18｜Karate as Popular Entertainment — Film, Manga, Television, and Games

🎬Scope of this chapter: From the twentieth century onward, “Karate” (カラテ) has been consumed as popular entertainment. Through film, television, manga, anime, video games, and fiction, the idea of “Karate” spread around the world and acquired a recognizable image. This chapter traces the history of karate as mass entertainment and examines the relationship between “actual karate” (what is practiced in dojos) and “the Karate of the imagination” (what audiences picture).

1. How the World’s Image of Karate Was Manufactured

For a great many people around the world, the image of “KARATE” was formed first through movies and television — long before they ever set foot in an actual dojo (道場, “training hall”).

Bruce Lee’s films (1970s)
The Karate Kid series (from 1984)
The action films of Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme
Manga and anime such as Karate Baka Ichidai (空手バカ一代, roughly “A Karate-Crazy Life”)
Fighting video games such as Street Fighter

These works offered the world a “Karate-as-character” that was distinct from actual karate. That image, in turn, drew newcomers into real dojos — and, conversely, fed back into and reshaped the actual practice of karate itself.

2. Bruce Lee and the Martial-Arts Film Boom

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) was not, strictly speaking, a karateka. He began with Wing Chun (詠春拳, a southern Chinese kung fu style) and went on to formulate his own approach, Jeet Kune Do (截拳道, “the way of the intercepting fist”). Even so, Lee’s films single-handedly raised the global profile of “Asian martial arts.”

The Big Boss (1971; Japanese title Dragon Kiki Ippatsu)
Fist of Fury (1972; Japanese title Dragon Ikari no Tekken)
The Way of the Dragon (1972; Japanese title Dragon e no Michi)
Enter the Dragon (1973; Japanese title Moeyo Dragon)
Game of Death (1978; Japanese title Shibō Yūgi — completed after Lee’s death using unfinished footage)

Lee’s style was, in fact, not karate. But audiences worldwide in the 1970s did not necessarily draw sharp lines between “kung fu,” “karate,” and “Asian martial arts” in general. Lee’s films launched a kung fu film boom and, at the same time, raised global interest in “Eastern martial arts” broadly construed. Within that sphere of influence, karate too came to enjoy popular attention.

3. The Karate Kid Series

The Karate Kid, released in 1984, decisively imprinted on American youth an image of “what karate is.”

An elderly Okinawan-born man, Mr. Miyagi, teaches “karate” to an American teenager, Daniel LaRusso.
The training scenes — learning through everyday chores, epitomized by “wax on, wax off” — are the film’s most memorable.
In the tournament climax, Daniel wins with the “crane kick.”

The film became tightly bound up with the American image of youth karate schools and chain dojos. The U.S. image of “KARATE” fused with Mr. Miyagi’s maxims: learn by watching, respect comes first, balance is everything.

From 2018, the sequel drama Cobra Kai carried the world of The Karate Kid into the present. Cobra Kai began on YouTube Red / YouTube Premium and later moved to Netflix, where it reached a far wider audience.

📘Note for newcomers — what “Okinawan” signifies here. Okinawa is the southernmost island chain of Japan and the historical birthplace of karate (see the earlier chapters on Ryukyuan te). Making Mr. Miyagi an Okinawan immigrant was the film’s way of signaling an “authentic” lineage for the art, even though the movie’s karate is a Hollywood construction.

4. Japanese Karate / Combat Manga and Games

In Japan, a large number of manga and anime took karate and the combat sports as their theme.

Ashita no Joe (あしたのジョー, “Tomorrow’s Joe”; original story by Takamori Asao [a pen name of Kajiwara Ikki], art by Chiba Tetsuya, 1968–1973): This is a boxing manga, not a karate manga. But as a work that depicted self-formation and upward social mobility through combat sport, it exerted enormous influence on the whole later genre of fighting manga.
Karate Baka Ichidai (空手バカ一代, “A Karate-Crazy Life”; story by Kajiwara Ikki, art by Tsunoda Jirō and later Kagemaru Jōya, 1971–1977): A work modeled on Ōyama Masutatsu (Mas Oyama) and the Kyokushin Kaikan organization. Fact and fiction are intermixed, but it is the representative work that popularized the image of Kyokushin and of full-contact karate.
Kenji (拳児; story by Matsuda Ryūchi, art by Fujiwara Yoshihide, 1988–1992): A manga whose subject is Chinese martial arts, not karate. It is nonetheless important as a work that gave Japanese readers a systematic look at “East Asian martial arts.”
Grappler Baki (グラップラー刃牙; by Itagaki Keisuke, 1991–1999, with the series continuing thereafter): A combat manga that ranges across karate, judo, boxing, Chinese martial arts, professional wrestling, and more; karate appears as one of several fighting arts.
Street Fighter (video game, from 1987): The image of Ryu and Ken — white dōgi (道着, training uniform), headbands, punches and kicks — strongly shaped the picture of “in-game Karate” from the late twentieth century onward.

These works moved back and forth between “realistic karate” and “fictional karate,” influencing one another along the way.

📘Note for newcomers — key names. Kajiwara Ikki (梶原一騎) was Japan’s most influential writer of sports and combat manga in the 1960s–70s; he often wrote under the pen name Takamori Asao. Ōyama Masutatsu / Mas Oyama (大山倍達) was the charismatic founder of Kyokushin (極真), a hard, full-contact style of karate. These names recur throughout the popular-culture history of karate.

5. K-1 and the Combat-Sports Boom on Television

K-1, launched in 1993, turned stand-up combat sports — karate among them — into a symbol of televised spectacle.

It was founded under the leadership of Ishii Kazuyoshi and others of the Seidōkaikan (正道会館) karate organization.
It produced star fighters such as Andy Hug, Ernesto Hoost, Peter Aerts, Mike Bernardo, Branko Cikatić, Satake Masaaki, and Kakuda Nobuaki.
Through television broadcasts, it established “stand-up combat” — cutting across karate, kickboxing, Muay Thai, and more — as a single entertainment genre.

Through K-1’s events, “Karate” enriched its image as “a sport you watch in competition.” The classical image of practicing kata (型, “forms”) in a dojo, and the image of a commercial spectator sport fought in a ring, came to coexist.

6. Between “the Karate Kid” and “Street Fighter”

The American “Karate Kid” image and the Japanese-born “Street Fighter” image are often a study in contrasts.

The Karate Kid: a path of spiritual growth — honoring courtesy, standing up to bullies. A static image of learn by watching and balance is everything.
Street Fighter: a competition pitting fighters from around the world against one another. A dynamic image of Hadōken, Shōryūken, and Tatsumaki Senpūkyaku (the signature fireball, rising-dragon punch, and spinning hurricane kick).

Using the same “Karate-ish” imagery, the two offer utterly different narratives. The contemporary image of “KARATE” is formed as a composite of several such popular-culture images.

7. The “Reverse Import” of the Image

A striking phenomenon is that these popular-culture images are “reverse-imported” — feeding back to influence actual karate.

Imagery from games: With the global success of Street Fighter, names like Hadōken and Shōryūken spread worldwide. They are not formal karate technique names, but for children and beginners they have become reference points for imagining punches, kicks, and stances.
The Cobra Kai effect: Since the hit of Cobra Kai, adults of the Karate Kid generation and a new generation of children have rediscovered their interest in “karate.”
The K-1 effect: Viewers who saw “high kicks,” “low kicks,” and “axe kicks” on television began arriving at dojos wanting to learn them.

Through this reverse import, the boundary between “actual karate” and “the Karate of the imagination” has blurred. It is a relationship of mutual influence: the image shapes reality, and reality generates the image.

8. Karate in Other Media

Beyond film, television, and manga, karate has been consumed across many other media.

Novels and nonfiction: Karate is often depicted within martial-arts fiction, combat-sport nonfiction, and athlete biographies. Masuda Toshinari’s Why Did Kimura Masahiko Not Kill Rikidōzan? (木村政彦はなぜ力道山を殺さなかったのか) centers on judo and professional wrestling, but it provides an important context for thinking about Japan’s combat-sports culture.
Documentary films: Works such as the Chijō Saikyō no Karate (“The Strongest Karate on Earth”) series, which took the Kyokushin Kaikan as its subject, presented karate as documentary cinema.
Games: Beyond Street Fighter, many fighting games — Tekken, Virtua Fighter, The King of Fighters — incorporated karate-like characters and techniques.
TV programs and variety shows: Through K-1, PRIDE, assorted combat-sport specials, and martial-arts showcase programs, karate was consumed as “a martial art you watch.”

Through these media, the many varied images of karate exist side by side.

9. The Boundary Between “Real Karate” and “Fictional Karate”

Popular-culture “fictional karate” is often spoken of as distinct from “real karate”: “fiction isn’t real,” “movie karate is detached from reality.”

From the standpoint of this series, however, the boundary between “the real” and “the fictional” is not as clear as one might think. The world of real karate is itself shaped by fiction. Hadōken and Shōryūken are not actual karate techniques — yet there is no denying that, through those very names, a great many people came to take an interest in punches, kicks, and stances.

“The real” and “the fictional” influence one another and dissolve each other’s boundaries.

10. Conclusion: The Tangled Relationship of Image and Reality

This chapter has traced karate within mass entertainment. Let us state just one conclusion.

The “image” of karate is intricately entangled with its “reality.” Many people around the world come to know karate through film and television before they ever encounter an actual dojo. That image then prompts entry into real karate and, conversely, shapes how real karate is practiced.

To answer the question “What is karate?”, we cannot ignore this “karate as image.” For much of the world, “Karate” is not only something practiced in a dojo, but something seen on a screen, watched in a ring, and played in a game.

Does this media-driven diffusion of karate cause us to lose sight of its “essence,” or does it constitute karate’s “contemporary form”? This series takes neither side. It records only this fact: that the complex relationship between image and reality is the very mode of existence of contemporary karate.

📝Note for newcomers. Consider the global image of the Japanese samurai: it was spread worldwide largely by Akira Kurosawa’s films and by Hollywood productions. This “samurai of the imagination” differs considerably from the actual samurai of the Edo period (1603–1868), yet it now forms the very core of what “samurai” means to most people. Karate is the same. The “Karate of the imagination” shapes the contemporary image of “KARATE.”

Principal References

Takamori Asao (Kajiwara Ikki) & Chiba Tetsuya (1968–1973) Ashita no Joe (あしたのジョー, “Tomorrow’s Joe”). Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Kajiwara Ikki, Tsunoda Jirō & Kagemaru Jōya (1971–1977) Karate Baka Ichidai (空手バカ一代, “A Karate-Crazy Life”). Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Matsuda Ryūchi & Fujiwara Yoshihide (1988–1992) Kenji (拳児). Tokyo: Shōgakukan.
Itagaki Keisuke (1991–1999) Grappler Baki (グラップラー刃牙). Tokyo: Akita Shoten.
Masuda Toshinari (2011) Why Did Kimura Masahiko Not Kill Rikidōzan? (木村政彦はなぜ力道山を殺さなかったのか). Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Donohue, J. (1994) Warrior Dreams: The Martial Arts and the American Imagination. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Krug, G. (2001) “At the Feet of the Master: Three Stages in the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate Into Anglo-American Culture.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 1(4).
Netflix, “The Karate Kid Saga Enters a New Era as Cobra Kai Comes to Netflix.” https://about.netflix.com/news/the-karate-kid-saga-enters-a-new-era-as-cobra-kai-comes-to-netflix
Ashita no Joe 50th Anniversary Site https://joe-50th.com/
MOVIE WALKER PRESS, “Films directed by and starring Bruce Lee” https://press.moviewalker.jp/person/21447/

“What Is Karate?” — A Multidimensional Inquiry Through Thought, History, and Sociology