🔤Scope of this chapter. The sound “karate,” and the Chinese characters that have been assigned to it — 唐手, 空手, 空手道 — plus the romanized KARATE. The history of these notations is not a game of letters. Changes in notation often carried with them a redefinition of the entity itself: political, ideological acts inscribed in script.
1. The Same Sound, Different Characters
The sound karate has been written in several ways across history.
| Notation | Reading | Main period of use | Connotation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 手 | te / ti | Early-modern to early-modern-period Okinawa | The native Okinawan name for indigenous corporeal techniques |
| 唐手 | tu-di / karate | Meiji era – 1930s | Name implying a relationship with China |
| 空手 | karate | Spreading from the late 1920s and through the 1930s | Empty-handedness; philosophical “emptiness”; mainland budo-ification |
| 空手道 | karatedo | 1930s onward | The suffix -do “way” links the practice to the budo system |
| KARATE | karate | Postwar to present | Internationalization; universalization via Latin script |
In what follows, we examine the context in which each notation appeared, and the ideological effects each renaming produced.
2. Te (手, ti) — Okinawan Corporeal Technique
From the early-modern Ryukyu Kingdom through Okinawa in the modern period, the word 手 (te / ti) has been described as a name for the unarmed martial arts and corporeal techniques native to Okinawa (Kadekaru 2017). The actual referent and usage, however, are inconsistent across periods, regions, and documents, and it should not be assumed that the single word te uniformly denoted a unified entity. The well-known regional division into Naha-te, Shuri-te, and Tomari-te should be handled cautiously as a classification organized after the fact, in the modern period, rather than as a fixed set of lineage names continuous from the early-modern era.
Linguistically, te / ti is the Okinawan dialect word literally meaning “hand.” It is more accurate to think that, within an Okinawan linguistic sensibility that called bodily uses and techniques “hand,” combat techniques too came to be called “hand,” rather than to suppose the practice was called te because it was a fighting method that used the hands.
📘Glossary: Naha-te, Shuri-te, Tomari-te. Naha, Shuri, and Tomari are place-names in the southern part of Okinawa’s main island. Each is said to have transmitted a different practice style. That said, this very tripartite classification has been pointed out as likely to be a later — especially twentieth-century — organization of what was once a more fluid landscape.
3. Tode (唐手) — Naming the Tie to China
The notation 唐手 can be confirmed in Okinawan documents and in the context of school physical education from the Meiji era through the early twentieth century. The character 唐 (to / tang) is an old way of writing “China”; 唐手 thus carried the sense of “hand of Chinese provenance.” Against the historical background of Ryukyuan exchanges with Fujian Province in southern China — study trips, trade — contact with southern Chinese martial arts is, as it were, inscribed in the character 唐.
However, it is important to note: the notation 唐手 does not mean what was practiced was pure Chinese martial arts. The prefix 唐 marks the presence of China at part of the roots; it does not mean the body of practice was identical with present-day Chinese martial arts.
📘Glossary: how 唐手 was read. The same two characters 唐手 carried two readings. In Okinawan pronunciation they were read approximately as tudi (sometimes transcribed toudi or tode); in the standard Japanese reading associated with mainland Japan, they were read karate. This double reading is itself a small symptom of the practice’s bicultural position between Okinawa and the mainland.
4. The Shift to Karate (空手) — A Discursive Event of the 1930s
The shift from 唐手 to 空手 proceeded from the 1920s through the 1930s, driven jointly by mainland Japanese university karate circles and by efforts on the Okinawan side to unify the nomenclature. Two events are especially important. First, the Keio University Tode-kenkyukai (慶應義塾唐手研究会, “Tode Research Society”) — Japan’s first university karate club — was founded on October 15, 1924 (Taisho 13) with Funakoshi Gichin as its instructor; at its fifth-anniversary commemoration in 1929 (Showa 4), the club formally rewrote 唐手 as 空手 and publicly adopted the name 空手道 (karatedo). Second, on October 25, 1936 (Showa 11), a roundtable hosted by the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper at the Showa Kaikan hall in Naha brought together leading Okinawan masters, who agreed to unify the name as 空手. (The newspaper’s serialized write-up of the meeting, from October 26 onward, ran under the title 「空手座談会」, “The Karate Roundtable.”) This transition was not simply a change in ateji (当て字, a Chinese character chosen for its sound rather than its meaning). At least three motivations overlap.
4.1 De-Sinicization
The 1930s in Japan were a period of escalating tension with China. One reading is that, in the course of incorporating the practice into mainland institutions as a budo, retaining the character 唐 (“Tang/China”) in the name became inconvenient. Switching to 空 (“empty”), one keeps the sound kara but tones down the Sinitic referent in the meaning. Still, reducing the transition to mere political de-Sinicization oversimplifies; the publicity strategy of the university karate scene, the Okinawan move to unify the name, and the aspiration toward budo-ification all converged.
4.2 Philosophization of “Emptiness” (空)
Another motivation lies in the philosophical resonance of the character 空. There is the 空 of toshu-kuken (徒手空拳, “empty hands, empty fists”), and the 空 of shiki soku ze ku (色即是空, “form is none other than emptiness”) in the Heart Sutra (般若心経, Hannya Shingyo, a short and widely chanted Mahayana Buddhist scripture in East Asia). Writing 空手 allows interpretations such as “the hand that bears no weapon,” “the hand that is empty (of self),” promoting karate from a mere fighting technique to something laden with thought.
4.3 Joining the Budo Discourse
In mainland Japan of the 1930s there already existed the Dai-Nippon Butokukai (大日本武徳会, Greater Japan Martial Virtue Society) as an umbrella organization for budo. As judo, kendo, and kyudo (archery) were being organized as budo, joining their company required that karate dress up as something budo-like. The renaming was one tactic.
5. Karatedo (空手道) — The Suffixing of Do (道)
The attachment of do (道, “way”) to 空手, yielding 空手道, also gained momentum in the 1930s. Funakoshi Gichin (船越義珍, 1868–1957) — the Okinawan teacher who introduced karate from Okinawa to mainland Japan in 1922 and is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Shotokan (松濤館) school — clearly used the word 空手道 in his 1935 Karate-do Kyohan (空手道教範, “Master Text of Karate-do”). His original Okinawan family name was written 富名腰 (read Funakoshi); he later registered under the homophonous mainland-style surname 船越, also read Funakoshi. The addition of do imitated the vocabulary of judo (柔道, codified by Kano Jigoro), kendo (剣道, the way of the sword), and kyudo (弓道, archery) — a gesture that redefines a technical art as a lifelong “path of cultivation of personhood.”
📘Glossary: do (道). In Japanese, do (道) is more than a road; it denotes a lifelong endeavor of self-cultivation through a particular technical art. Sado (tea), kado (flower), shodo (calligraphy), kendo, judo. Attaching do binds itself to reinterpreting the practice as “a means of forming a human being.”
6. “KARATE” — The Postwar Internationalization
After the war, karate spread to the world. U.S. military presence in Okinawa, the emigration of Japanese people, representations on film and television. The romanized notation KARATE pushed karate into the rank of an international word.
What is interesting is that as KARATE circulated internationally, it also returned, in romanized form, to the Chinese-character world: today it is common to see KARATE in Latin letters on posters and dojo signs even in Japan. As the notation became international, KARATE became a sign that does not merely belong to 空手 but contains 空手 within a wider compass.
7. What Each Renaming Redefined
In summary, each shift in notation has accompanied the following kinds of redefinition.
| Change in notation | Direction of redefinition |
|---|---|
| The coexistence and reorganization of 手 / 唐手 | Forming a framework that frames Okinawan corporeal technique as a martial art including its tie to China |
| 唐手 → 空手 | Dilution of the Sinitic; emphasis on empty-handedness; philosophization of 空 |
| 空手 → 空手道 | Redefinition from a technical art to a “way”; connection to the budo system |
| 空手 → KARATE | Internationalization; connection to universalism |
Each change bears the stamp of the politics, thought, and international relations of its own time.
8. The Act of Changing a Name
Changing a name is a heavy act in intellectual history. As Eric Hobsbawm and his collaborators termed it, “the invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983): naming, or renaming, a practice reconstitutes it as “traditional,” “orthodox.”
The shift from 唐手 to 空手 can be read as one such case of “invented tradition”: a process that connected Okinawan corporeal technique to the mainland budo system, and then extended it further into the world’s KARATE. At each stage, the notation has been walking ahead of the substance.
📝For readers new to karate. In daily life one almost never rewrites the characters of a word. But for a socially expansive concept such as karate, the very choice of script becomes a political and ideological act. Think of debates over writing “障害者” vs. “障がい者” vs. “障碍者” (“person with a disability,” with the second character softened in different ways) in modern Japan. In the same way, at the moment 唐手 was rewritten as 空手, the meaning of the object shifted.
9. Remaining Questions
This chapter has traced the history of the notation. Several large questions follow.
- Have 手, 唐手, 空手, 空手道, and KARATE truly referred to the same entity?
- Or has each notation referred, in its own time, to a different entity?
- If the latter, how many “karate” do we possess?
These questions will be examined historically in the chapters that follow.
Principal References
- Kadekaru, Toru (2017) Okinawa Karate no Sozo to Tenkai (沖縄空手の創造と展開, “The Creation and Development of Okinawan Karate”). Doctoral dissertation, Waseda University.
- Kinjo, Hiroshi (2011) Tode kara Karate e (唐手から空手へ, “From Tode to Karate”). Tokyo: Nippon Budokan.
- Funakoshi (Tominakoshi), Gichin (1922) Ryukyu Kempo: Karate (琉球拳法 唐手, “Ryukyu Kempo: Tode”). Tokyo: Bukyosha. (The author’s name on the cover is given as 富名腰義珍, his Okinawan family name; he is the same person later known as 船越義珍.)
- Funakoshi, Gichin (1935) Karate-do Kyohan (空手道教範, “Master Text of Karate-do”). Tokyo: Okura Kobundo.
- Ryukyu Shimpo (1936) “Meisho wo ‘Karate’ ni Toitsu shi Shinkokai wo Kessei! Kenka no Tatsujin Morashi Zadankai Nigiwau” (名称を“空手”に統一し振興會を結成！ 縣下の達人網羅し座談會賑ふ, “Unifying the Name as ‘Karate’ and Forming a Promotion Society! The Province’s Masters Gather, the Roundtable Bustles”). Ryukyu Shimpo, October 26, 1936. (The roundtable itself was held on October 25, 1936, at the Showa Kaikan hall in Naha.)
- Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press.