Passai
karate kata
Passai (katakana パッサイ), also Bassai (バッサイ), is a karate kata. According to Motobu Chōki, the Passai kata was one of the three most practiced kata in Okinawa, along with Naihanchi and Kūsankū, but was already lost in China at the time. Originally there were two types of Passai, Dai (大, lit. 'big') and Shō (小, lit. 'small'), but today there are many different variations depending on the school. In 1935, Gichin Funakoshi changed the name of the Passai Dai (パッサイ大) to Bassai Shodan (抜塞初段, now Bassai Dai) to reflect the Japanese pronunciation and Kanji, and the pronunciation Bassai was subsequently popularized on the Japanese mainland.
The Passai kata is practiced today in various Korean martial arts besides karate, such as Taekwondo, Tang Soo Do, and Soo Bahk Do. In Korean, the kata have several names: Bassahee, Bal Se, Pal Che, Palsek, Bal Sae, Ba Sa Hee, and Bal Sak. The kata's focus is the idea of changing disadvantage into advantage by strong and courageous response, switching blocks and differing degrees of power. The feeling of kata should be precise, with fast execution of technique and attention given to appropriate balance between speed and power. Passai kata are usually classed as intermediate.
History
Passai kata originated in the Ryukyu Kingdom (present-day Okinawa Prefecture, Japan), but its origins are unknown.
“Passai” enters the record as karate kata. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Passai, karate and kata can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q810466. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Passai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.