OTHER ARTS
Other Martial Arts: Judo, Capoeira, Taekkyeon and Their Origins
Karate did not develop in isolation, and neither did anything else. These pages cover the other martial arts the archive refers to most often, held to the same standard as everything here: what the record supports, and where the popular story outruns it.
Why these martial arts appear on a karate site
Karate borrowed its entire grading system from judo, shares Okinawan and southern Chinese ancestry with several other styles, and is routinely compared with arts it has almost nothing in common with.
Getting the neighbors right is part of getting karate right. A great deal of what people believe about karate is really a belief about martial arts in general, absorbed from film and then applied to whichever one they walked into.
The same standard applied to every martial art here
Each of these arts has an origin story that circulates far more widely than its documentary record.
The interesting history is usually the one nobody repeats, because it involves institutions, politics and money rather than secret masters. Judo has a founder, a date and an address, which makes it unusually easy to check and unusually boring to mythologize. Capoeira has a genuinely extraordinary history that requires no embellishment. Taekkyeon has a reconstruction that is far more interesting than the unbroken lineage sometimes claimed for it.
Who invented kalaripayattu, and the oldest-martial-art claim
Nobody invented kalaripayattu, in the sense the question usually means. The South Indian tradition centered on Kerala has no founder anybody can name from a record, and where a founder is named the name belongs to mythology rather than to history.
It is also the art most often introduced as the oldest in the world, and as the source from which the Chinese and then the Japanese traditions descend, usually by way of the story that the monk Bodhidharma carried it to the Shaolin temple. That story is very widely repeated and it has no contemporary evidence behind it. It first circulates long after the events it describes, and the karate end of the chain is thinner still.
The real history is more interesting and rarely told. Kalaripayattu was suppressed under British colonial rule and what is practiced today owes a great deal to a deliberate twentieth-century revival, assembled from surviving lineages during a period of Indian cultural nationalism. That is a documented process with names and dates attached, which is more than the founder legend offers.
Comparisons that are worth making, and one that is not
Comparing training methods across arts is productive. Comparing arts is not.
Whether a school practices against resistance, whether it corrects individuals, and whether its rules reward the thing it claims to teach are all questions you can ask of any of these arts and get a useful answer. Which art wins is not a question with an answer, because it is really a question about two specific people on one specific day.
What karate borrowed, and who it borrowed from
Karate is not an isolated invention, and the borrowings are documented rather than speculative.
The grading system came from judo: Jigoro Kano built the kyu and dan ladder for his own school in the 1880s, and karate adopted it when it sought recognition on the Japanese mainland. The technical material has Chinese ancestry, most visibly in the Fujian traditions that reached Okinawa through trade, which is why several kata names survive in a Chinese reading rather than a Japanese one. Even the white uniform is a judo import.
None of this is a debunking. An art that borrows a working ranking system and a working teaching format is behaving sensibly. It matters only because the borrowings are usually presented in reverse, as though karate were the source, and that reversal is what makes the oldest-art claims on this page worth checking one at a time.
The borrowing ran outward too, and recently enough to be documented. Several of the Korean pioneers who assembled taekwondo in the 1940s and 1950s had trained in Japanese karate during the occupation years, Choi Hong-hi among them, which is why early taekwondo forms sit so close to Shotokan kata that the resemblance needs no explaining. The subsequent effort to trace the art solely to older Korean practice is a nationalist project rather than a historical one, and it is the same move Japanese karate had made a generation earlier with its own Chinese inheritance.
SELECT YOUR ESSAY
- OTHER ARTS Judo: the Origin of the Belt System Karate Borrowed
- OTHER ARTS Full-Contact Karate in Las Vegas: the Westgate Tournament Circuit
- OTHER ARTS Capoeira: the Brazilian Martial Art That Looks Like a Dance
- OTHER ARTS Taekkyeon: the Korean Martial Art of Stepping and Sweeping
Questions people actually ask
Which martial art is the most effective?
The question has no answer in the abstract, because effectiveness depends on the rules, the context and the person. Any art that includes regular practice against a resisting partner will produce more capable people than one that does not, whatever its name.
Is capoeira a real martial art or a dance?
Both descriptions are accurate and neither is complete. It developed in Brazil among enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans, and the movement vocabulary is genuinely combative even though it is practiced as a game inside a musical circle.
How old is taekkyeon?
Korean records mention a folk practice under that name well before the twentieth century, but the modern form was reconstructed in the twentieth century from a very small number of surviving practitioners. Claims of unbroken transmission over centuries are not supported.
Did judo really come before karate belts?
Yes. Jigoro Kano introduced the kyu and dan grading structure for judo in the 1880s and karate adopted it decades later, which is why the belt system fits judo's teaching model more naturally than karate's.
Who invented kalaripayattu?
No one person, and no record names a founder. Where a founder is given the name comes from mythology. What is documented is a twentieth-century revival in Kerala, assembled from surviving lineages after colonial-era suppression.
Is kalaripayattu the oldest martial art in the world?
The claim is common and unsupported. So is the related story that it reached China with Bodhidharma and became Shaolin kung fu, and from there the Japanese arts. That chain appears in sources written long after the events and has no contemporary evidence behind it.
Why compare karate with other martial arts at all?
Because the useful questions are about method rather than style. Whether a school trains against resistance and corrects individuals tells you more than its name does, and those questions work on any art.