1. Uechi in China

[emattson]

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By Graham Noble

This story goes back to the very last years of the 19th century in Okinawa when a twenty year old farm worker, Kanbum Uechi, boarded a ship bound for Fujian, the southern province of China, where he hoped to learn authentic Chinese Ch’uan fa, (kempo). There was an old tale that the girl he planned to marry had been taken away from him by his best friend and this so upset Uechi that he resolved to go to China to learn the best fighting systems so that on his return he could kill his one-time friend . . . which seems a bit far-fetched: at that time he could have learned the “killing art” of karate on Okinawa itself, so you wonder why he would have needed to travel all the way to China to accomplish his aim. The consensus is, in fact, that he went to China to avoid the military draft, which the Japanese government was then extending to Okinawa. The draft was unpopular in Okinawa and Uechi would have been one of many young Okinawan men who were guilty of draft evasion. And of course, he may have had a genuine desire to study Chinese kempo, tales of which he could have heard from his youth.

Uechi is said to have travelled to China in 1897, a couple of years after the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Mark Bishop, in his 1989 book “Okinawan Karate, Teachers, Styles and Secret Techniques”, quoted Eichi Miyazato (Goju Ryu) repeating “a popular romantic rumour that has Uechi avoiding military service by stowing away on a junk bound for China only to be shipwrecked off the Fukien coast and washed ashore on a beach near Fuchou, where he was helped by the locals who taught him Chinese boxing.” However, the Uechi Ryu history in Kanei Uechi and Shigeru Takamiyagi’s 1977 “Okinawa Karate Do Sono Rekishi to Giho” – which is pretty much the source for all historical writings on the origins of Uechi Ryu – doesn’t mention this story. It simply states that, along with others, Kanbum Uechi made the sea journey to Fuzhou, Fujian’s capital city. China was a strange land and Uechi had few possessions, so it’s likely that initially he would have made contact with other Okinawans in Fuzhou. Trade had flourished between the Ryukyu kingdom and China for hundreds of years and Ryukyuan administrative and trading centres had long been established in Fuzhou. In the 1870s Japan stopped the Ryukyu’s official tribute to China and ordered these centres to be closed; however, according to various writers Okinawan fugitives continued to use these offices for some time thereafter.

Very little is really known about Uechi’s years in Southern China. In a letter to Harry Cook in 1973, Kanbum’s son, Kanei wrote that “My father, the late Mr. Kanbum Uechi, studied Pwangai Noon under the instruction of Master Shushiwa, (Chou Tzu prostitute). He did not study any Okinawan style karate prior to his journey to China.

“ . . . To my best knowledge my father’s companion in China was Go Ken Zen, who finally came to Okinawa and married an Okinawan girl and died in Okinawa. It is also said that my father was called Ching Li in China but I don’t know so clearly about this.” Go Ken Zen was presumably the White Crane stylist Go Ken Ki who had a tea trading company in Okinawa and was a fairly well-known figure in Okinawan karate circles in the first half of the 20th century.

Ryuko Tomoyose, one of the leading teachers of Uechi Ryu, told George Mattson (1984): “One thing that I recall now, Kanbum Sensei told us he had studied Shorin Ryu first at the Ryukyukan, Ryukyu Embassy, he was welcomed there for the time being, maybe less than a year. While he was staying at the Ryukyukan he studied Shorin Ryu. When he got acquainted with this Chinese friend he was taken to the place where the martial arts teached (?) and he became very friendly with this man, (his subsequent teacher, presumably).” “Shorin Ryu” would have been Shaolin style, but that is such a general term in Chinese martial arts that it gives no clue at all what Uechi may have first studied in Fuzhou.

According to the history set out “Okinawa Karate Do, Sono Rekishi to Giho”, Kanbum originally enrolled at the Kojo family dojo in Fuzhou which was run by Okinawans who had travelled between Okinawa and China on business for many years. He is said to have studied there for three years, but grew dissatisfied with the teaching he received. He didn’t get on with one of the teachers there, Makabe Udon, and eventually he left to study with a new, Chinese teacher, Shushiwa, who would remain his teacher for the rest of his time in China and who would teach him the system that he would take back to Okinawa.

How he met this Shushiwa we don’t know, but there are a number of stories. Years ago I asked the well-known Uechi Ryu teacher George Mattson this question, and in a letter of September 1973 he replied: “I am not sure how Kanbum Uechi was introduced to his teacher (Shushiwa) but one story has it that the family he was living with did. Another story has it that Kanbum saved the life of the master’s son and was then taken in as part of the family.” Another story is that Shusiwa taught at a Buddhist temple and Uechi introduced himself and entered the temple. A variation on this, told by Bunichi Ichikawa in his “Ryukyu no Karate Monogatari” (Story of Ryukyu Karate) and repeated in Takao Nakaya’s “Karate Do History and Philosophy,” is that Uechi became a servant at the temple “and observed that every morning and evening all the monks went to a special room which was locked for several hours. Uechi thought they were reading the Okyo, the Buddhist holy writings which were always read aloud and in a rhythm. Sometimes loud shouts would be heard but Uechi thought that was just the Chinese way of reading the Okyo. One day the shouts were unusually loud so Uechi went to see what was happening. He managed to find a place to look inside and saw the monks in an unusual stance with their shirts removed. One older monk was giving commands and hitting the others on their legs, stomachs and shoulders. Later Uechi found that this was the kata Sanchin. After this discovery, Uechi began to practice martial arts with this group. The teacher’s name was Chou Chi Wo. Uechi remained in China for thirteen years in which he studied Chinese martial arts.” In his “Secrets of Uechi Ryu” (1996) Alan Dollar quotes senior Uechi Ryu teacher Seiko Toyama’s story that one day Shushiwa was ill and suffering from a terrible headache and his students sought out Kanbum Uechi as a known medicine seller. Uechi cured Shushiwa with herbal medicines and as a result Kanbum was accepted as an official student in a secret ceremony at the Fu Chuan Shin Temple. This version of events though clashes with the usual accounts which state that it was actually Shushiwa who was the medicine seller, and that it was Uechi who learned the secrets of Chinese medicine from him. Kanbum Uechi’s son Kanei told Mark Bishop that Kanbum “had travelled to Fuchou in China at the age of twenty, with no previous training in Chinese boxing. There, to support himself financially he had joined forces with a medicine hawker Shu Shi Wa, who taught him about herbal medicines ‘to cure all ills’ and how to gather them from the mountains to make the concoctions. Kanbum Uechi then learned how to put on a convincing display of kung fu in order to sell their wares, moving from one lucrative spot on street corners to another, while carrying round on his shoulders the heavy box containing the bottled brews.”

It’s all very contradictory and I don’t think we have any idea what actually happened, but Uechi historians agree that Kanbum Uechi became a pupil of Shushiwa and learned his style, which consisted initially of training in Sanchin kata. Uechi was taught one movement at a time and for the first three months he practised just the opening move and initial double thrusting technique of the form. He practised only Sanchin for three years before he was ready to learn the second kata. Seisan, and by then “his arms and legs were like steel sinews.” There is a story that at the end of three years training under Shushiwa, Kanbum revisited the Kojo dojo and demonstrated a powerful Sanchin. When he saw this, Makabe apologised for his previous rudeness.

Kanbum supported himself in China by selling medicines on the street, initially assisting and learning from his teacher Shushiwa. He would demonstrate his martial arts to draw crowds and show the potency of his medicines, and this could be a tough job because you might have to face public challenges from other kempo experts. There may be an echo of this period of Uechi’s life when he told Kenwa Mabuni in the 1930s: “Another interesting thing is when you become an expert you can demonstrate kata on the road or in front of a crowd. If there is a more proficient expert among the people passing by, he will stop and give you some instruction.”

Apparently some of that old medicinal knowledge was passed down in Uechi Ryu to a few selected students. Alan Dollar, for example, (“Secrets of Uechi Ryu Karate”) mentions the use of a potion specially prepared by his teacher, Seiyu Shinjo: “Master Shinjo became alarmed at the extreme bruising on my body, the result of another beating from his son Kiyohide. I was given about six ounces of a noxious potion to drink. Within two days all the bruising, and the accompanying pain, were completely gone.”

That was in the mid-1970s. Back in the late 1950s, when George Mattson began his study of Uechi Ryu in Okinawa, he too took the Uechi medicine and found that his bruising disappeared soon afterwards, the next evening in fact. His teacher, Ryuko Tomoyose, told him that the potion was made from a “small, gnarled root” that Kanbum Uechi had brought back with him from China. He said that the root should be “cut up into thin slices and placed in a wicker basket. For thirty nights the basket and root slices must be placed outside in order to collect the morning dew. Prior to putting the basket outside, mother’s milk had to be sprinkled on the root slices. At the end of the thirty days the root slices would be placed in a gallon jug of rice wine to ferment for another thirty days.” Mattson mentions that he brought a sample of the root back to America, but none of the academic institutions he contacted about it, including the Harvard Medical School, were interested in analysing this old folk remedy.

After four years of training Uechi was given a teacher’s licence by Shushiwa and a little later he opened up his own kempo school. For some reason that was in the town of Nansei (Nansoe, or Nansho), “about 250 miles south west of Fuzhou.” Why Uechi chose to move that far is not known, but anyway he opened up a school there and had many pupils. Many years later, when he was living in Wakayama prefecture in Japan he told Kenwa Mabuni that in China “When you open a dojo, your main concern is dojo yaburi (challengers) who come to your dojo from time to time, in other words, a couple of toughs who come to the dojo to challenge the sensei to a fight. Suppose the teacher gets defeated in the challenge match, then the challengers take the tuition money for that month. Therefore, unless you are truly confident in your skill, you would not be able to open a dojo.”

Hard facts about Kanbum Uechi’s time in China are non-existent, but there are stories. For example, in “Ryukyu no Karate Monogatari” (“Ryukyu Karate Story”, 1979), Bunichi Ichikawa wrote:

“It was during the chaotic days in the end of the Shincho (Ch'ing Dynasty). Taking advantage of such circumstances, ambitious thieves, who were self-claimed heroes, were going on a rampage throughout China. As a result, kempo was actively practised.

“Kanbun learned kempo under his teacher for ten years. After reaching the level of Menkyo-kaiden (full mastership), he moved from Fuzhou to Nansoe (?). There was a kempo dojo at Nansoe and when it became known that Kanbum was a foremost master (of kempo) he was asked to take it over and teach the students. It was a request from the elderly head of the dojo. When Kanbum asked about the reason for the request, he was told that lately the dojo had been frequently invaded by aggressive challengers from various places, and money was being taken by threat. The dojo head believed that such incidents were going to continue. He therefore wanted to have a true expert as dojo head, and wished him to take over and maintain the dojo. Kanbun then accepted the request to become the new Dojo head and to teach the students.

“Before long, a dojo challenger with a commanding face, full beard, and powerful physique came (to the dojo. He certainly had the appearance of a strong heroic figure. He said: ‘I secluded myself in the mountains for twenty five years, mastering the essence of Shorinji style Kempo (Shaolin ch’uan-fa). I am Chouki Shogun, undefeated in matches with 483 renowned warriors throughout the areas of Henan, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Guangxi and Guandong.’

“When, as was the custom, the assistant instructor faced this man, it was seen that the boastful challenger was actually a strong fighter. Kanbun knew he had to be careful, and faced the man full of fighting spirit. The man seemed to Kanbum to be overwhelmingly larger than he was. . . . Even before the fight began all the students thought that this time their sensei was going to be defeated.

“Kanbum prepared himself with his knife-like sharp fingers held tightly together. Like a leopard, he attacked. . . . The self-claimed Chouki Shogun, underestimating Kanbum because of his smaller size, dashed toward him like a charging bull, trying to strike him with his fists and feet. However in a split second, Kanbum deflected the attack, putting Chouki Shogun off-balance toward the front. Kanbum then counter-attacked with sokuto. However, Chouki Shogun dodged the blow even in an off-balance position. Again, using his big physique he ran toward Kanbum as if he was trying to knock over an enormous rock. Had his strike connected, Kanbun could have been instantly thrown against the dojo wall and knocked out. But Kanbun was light on his feet, like feathers in the wind, moving and avoiding the attack freely.

“Not being able to connect with his blows, Chouki Shogun lost his composure. Yelling something in Chinese, he tried to finish Kanbun with a killing blow, but Kanbum ducked the attack and his spear-like five fingers thrust into the attacker’s neck. With a tremendous scream, his opponent lost his footing, staggered toward the dojo wall panel, and collapsed. Kanbum’s fingers were covered with blood. Chouki Shogun had suffered a crushing defeat and fled. Dojo challengers continued to come, but it is told that they were defeated every time, surrendering to Kanbum’s fist.”

A similar story, or maybe the same story in a slightly different form, is told in George Mattson’s “Uechi Ryu Karate Do” (1974): a few days after he opened his school in Nansoue, Kanbum was visited by a rival teacher who was abusive and asked why Uechi thought he could open a school there. Kanbum tried to calm him down and offered him tea, and after that the two men performed their kata, Uechi doing his favourite Seisan. But the other expert said that kata proved nothing and he wanted to fight. When he attacked each of his kicks and strikes was blocked until Uechi parried a face punch and countered with a kick to the stomach which bent the man double. Kanbum then jumped on the man’s back and he accepted defeat. Another time when Kanbum was selling some rice a crook tried to pay with a counterfeit coin and Uechi bent the coin in front of him.

Some of the stories that were supposed to have come back from China are far-fetched, and some literally unbelievable. In George Mattson’s first book, the 1963 “Way of Karate”, for example, he tells of an occasion when a village was being terrorised by a man-eating tiger and the villagers came to Uechi and his teacher for help. The two men went into the forest to wait for the tiger. Apparently, when the tiger attacked they planned to kill it with a one knuckle strike to the heart. It’s bizarre to think that you would kill a tiger this way, but this also begs the question as to why the two men would go out unarmed when there were any number of weapons in Chinese martial arts that they could have taken. In any case, the one knuckle strike technique never had to be put to the test because they came across an old man “with a flowing white beard” who said that he had killed the tiger a short while ago. He pointed in the direction where this had happened and walked away without giving his name. When Uechi and his teacher reached the area the old man had indicated, they found the dead tiger. There were no weapon marks or eternal signs of injury, but when they turned the animal over they saw that the tiger’s body had left an inch deep imprint on the ground. They surmised that the tiger’s back had been broken: as it attacked the old man from behind he must have grabbed its front legs and threw it over his shoulder, snapping its back and killing it in the process. The story sounds quite ridiculous.

There is another Uechi legend which supposedly had a direct impact on the history of Kanbum Uechi and his teaching. Supposedly this went back to 1908 when Uechi was running his school in Nansoue. One of his students was involved in a dispute with his landlord, or with a neighbouring farmer over irrigation of his land, and when a fight started Uechi’s student killed the man with a kempo strike. Uechi was shunned by the community and blamed himself for the death. He closed his school, vowing never to teach martial arts again, and shortly afterwards he returned to Okinawa.

There is a curious reference to this incident in an interview with Uechi Ru Ryu senior Seiko Toyama in the French “Karate Bushido” magazine, (March 1996 edition). Toyama told the magazine that “one day, in a street fight, one of his pupils, a farmworker, killed a man with the pole that he used to carry heavy loads. Kanbum was blamed for his death.”

This is the only mention of a weapon being used in the fight; every other retelling of the story states that it was a kempo strike that killed the man – although of course this is what karate people would like to believe. Elsewhere Toyama himself said that it was an empty hand strike, and that in fact it had not been a student but Kanbum Uechi himself who had delivered the killing blow. In Alan Dollar’s “Secrets of Uechi Ryu Karate” Toyama is quoted as saying that he had “heard Kanbum tell Ryuyu Tomoyose that he had once used a technique that he now disguised as the crane and had killed a man. He said that he had to leave as result.

“In the conversation Kanbum revealed that he had accidentally killed someone in China using the cobra technique he had been taught in Pangainoon. The vertical downward strike resembled the striking method of the cobra. It was considered as dangerous as the snake’s bite. Kanbum explained the fingertip strike, delivered in the way he had been taught, would certainly result in death.

“After the incident, he vowed never to teach the technique the way he had learned it from Shushiwa. He explained that he used the crane to hide the cobra and placed less emphasis on the new version of the technique. The knowledge of the subtle differences of the two techniques died with Kanbum Uechi.” One account says that the man died ten days after being struck.

In Mattson’s “Way of Karate” he tells an old story in which Kanbum Uechi was accosted by a gang of five bandits and on being attacked by the leader he parried the blow and counter attacked ”with a strike that instantly killed the bandit.” Again, maybe this is another version of the same story.

I might be imagining this, but I think (?) I read somewhere that the killing technique came from Sanseiru kata but that after the man’s death Kanbum Uechi had changed the movement slightly so that it wouldn’t be so dangerous; the same story, effectively, as told by Seiko Toyama. A technique unique to the Uechi Sanseirui is the downward finger strike at the end of the kata, something like a strong downward peck with the fingers. This is the “kakushiken” (crane hand) formation, and it is also found in Fujian White Crane style. In the various illustrations showing the application of this technique, in both Uechi Ryu and White Crane, the strike is directed at the fleshy hollow above the collar bone . . . . which is interesting, because on page 120 of James Y. Lee’s long forgotten book “Modern Kung-Fu Karate. Book 1 Part B” (1962) Lee describes this part of the body as a vital point, “The Shoulder Well”:

“Shoulder well: The soft area between throat and collarbone is called ‘Well of the Shoulder’. A strong attack can result in death. In Chinese karate the most common methods of attack are: 1. The reverse palm poke; 2. Eagle beak attack; 3. Hooking the fingertips.

“Symptoms of injury to ‘Shoulder Well’: When this spot is injured, blood will not circulate freely to the brain, swelling will not appear till a later date, the victim’s complexion will turn pale and white, the hands and feet will feel weak and rubbery, cold sweat will be experienced, headaches, ringing in the ears – he will lose consciousness from time to time, without proper treatment victim will suspire.”

This is interesting, but of course it’s just idle speculation and really, we have no idea whether Uechi, or his student, used this technique, (probably not) or whether the story of the fight and the resulting death is actually even true: killing someone with one karate strike is the stuff of legend but in reality it’s not so easy. In any case, a couple of years after this incident was supposed to have happened, Kanbum Uechi returned to Okinawa and for the next fifteen years or so he seems to have kept himself to himself and never taught his art to anyone at all.

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