Kanji

The name KARATE-JUTSU is used today by this organization because the art, although developed in Okinawa, has its origins in China and India. Since the Arts left the Chinese mainland much of the ancient Chinese knowledge was lost or watered down. It is our attitude, and that of many others, that through walking the pathway to becoming egoless, we will relearn the wisdom of the ancient Okinawan, Chinese and Indian masters.Historically the term KARATE has had two meanings. The original one was used with the phrase KARATE JUTSU.

KARATE JUTSU means the art, tactic, techniques, or skill of karate, or the techniques of Chinese Hands.

item4 KARATE (also pronounced tode or tote) the original written form, meant China hand. Okinawan karate used this description until they changed during the 1920's and 1930's to using the Japanese empty hand characters due to the political climate of this period in Japan. For various reasons, the Japanese of this time period tended to look down upon all things Chinese. Therefore the Okinawans swapped characters for a non-political one being the more recent and commonly used Japanese term which is pronounced in the same way, karate - (empty hand)

item6 KARA is the Chinese character 'tang'. The Japanese pronounce it as 'kara' or 'to' and sometimes use it to mean the country of China. The Okinawans used this character to describe the fighting skills which they had learned from the Chinese as 'tode' or 'tote' or 'karate'. These are all different ways of saying the same characters

TE means hand. It is sometime said as 'de' as in 'tote', 'tode', or 'karate'. It was also the name given to the native Okinawan fighting method (Okinawa Te) before the influence of Chinese fighting techniques.

item8 JUTSU means art, tactic, techniques, or skill

item9 KARATE-DO is a term used by many karate schools today and means “WAY OF THE EMPTY HAND” The DO (way) replaced the JUTSU at the same time as the change of KARA China to Empty.

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