Okinawan martial arts
okinawan martial arts
Okinawan martial arts refers to the martial arts, such as karate, tegumi and kobudō, which originated among the indigenous people of Okinawa Island. Due to its location (between "Mainland Japan" and Taiwan), Okinawa was influenced by various cultures with a long history of trade and cultural exchange, including Japan, China and Southeast Asia, that greatly influenced the development of martial arts on Okinawa.
History
In 1429, the three kingdoms on Okinawa unified to form the Ryukyu Kingdom with Chinese imperial backing. This led to significant contact between Chinese and Ryukyu envoys and traders. Okinawans combined Chinese martial arts with the existing local arts to form Tōde (唐手, Tuudii; Tang hand, China hand), sometimes called Okinawa-te (沖縄手, Uchinaa-dii). When King Shō Shin came into power in 1477, he banned the practice of martial arts, due to fears of the widespread teaching of the art of deception. However, Tōde and Ryukyu kobudō continued to be taught in secret. The ban was continued in 1609 after Okinawa was invaded by the Satsuma Domain of Japan.
Well into the 20th century, the martial arts of Okinawa were generally referred to as te or tii 手, Japanese and Okinawan for "hand". Te often varied from one town to another, so to distinguish among the various types of te, the word was often prefaced with its area of origin; for example, Naha-te, Shuri-te, or Tomari-te, for the villages of Naha, Shuri, and Tomari, respectively.
“Okinawan martial arts” enters the record as okinawan martial arts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Okinawan, martial and arts can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Okinawan martial arts” 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.