist, and although I can’t find a specific reference to him fighting a Russian named Kang Tyre, Wikipedia has this: “Wang defeated a Russian who was rampaging around a public park located in Beijing after he boasted that he was the strongest fighter in the world in 1919.”

The match involving Han Muxia (Han Mu-hsia), a well known expert in hsing-I and pa-kua was covered in the September 1993 issue of Dan Miller’s great “Pa Kua Chang Journal”. According to this account, “In 1918 a Russian strongman named Kangtaier (the Chinese pronunciation of the Russian’s name) was travelling around the mainland setting up platform boxing matches and challenging Chinese boxers. Previous to his arrival in Beijing the Russian was undefeated at platform boxing. He arrived in Beijing around the beginning of September and was beating the Chinese badly in every boxing match he set up.” Although the account states that some or all of these fights were fixed, the whole thing made it seem that there were no good fighters in the whole of China. At that time the famous Chang Chao-tung was around sixty and too old to fight but he called on Li Tsun-i and together they took their best students, Liu Chin-ching, Wang Chun-chen, Li Tzu-yang and Han Mu-hsia to Beijing to face the foreigner. “They arrived in Beijing on September 12, 1918 and issued a challenge to the Russian.”

In the event no public match took place but Chang, Li and the students went to see the Russian and his manager at their hotel and said they still wanted to fight. The Russians agreed to hold a match in private and an agreement was signed to the effect that if one of the fighters was killed there would be no legal repercussions. Chang Chao-tung chose Han Mu-hsia to fight, and Chang and Li Tsun-I signed as witnesses to the “death fight contract”.

As soon as the match started the Russian threw a punch but Han blocked the strike with a rising palm and countered with a palm strike to the ribs. The Russia went down, rolled over and vomited on the ground. He was unable to continue.

Later, Kuo Shu-fan asked Han Mu-hsia what had happened and Han replied that Kangtaier had tried to grab his right elbow to punch him in the throat. He hooked the Russian’s foot, upsetting his balance, then used his left palm to slap the Russian’s arm away and his right palm to strike the to the ribs. The Russian made a loud noise and fell down.

As somebody commented on one of the forums, “I think the ‘giant Russian boxer’ legend has been used by every kung fu grandmaster in the business.”

But a Russian strongman called Kangtaier – allowing for memory, and language differences, “Kangtaier” sounds suspiciously like the Japanese “Kentaro” . . . . or Kentel. Could this have been Jan Kentel? I have no idea, but after Lenin’s revolution in August 1917 there was an exodus of millions of people from Russia and some found their way to China, so the timescale means it’s at least plausible that it is Jan Kentel who is being referred to.

And there is this too. Seiko Fujita (1898 – 1966) was the famous “last active ninja”. He is quite a famous, and controversial, person in the history of 20th Century Japanese martial arts. In his autobiography (“The Last Ninja of Koga”, edited and translated by Dan Roley), Fujita recounted that one day he was walking round Osaka’s entertainment area when he saw a poster outside a theatre which read: “Kenteru, the world’s strongest man from Russia, appearing here now.”

According to Fujita, Kenteru was an enormous man, “a mountain on two legs”, who weighed as much as three or four average Japanese. He performed some strength feats for the waiting crowd and as Fujita recalled, “I have to admit, they were pretty impressive.” Kenteru put a coin between his teeth “and tore it in two with a twist of his hand”; he pounded a nail into a board with his bare hand; he bent nails with his hands; he snapped chains around his chest, let a car run over his chest and then won a tug of war with the car.

Fujita thought he could duplicate Kenteru’s feats and so a contest was arranged for the following day between the two men: according to Fujita the story was covered in at least one local newspaper. Fujita was able to duplicate several of the Russian’s feats but failed on a couple of others and thus was behind in the contest until he proposed, as his own chosen feat, a contest to see who had “the strongest innards”. With that, a cup and a roof tile were brought out for each contestant – and Fujita began to eat the cup and then the tile. This was one of his special talents, and after Fujita got through about a third of the tile Kenteru declined to try, and admitted defeat.

That was Fujita’s story, and incidentally, his recollection of the Russian’s feats is a pretty accurate account of a 1920s strongman routine and reminiscent of Kentel’s actual performances in Australia. Fujita wrote that the contest occurred when he was in his early twenties, so as he was born in 1898 (or 1899, depending on the source), he must be talking about the early 1920s. The important thing anyway is that the strongman he was talking about must have been Jan Kentel – who once again appears as a loser against an Asian martial artist.

What is going on here? Jan Kentel lived in the Far East for several years. He was a very powerful man, certainly by Asian standards of the time, and it seems that he made a strong impression on people, so much so, I think, that he became a kind of representative “Russian strongman” in people’s minds and became linked with any story of an Asian martial artist defeating a big foreigner. I originally wrote about Choki Motobu and Jan Kentel some years back, and in some places it is now established as history that it was Kentel who Motobu knocked out in the famous karate vs boxing contest. But personally, I have never believed that: I have always doubted that Kentel fought Motobu, or Han Mu-hsia for that matter. Kentel had been a fairly well-known personality in 1920s Japan so it’s odd that he wasn’t named in the 1925 “Kingu” article, or that afterwards Motobu himself could only identify his opponent as “John Somebody.”

Also - size and bodyweight are critical factors in contact sports, and looking at the Japanese photo of a 200 pound-plus Kentel some people have wondered whether a much smaller Choki Motobu could really have beaten him. However, as Kentel was in Japan at that time and was probably well known as a strongman it is quite possible that his name was arbitrarily attached to the story at a later date. Such a thing would be far from unusual in martial arts history. There is also an interesting paragraph in Pat McCarthy’s translation of Shoshin Nagamine’s book on Okinawan karate masters. In the section on Motobu and the boxer, Nagamine wrote that (italics are mine) “Demonstrating his strength and taking on all comers, the foreigner in question was presumed to be a well-known professional fighter who was travelling around the Orient under the pretence of being a White Russian named John Kentelu. However, there seems to be a question about his credentials and even his name.”

I don’t think we know who Choki Motobu fought. He will probably always remain, as Motobu said himself, “John Somebody.”

Next chapter

[emattson]

Wikipedia has this: “Wang defeated a Russian who was rampaging around a public park located in Beijing after he boasted that he was the strongest fighter in the world in 1919.”

I tend to dismiss stories of "arrogant foreigner causing trouble" stories as cheap propaganda.

China Travel website is one example. It has a long listing of Chinese victories, but it's numerous typos make it hard to take seriously.
https://www.chinatraveltop.com/two-big- ... l-history/

In reality, China has terrible sufferings, defeated by the crushing forces of rebellion, floods, and droughts.

"Between 108 BC and 1911 AD, there were no fewer than 1,828 recorded famines in China, or once nearly every year in one province or another." (Wikipedia) The Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1962 and the famine of 1928-1930 were some of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China