🎓Scope of this chapter. Why was it that karate, until then a regional martial art of Okinawa, was so rapidly taken up by university clubs on the Japanese mainland in the 1920s and 30s? This cannot be treated as an accident. The mainland diffusion of karate occurred at the intersection of three forces: the structure of Japanese society at the time, the social position of the university student as a newly emerging class, and the institutionalization of budō (武道) discourse.
1. The Decisive Decade of the 1920s
In any account of karate’s history, the 1920s stands out as the decisive decade.
- 1916. Funakoshi Gichin is reported to have demonstrated tōde (唐手, the older notation for what would later be written as karate) at the Butokuden (武徳殿, the central training hall of the Dai-Nippon Butokukai) in Kyoto. This demonstration, however, rests in part on later sources; confirmation in primary documents remains tentative.
- 1922. Funakoshi exhibits and introduces tōde at the Ministry of Education’s Undō Taiiku Tenrankai (運動体育展覧会, “Exhibition of Sport and Physical Education”) in Tokyo. In the same year he gives demonstrations at the Kodokan and other venues, and begins teaching in Tokyo.
- 1924. The Tōde Kenkyūkai (唐手研究会, “Tōde Research Society”) is founded at Keio University — the first university karate club in Japan.
- 1925. A Tōde Kenkyūkai is founded at Tokyo Imperial University (the predecessor of today’s University of Tokyo).
- Late 1920s–1930s. Karate research societies and clubs spread to other elite institutions, including Daiichi Kōtōgakkō (一高, the First Higher School), Tokyo University of Commerce (the predecessor of Hitotsubashi University), Waseda University, Takushoku University, and Hosei University.
In just one decade, tōde was transformed from “a curious local martial art from Okinawa” into “a budō practiced by university students nationwide.” Explaining this shift by saying “because Funakoshi Gichin was a great man” is insufficient. There were social and institutional conditions that made Funakoshi’s activity possible.
2. Why the Universities?
The first foothold for tōde on the mainland was neither shrines, nor police, nor the military, but the universities. This was not an accident.
2.1 The University Student as a New Social Stratum
In 1920s Japan, university students were a strikingly small elite by population share. In 1920, the student body of kyūsei daigaku (旧制大学, the pre-1947 elite universities established under the Imperial University Ordinance and later the University Ordinance of 1918) numbered in the low tens of thousands, and the higher-education sector as a whole — including kōtōgakkō (高等学校, the elite higher schools that prepared students for university) and specialized schools — totaled only around 60,000 students. They formed a small minority of their age cohort (Amano 1989).
These students were uniquely positioned to take up new culture, scholarship, and bodily practices. They were elites, but in a free interval before being absorbed into the core of society. That such a stratum chose a novel practice like tōde as an extracurricular activity has a sociological logic of its own.
2.2 An Open Niche in the Roster of Budō
The universities already had jūdō, kendō, and kyūdō (archery) clubs. These martial arts had secured positions within the mainland’s existing systems of budō, school physical education, and university athletic culture. Tōde, by contrast, was a “novel budō” that did not fully overlap with the existing martial arts and could easily carve out its own niche.
Jūdō and kendō had already been systematized by figures such as Kanō Jigorō and Takano Sasaburō, and the institutional bar for entry was high. Tōde, by contrast, had not yet developed fixed schools (ryūha), ranking systems, or set curricula. That looseness left it flexible enough for university students themselves to organize freely under the heading of kenkyūkai (研究会, “research society”).
2.3 The Climate of “Taishō Democracy”
The 1920s unfolded under the climate known as Taishō Democracy. New thought, new bodily culture, and new forms of education were sought voraciously — Marxism, liberalism, new religions, rationalism, and various health and physical-training regimens all flourished. Within this climate, tōde too was received by university students as one such “new bodily culture.”
📘Glossary: Taishō Democracy. The current of political liberalism and cultural pluralism that ran through the Taishō era (1912–1926) and into the early Shōwa years. It was marked by movements for universal manhood suffrage and women’s suffrage, by avant-garde arts, and by an influx of foreign thought.
3. Funakoshi Gichin and the Transplantation to the Mainland
Funakoshi Gichin (1868–1957) trained under Asato Ankō and Itosu Ankō, and spent more than thirty years as a primary-school teacher in Okinawa. He later served as president of the Okinawa Shōbukai (沖縄尚武会, an early Okinawan martial-arts promotion society) and as a budō instructor at the Okinawa Prefectural Normal School. From his move to Tokyo in 1922 onward, he became the central figure in the mainland diffusion of tōde.
Funakoshi’s strategy was continuous with that of Itosu: to present tōde not merely as a bujutsu (武術, “martial technique”) but as a budō (武道, “martial way”) — a practice carrying educational and ethical value. In 1935 Funakoshi published Karate-dō Kyōhan (空手道教範, “Master Text of Karate-dō”), in which he explicitly carried out the orthographic shift from 唐手 to 空手道. This change, however, was not completed by Funakoshi alone. It was linked to parallel moves at the Keio University Tōde Research Society (which adopted the “空手道” notation as early as 1929) and within other mainland university circles, and to the 1936 unification of the name on the Okinawan side.
📘Glossary: 唐手 vs. 空手. Both are read karate in modern Japanese. The older notation 唐手 uses the character for “Tang” (i.e., China), pointing to the art’s perceived Chinese roots. The newer notation 空手 uses the character for “empty,” framing the practice as one of empty-handed combat. The shift from the first to the second was thus simultaneously a graphic, conceptual, and political move.
4. The Profile of the University-Club Karateka
What social stratum did the students who studied karate at the universities of the 1920s and 30s belong to? Strict statistical tracking is difficult, but several tendencies can be noted.
| Dimension | Tendency |
|---|---|
| Class background | Predominantly the propertied middle class and above, regional notables, and educationally invested urban families — in short, households that could afford university tuition. |
| Region of origin | Mostly Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. Okinawans were few in number, but Okinawan instructors and mediators played pivotal roles in the early period. |
| Career path | Government service, teaching, corporate employment, the military, and posts connected to overseas trading houses and colonial administration. |
| Parallel training | Many had prior experience in jūdō or kendō; karate was often layered on top of existing budō practice. |
It is worth noting that some of these university karateka went on, after graduation, into positions tied to the expansion of the Japanese empire — central and local government, large firms, the military, overseas trading houses, and colonial administration. The mainland diffusion of karate coincided temporally with imperial expansion, and the relationship between the two warrants sociological examination. That said, university karate should not be reduced outright to “a tool of imperialism”; it is better read as a site where student culture, the budō-ification of bodily practice, and the state’s management of bodies all overlapped.
5. Entry into the Discourse of “Budō”
In the 1930s, the concept of “budō” was being institutionalized on the mainland, primarily through the Dai-Nippon Butokukai (大日本武徳会, “Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association”). Around the core of jūdō and kendō, the disciplines of kyūdō, naginata, and others were sorted into the category of “Japanese budō” and linked to systems of school and social physical education.
Karate sought entry into this budō discourse and repositioned itself accordingly. Three institutional moves are especially visible:
- Change of notation. 唐手 → 空手 → 空手道.
- Formation of distinct schools. What would later come to be called the “four major schools” — Shōtōkan-ryū, Gōjū-ryū, Shitō-ryū, and Wadō-ryū — took shape in this period.
- Adoption of rank and title systems. The dan-i (段位, ranking) and licensure model was imported from Kōdōkan jūdō and the Butokukai.
Taken together, these were institutional moves to lodge karate firmly within the discourse of budō.
6. The Costs of Transplantation
The transplantation to the mainland and the budō-ification gave karate new reach, but they came with several “costs.”
- Thinning of its Okinawan-ness. Mainland karate was cut loose from its Okinawan cultural context. Okinawan-dialect names for techniques were translated into standard Japanese, and the Okinawan historical background was elided.
- Hardening of schools. Lineages of transmission that had previously been relatively fluid were re-ordered on the mainland into organizational names, school names, and master lineages. After the war, the “four major schools” framework became standard, and inter-school differences came to be institutionally emphasized.
- Group-instruction format. Collective practice in the university-club setting became the standard form, and practice grounded in individual master-student relationships was pushed to the margins.
- Seeds of a competitive orientation. Although a formal competitive system in the modern sense had not yet been established before the war, the mutual exchanges, demonstrations, and inter-club rivalries among university clubs prepared the ground for the postwar shift toward sportized competition.
7. Wartime Mobilization and Karate
From the late 1930s into the wartime period, karate, along with the other budō, was drawn into the atmosphere of wartime mobilization. As part of school budō and as an auxiliary to military drill, karate became connected to the state’s apparatus of bodily management.
In this period karate was re-emphasized as “a technique to subdue an opponent with bare hands.” In some manuals and teaching contexts, its meanings as self-defense, as a method of restraint, and as military bodily training came to the foreground. Karate’s spirituality as a budō and its practical efficacy as a combat technique were laid one over the other within the climate of nationalism.
8. Conclusion: A Karate Made by the University Clubs
In the mainland diffusion of karate, the university club was the decisive base. Funakoshi’s instruction at the Meishōjuku (明正塾, a dormitory for Okinawan students in Tokyo where he began teaching after the 1922 exhibition), his demonstrations at the Kōdōkan, and karate’s spread through dojo and exhibitions in various regions cannot be ignored — but in their continuous recruitment of students, their organization-building, and their diffusion through graduates across the country, the role of the university clubs was outsized.
The karate built in the university clubs took on the character of a bodily education for the elite, standardized group instruction as its form, and oriented itself toward entry into the discourse of budō. After the war, it was the graduates of these university clubs who opened dojo across Japan, organized the postwar schools and federations, and carried karate to the world.
A substantial portion of the institutional skeleton of karate as we know it today derives from the university-club culture of the 1920s and 30s.
📝For readers new to the topic. Think of the sākuru (circle) culture of present-day Japanese universities — tennis circles, light-music circles, photography clubs, literary societies. In many cases, these are the seedbeds for cultural practices that go on to spread into society after graduation. The university tōde research societies of the 1920s occupied a similar position. The crucial difference is that, at the time, university students themselves were a tiny elite — only a few percent of their age cohort.
Principal References
- Kadekaru, Tōru (2017). Okinawa Karate no Sōzō to Tenkai: Koshō no Hensen wo Tegakari ni shite (沖縄空手の創造と展開：呼称の変遷を手がかりにして, “The Creation and Development of Okinawan Karate: Through the Transformation of Its Names”). Doctoral dissertation, Waseda University.
- Kinjō, Hiroshi (2011). Tōde kara Karate e (唐手から空手へ, “From Tōde to Karate”). Tokyo: Nippon Budokan.
- Amano, Ikuo (1989). Kindai Nihon Kōtō Kyōiku Kenkyū (近代日本高等教育研究, “Studies in Modern Japanese Higher Education”). Tokyo: Tamagawa University Press.
- Funakoshi, Gichin (1935). Karate-dō Kyōhan (空手道教範, “Master Text of Karate-dō”). Tokyo: Ōkura Kōbundō.
- Tominakoshi (Funakoshi), Gichin (1922). Ryūkyū Kenpō Tōde (琉球拳法 唐手, “Ryukyuan Boxing Method: Tōde”). Tokyo: Bukyōsha.
- Sonohara, Ken (2023). “Okinawa Butokuden Kaiden-shiki Kankei Shiryō ni tsuite” (沖縄武徳殿開殿式関係資料について, “On Materials Related to the Opening Ceremony of the Okinawa Butokuden”). Bulletin of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum. https://okimu.jp/sp/userfiles/files/page/museum/issue/bulletin/hakukiyou16/05_Sonohara.pdf
- Keio University Karate Club, “History.” https://www.keiokarate.com/
- University of Tokyo Karate Club, “History.” https://www.toudai-karate.com/history/
- All Japan University Karate-dō Federation, “History.” https://www.jukf.org/modules/tinyd1/