🏫Scope of this chapter. Karate today is often spoken of in the register of “ancient martial arts” and “secret transmission.” Yet in Meiji- and Taishō-era Okinawa, tōde (唐手, the older name for what is now called karate) spread above all as a subject of school physical education. From a secret art to a form of gymnastics. This chapter dissects how that pivot shaped karate’s subsequent history.
1. The Starting Point: “Karate as Gymnastics”
When one sets out to write a general history of karate, one fact is regularly skipped over: the earliest institutional foothold of karate in modern Japan was neither a shrine nor a private dōjō, but the school.
In Okinawa Prefecture, tōde was introduced in 1901 as part of the physical-education curriculum at Shuri Jinjō Shōgakkō (首里尋常小学校, Shuri Ordinary Elementary School). In 1905, it was adopted as a formal physical-education subject at Okinawa Kenritsu Chūgakkō (沖縄県立中学校, the Okinawa Prefectural Middle School — later renamed the First Prefectural Middle School, today’s Shuri High School) and Okinawa Kenritsu Shihan Gakkō (沖縄県立師範学校, the Okinawa Normal School). The central figure was Itosu Ankō (糸洲安恒, 1831–1915), who has appeared in earlier chapters (Kadekaru 2017; Kinjō 2011).
🗾Note for readers outside Japan. Jinjō shōgakkō was the standard term for elementary school in pre-war Japan. Chūgakkō at the time meant a five-year secondary school for boys, roughly comparable to a combination of today’s junior and senior high school. Shihan gakkō was a teacher-training college producing primary-school teachers. All three were elite, state-recognized institutions, and their adoption of tōde carried symbolic weight.
2. The “Ten Precepts of Itosu” (1908)
In 1908, Itosu Ankō submitted to the Education Section of Okinawa Prefecture what has come to be known as the “Ten Precepts of Itosu” (Itosu Jukkun, 糸洲十訓; also cited in primary sources as Karate Kokoroe Jūkkajō 唐手心得十ヶ条 or Karate Jukkajō 唐手十箇條). The document was a position paper aimed at widening the use of tōde in the schools; across ten articles it set out the practice’s benefits, its training methods, and its educational value.
Its main points, in summary, are these.
- Tōde does not derive from Confucian or Buddhist teaching; it is a path of bodily training developed by warriors.
- It is useful for self-defense in emergencies, but is not to be used to pick fights.
- It strengthens muscle and bone, and will also serve future military service and a soldierly society.
- As a foundation for physical education, it ought to be practiced widely from the elementary-school age onward.
What is striking is that the Ten Precepts justify tōde not merely as a “bare-handed combat technique,” but as “a single practice that combines physical conditioning, school physical education, and military utility.” To fit tōde into the framework of public education, Itosu’s strategy was to redefine its meaning in pedagogical and physical-education terms.
📘Glossary: Itosu Jukkun. A ten-article position paper, submitted by Itosu Ankō in 1908, summarizing the educational significance of tōde. Commonly called Itosu Jukkun (“the Ten Precepts of Itosu”), it is also cited in primary sources as Karate Kokoroe Jūkkajō (“Ten Articles of Karate Know-How”) or Karate Jukkajō (“Ten Articles of Karate“). It is one of the key primary documents in karate history.
3. The Pinan (平安) Kata — Inventing a Curriculum for Education
For the sake of group instruction of children, Itosu reorganized the existing kata of tōde. The Pinan (平安) series he created — Pinan Shodan through Pinan Godan (1st through 5th) — is understood as an educational kata set, edited and staged from older kata into a sequence suited for beginners under the school system.
What happened here was decisive.
- Up to that point, te / tōde had been transmitted within the personal relationship of master and disciple, and only to a small number of pupils.
- With the creation of Pinan, tōde was recomposed as a curriculum to be learned in stages according to school grade.
- This was an act of overlaying the logic of modern school education onto the logic of martial-arts transmission.
The Pinan kata were later carried to mainland Japan by Funakoshi Gichin (船越義珍) and became core beginners’ kata in the Shōtōkan school, where the same characters 平安 are read not in the Okinawan way as Pinan, but in the standard Japanese on’yomi (音読み, the Sino-Japanese reading of Chinese characters) as Heian (へいあん). Through other lineages they were also adopted in Mas Oyama’s Kyokushinkai and elsewhere, under the name Pinan / Heian. A substantial portion of the beginner kata that we today think of as “karate” is, in fact, the inheritance of Itosu’s educational reorganization.
4. Between “Gymnastics” and “Martial Art”
The tōde of Meiji- and Taishō-era Okinawa stood on the boundary between martial art and gymnastics. Taught as a group activity in schools, it could not escape the conventions of modern calisthenics: lining up, responding to commands, moving in unison. At the same time, it remained a craft for the protection of one’s own body.
| Aspect | Tōde as gymnastics | Tōde as martial art |
|---|---|---|
| Aim | Bodily health; cultivation of discipline | Combat; self-defense |
| Mode of instruction | Lining up; commands; group action in unison | One-on-one master–disciple instruction |
| Curriculum | Staged; sorted by age | Individualized; secret transmissions exist |
| Evaluation | PE grade; health indicators | Practical effectiveness in real combat |
This doubleness still colors karate today. The karate practiced in school clubs and children’s classes as group training, and the karate learned one-on-one under a master in a traditional dōjō, share the same name but inherit, almost intact, the institutional duality that was settled in the Meiji era.
5. Removing the “Dangerous Techniques”
Another important shift took place in the course of this gymnastification: the deliberate removal of “dangerous techniques.”
Strikes to the groin, eye attacks, joint-breaking, attacks to the neck — these are hard to teach as they are in a school setting. In the process by which Itosu put together the kata framework for school use, techniques and interpretations judged pedagogically unsuitable are thought to have receded from the surface.
This tendency continued, in different forms, into the later mainland transplant and the postwar competitive turn. The establishment of sundome (寸止め, literally “stopping one sun short,” where sun is a traditional Japanese unit of length of about 3 cm — in practice, a rule under which strikes are deliberately halted just before contact), the use of protective gear, and the prohibition of attacks to vital points all institutionalized “a karate that can be safely practiced and competed in.” That said, the dangerous techniques did not disappear entirely; in the contexts of bunkai (型分解, the practical reinterpretation of kata), self-defense, Okinawan karate, and full-contact karate, they continue to be preserved and reinterpreted in different forms.
From this, a question arises. Is a karate from which the dangers have been removed still “karate”?
This article series offers no answer. It only describes the historical course of technical selection, and how that course altered karate’s meaning.
6. The Intersection with Modern Calisthenics
One further factor cannot be overlooked: the influence of modern Western-style calisthenics on mainland Japan during the Meiji era.
After the promulgation of the Gakusei (学制, the modern school ordinance) in 1872, Japanese schools introduced Western-style gymnastics and military-style calisthenics as physical education. Unified group movement, commands, lining up, marching — these conventions of modern school PE pressed upon tōde the moment it was admitted into the school setting.
In other words, the gymnastification of tōde in the Meiji era was not solely a change driven from within tōde itself; it was also a translation carried out under the institutional pressure of modern school physical education.
7. Closing: Tōde as Gymnastics, as Origin
When we speak of the origins of karate, the image that tends to circulate is “an ancient martial art transmitted by the Okinawan shizoku (士族, the Ryukyuan warrior class).” That image is half true and half misleading.
If we want to think about karate’s institutional, modern origins, we have to weigh not only the in-family transmission within the shizoku class, but also school physical education in the Meiji era. Itosu taught in schools, created the Pinan kata, organized techniques for educational use, and connected them to the conventions of modern school PE. Through this sequence of acts, tōde was turned into “a modern, reproducible practice.”
Between the older te / tōde and the later “school tōde” there is a clear discontinuity. And yet the break is not total. The karate we know today stands at the crossroads of an older bare-handed martial tradition and its modern reorganization through school physical education.
📝Note for non-Japanese readers. Picture rajio taisō (ラジオ体操, literally “radio calisthenics”) — a short routine of group exercises that is still done today in Japanese schools and workplaces, often to broadcast accompaniment. Popularized from the late 1920s and 1930s (early Shōwa period) by agencies such as the postal life-insurance bureau, with the aim of improving national health, it is the textbook case of modern Japanese mass calisthenics. There was a period when Meiji-era tōde sat in a similarly “taught in groups, used to discipline the body” position. This is the other face of karate — the face that tends to be hidden behind the image of a “secret martial art.”
Principal References
- Kadekaru, Tōru (2017). Okinawa Karate no Sōzō to Tenkai: Koshō no Hensen o 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 Transition of Its Name”). Doctoral dissertation, Waseda University.
- Kinjō, Hiroshi (2011). Tōde kara Karate e (唐手から空手へ, “From Tōde to Karate“). Tokyo: Nippon Budōkan.
- Itosu, Ankō (1908). “Karate Kokoroe Jūkkajō / Itosu Jukkun” (唐手心得十ヶ条／糸洲十訓, “Ten Articles of Karate Know-How / The Ten Precepts of Itosu”).
- Abe, Akiyuki (2023). “Kindai Okinawa no Seinen Kyōiku Keitō ni okeru Karate no Teichaku Katei” (近代沖縄の青年教育系統における空手の定着過程, “The Process by Which Karate Took Root in the Youth-Education System of Modern Okinawa”). Budōgaku Kenkyū (武道学研究), Japan Academy of Budo (early-access on J-Stage, 17 March 2023).
- Kimura, Kichiji (1975). Nihon Kindai Taiiku Shisō no Keisei (日本近代体育思想の形成, “The Formation of Modern Japanese Physical-Education Thought”). Tokyo: Kyōrin Shoin.
- Takenoshita, Kyūzō, and Kishino, Yūzō (1959). Kindai Nihon Gakkō Taiiku-shi (近代日本学校体育史, “A History of Modern Japanese School Physical Education”). Tokyo: Tōyōkan Shuppansha.