Karate Links and Sources: Where to Look and How to Judge What You Find

How to judge a karate source

Nearly every argument about karate history is really an argument about provenance, and it can usually be settled without anybody raising their voice. There are three questions worth asking, in order.

What is the earliest version of this claim, and how far is it from the events? A statement with contemporary writing, photographs or a named witness behind it is evidence. A statement that first shows up in a book published four decades later, citing nobody, is a tradition. Both are worth having and only one settles anything.

Who benefits if it is true? Lineage claims are competitive assets. An organization asserting an unbroken line to a founder is making a claim about its own authority, which does not make it false but does mean it should not be the only source.

And could it be wrong? An explanation that no observation could contradict is not being cautious, it is being unfalsifiable, and the difference matters more in this subject than in most.

Governing bodies worth knowing about

Federations are authoritative on exactly one thing: their own rules. That is not a small thing, because a large share of online disagreement about scoring, grading and eligibility comes down to two people describing different rulesets in the same words.

• World Karate Federation — The international federation that writes the competition rules referenced throughout the sparring section, including the scoring table that pays three points for a jodan kick and one for a punch. The rulebooks are published here, which makes it the place to check a claim about scoring rather than argue about it.
• USA National Karate-do Federation — A national federation of the ordinary kind. Worth a look mainly as a reference point for what a governing body publishes about itself: grading structure, officials, and who answers for a decision.

There is no equivalent authority on karate history, and the absence is not an oversight. No body has jurisdiction over the past, and the organizations that would most like to are the ones with the strongest interest in a particular version of it.

What the primary sources for karate history actually are

The documentary base for this subject is thinner than the volume of writing about it suggests, which is exactly why so much of it is contested.

For the mainland period there are books published by the people involved, and they are the closest thing to a record: Funakoshi's own Karate-dō Kyōhan and his later autobiography set out what he taught and how he described it at the time, and they can be compared against what organizations say he taught. For the Okinawan background the useful material is administrative rather than martial. School records, trade documents and correspondence establish when karate entered formal education and under whose authority, and the 1908 letter in which Anko Itosu set out his ten precepts to the prefectural education authorities is a real document with a real addressee, which is more than most lineage assertions can offer.

Two categories deserve more suspicion than they usually get. Interviews given decades later by senior figures are memory, not record, and memory in this field has a consistent bias towards continuity. Photographs are better, but they date a stance rather than a syllabus, and a single image is routinely made to carry an argument it cannot support.

You will notice that none of this requires reading Japanese or visiting an archive. It requires knowing whether the thing in front of you is a document or a recollection, and being willing to say so when it is the second one.

Where to start on this site

If the question is historical, the Shotokan and Kata sections carry it. If it is about a club you are considering or already in, Dojo Life and Belts & Ranks are the practical ones. If you arrived from an argument somebody was losing on a forum, it was probably about one of the claims in Myths.

The sections are organized by subject rather than by date because the arguments recur and the chronology does not help. A claim about the belt system made in 2005 fails for the same reason it fails now, and grouping the answer with the question is more use than grouping it with whatever else was written the same month.

• SHOTOKAN — Shotokan karate examined as history rather than lineage myth — where the style came from, how it was standardized, and why its organizations split.
• KATA — Where karate kata came from, how the forms changed in transmission, and what the records genuinely support about their meaning.
• BELTS & RANKS — The karate belts and ranks system explained: where the kyu and dan grading system came from, what a rank certifies, and what it does not.
• TRAINING — Karate training examined mechanically: what the makiwara teaches, what conditioning does, and which technique advice survives physics.
• SPARRING — Karate sparring examined honestly: how kumite is scored, what tournament rules reward, and what free sparring reveals that kata cannot.
• DOJO LIFE — How a karate dojo actually works: what instructors are selected for, how grading politics operate, and where the authority really sits.
• PHILOSOPHY — Karate philosophy without the incense: what training does to character, and why the stated reasons rarely match the real ones.
• MYTHS — Karate myths tested against evidence: no-touch knockouts, belt folklore, ki, and the lineage stories that do not survive checking. Some claims hold up.
• OTHER ARTS — The martial arts outside Shotokan — judo, capoeira, taekkyeon — held to the same standard of documented history rather than folklore.