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In a certain way my father thus predicted the present form of karate and warned us of this development. The transformation of karate into competitive sports is one of the main topics of this book, too. But before coming to this point, I would like to say something more about the history of karate.

On Okinawa, three different styles of karate developed in three localities – Shuri, Naha and Tomari.33 The term karate was introduced in the years 1911-1912 when the “Okinawa Boxing” or the “Okinawa Hand” became a compulsory subject at Japanese middle schools.

At first karate was written combining the character for “Tang China” with that for “hand”. The people of Okinawa called their native martial art only “hand” (te), and the Chinese kempō was called tō-de i.e. “Tang Chinese hand”. The three local styles were called Shuri style, Naha style and Tomari style, or Shuri-te, Naha-te and Tomari-te, respectively. The oldest one was the Shuri-te. This is an original Okinawan system of hand-fighting techniques which took an independent development nourished by Chinese kempō. There was a saying among the Okinawa karate masters: “The only true hand (te) is the Shuri-te.”34 The youngest style is the Naha-te in which the Chinese kempō is preserved most obviously. The Tomari-te is somewhere in between, geographically as well as technically.