Kitabı oku: «Empty Hand», sayfa 4

2 Shitō-Karate – the Teachings of Mabuni Kenwa
2.1 “Captured” in the World of Budō
Striving for a Healthy Body

Some time ago I went to India as a supervising coach. There, a student came to me and told me full of joy that his son, who had practiced karate already since he was a child of six, had reached the black belt. I myself was also quite happy about this and we enjoyed a little chat. He asked me when I had started karate. I answered slightly amused that I had probably started kicking in my mother’s womb. And this was not mere joking. Because wherever my mother was indoors with me, my father was somewhere nearby, fiercely practicing karate. So I was educated in karate since my birth. I was born into a world of karate and I grew up in this world. After my father had died in 1952 at the age of only 53 I practiced every day for four hours without any break, and even today all I can think of and think about is karate.

My father was born in 1889 in Shuri, which is a town in the Okinawa prefecture. Among his ancestors was a lord of the old Ryūkyū kingdom called Ōshiro Kenyū who was famous for his courage and called “demon Ōshiro”. He belonged to a clan called Ka (Ka uji). The names of the Okinawan natives include a character indicating to which family the person belongs. The names of the members of the Ka clan contain a character with the meaning “clever” and the reading ken. The Mabuni family is the main family of the clan to which I belong in the 18th generation. I am the head of the family. But because I am living in Ōsaka, the families of the Ka clan founded an association to take care of the clan’s shrine.

My father was a very frail child. His family was really worried about him. Whenever possible, he was told stories about his brave forefather, and my father seems to have been deeply impressed. It is reported that when he was a small child he was already determined to gain a strong and healthy body.

A Life Without Selfishness and Greed

After my father had graduated from middle school he served in the army and later became a policeman. But more than anything else he was interested in his beloved karate practice. He often told me that karate had been of great help to arrest criminals or in other difficult situations of his work.

In those days one needed influential warrantors to become a karate student and be accepted by a karate master. Then the decision of the student was examined several times. Finally he had to place some incense sticks in front of the Buddhist altar, sit there for a long time and do an oath. At that time one could not chose a teacher freely and enter a karate club easily. The karate itself, so to say, chose the people by whom it wanted to be studied.

As a policeman, my father got around a great deal and often he had the chance to come into contact with other kinds of budō. Here and there in the villages he could meet people with expert abilities not only in the Shuri-te or Naha-te but also with regard to other local forms of karate and old kata.

My father was a man of high character. He was generous, very sociable and popular among people. He was without selfishness and greed. Often he helped others and from time to time this brought him into trouble. After the feudal domains had been abolished and a new administrative structure based on prefectures had been introduced, the nobility rank of the Mabuni family was confirmed. This happened in the beginning of the Meiji period in the 1870s. My grandfather got a financial compensation which he used to build a sweets shop. But this shop went bankrupt after a short time. A joke was told that my grandfather had spread the sweets among his friends too generously.

My father had no special talents by nature. He did not like to play Go or Japanese chess and was not interested in betting or gambling. When he had reached a middle age he stopped drinking alcohol. But he liked cigarettes. “Golden Bat”43 was his favorite brand. Since shortly after the war all goods were rationed, tobacco was rare and of course cigarettes were very hard to get. But from time to time my father managed to get some and he used to share them with his students. He passed the packet around although often in the end not a single cigarette was left over for him. In fact he was not interested in material things at all.

The only thing he felt a strong greed for was budō. Maybe he was also driven by the unconscious fear that the Okinawa-te could disappear in the waves of modernization like many an old tradition. So he tried hard to study all kinds of traditional Okinawa techniques. Meanwhile many people realize and highly valuate his contribution to the preservation of traditional Okinawan culture. By now 70 percent of the kata my father had studied are lost even on Okinawa.

Praised by Kanō Jigorō

My father’s passion for karate did not become weaker. Not for one day. In 1918, the year I was born, he founded the “Society for Karate Studies” in his flat. He was then 29. All day people who had something to do with karate were coming and going. Already when I was a small child I was always at my father’s side watching him teaching karate. I still can remember that his visitors and students were making fun with me and giving me sweets and that I was trying to copy their kata movements. When my father went to his karate lessons at schools or to budō performances he always took me along. Like the “novice in front of the temple gate” could read the holy books without having studied them, I was able to do karate without having learned it.

Photo 17:Kanō Jigorō (1860-1938).

In 1924 my father quit his police career to become a karate-teacher at the Okinawan Fishery School, at the Teaching Staff Seminar and at the local Police Academy. The following year he founded the Society for Okinawan Karate Studies, opened the first dōjō on Okinawa and began to teach karate in his own school. The dōjō was right behind the house and perfectly equipped with all training devices typical for the Okinawan karate practice. Besides my father other budō masters were teaching here like Miyagi Chōjun, Kyoda Jūhatsu, Motobu Chōyū, Hanashiro Chōmo, Ōshiro Chōjo, Chibana Chōshin and Go Kenki, who was teaching Chinese kempō. The whole elite of modern karate had gathered here.

In 1921 the Princes Kuninomiya and Kachōnomiya visited Okinawa, and in 1925 a visit of Prince Chichibunomiya followed. They honored my father and his colleagues by watching their karate performances. One day, when my father and some other teachers were just discussing the daily training program, Kanō Jigorō (1860-1938), the founder of jūdō came into the dōjō to invite them to the opening ceremony of the Association of Okinawan Jūdō Masters. This was probably in 1927. Miyagi Chōjun and my father Mabuni Kenwa took the chance to give a karate performance and some explanations which deeply impressed master Kanō and made him say: “This kind of budō including attack and defense is ideal and should be spread all over the country.”

Funakoshi Gichin Learned Kata From My Father

Already five years before, in 1922, Kanō had watched a karate performance at the 1st Exhibition on the Education in Traditional Budō organized by the Japanese Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Tōkyō and voiced his strong interest in karate. This performance had been given by master Funakoshi Gichin (1869-1957) who later was called the “father of modern karate”. At that time he was regarded in mainland Japan to be representative for the Okinawa karate. He stayed in Tōkyō and was the first to make efforts to spread karate in an environment characterized by aloofness, and under poor living conditions. What had kept him stay in Tōkyō was master Kanō. This extraordinary budōka was farsighted and clearly recognized the potential of karate to develop from a local to a universal art of fighting.

Master Kanō was even more impressed when he saw the performance carried out by master Miyagi and my father in the center of the karate culture coming in touch with its mainstream. This is comprehensible because at the time he had presented karate for the first time in Tōkyō master Funakoshi knew only a few of the Shuri-te kata.

In order to expand his knowledge he decided to send his son Gigō44 to study kata in my father’s dōjō on Okinawa. Master Funakoshi Gigō was a karate teacher at the Taku­shoku and Waseda Universities. My father already had a good reputation in the world of karate but he was 20 years younger than master Funakoshi Gichin. This might have been the reason why my father was grateful and felt honored that master Funakoshi – represented by his son – had accepted lessons from him. Later he always was very rigid in his criticism against students who made depreciatory remarks about the kata of the Shōtōkan style master Funakoshi had founded. My father did not tell me anything about master Gigō’s visit but my mother revealed it to me in her late years.

Photo 18: Funakoshi (Yoshitaka) Gigō (1906-1945) hitting the makiwara.

Urged by master Kanō my father quit his work as a teacher on Okinawa and went to mainland Japan without his family. This happened in 1929 when he was 41 years of age. At first he lived together with fellow countrymen in the Wakayama prefecture and then moved to Ōsaka where he settled in the south-western ward called Nishinari.

The reason my father chose Ōsaka but not Tōkyō was surely his respect and consideration towards his fellow countryman and elder colleague master Funakoshi who was trying hard to make karate popular in the Tōkyō area. At that time karate was absolutely unknown to the people in the Ōsaka area. When they saw karate performances they thought this to be a kind of “fighting dance”. But when the karate activists started to smash tiles and break wooden boards they began to understand the power of the karate fist. One of the performances especially popular at that time was the smashing of beer bottles. This could of course not be left to the assistants but using the right technique it was a rather easy exercise. The bottle should not be fixed too tightly. It was half filled with water. When the edge of the hand chopped off the bottle-neck it jumped away with a plopping sound.

Sitting in the center: Mabuni Kenwa. Standing from left to right: Funakoshi Gichin (1869-1957), Nakasone Genwa (1895-1978), unknown, Konishi Yasuhiro (1893-1983), Mabuni Kenei. Photograph from 1930.

There was a lot of public criticism on karate because it was feared to be misused by ruffians as a means for street-fighting and for injuring people. Others warned not to teach karate to policemen because they could be provoked to use inappropriate force for example when arresting criminals. It was not easy to make karate popular in such an atmosphere. This time could be considered to be a preparatory period of the development of karate, although it was a rather long time.

In the summer holidays – I had just finished the 6th grade at primary school – we got my father’s call from Ōsaka we had been longing for: “Come over here!” Later when I faced military service the family decided to be registered at the new residence. This was important because as long as I was registered on Okinawa I would have been called for service on the far away island of Kyūshū.

In Ōsaka I started practicing karate and it was my independent and conscious decision to do so. I was 13 – the same age my father was when he had started karate under master Itosu. I must stress that my father had never tried to force me to practice karate, not in the least.