An origin of the Karate has been dated deeper to the past before more than thousand years. When Daruma in the Shao-lin monastery had learned his pupils the methods of run and physical power developments necessary for discipline accepting as a part of their religion. The physical training method had been further developed and adapted to its statement which we now call the shaolin fight method. This fighting art had been transferred to Okinawa. Later the ruler of the past Okinawa and then the feudal man of Kagoshima, the southmost projection of the Kjusu Island in Japan, had prohibited the arm use. This has led to developments of a fighting method called “an empty hand” and to self-defending techniques.

This fighting art was called Karate thanks to its Chinese origin and had been written by means of symbols corresponding to the expression “Chinese hand”. The modern master Gitchin Fanakoshi who died 1957 as 88 years old, had changed these symbols in the way that they denoted “to be empty”. For the master the Karate had been a fighting art but also a mean for a character creation. He wrote: “As a shiny surface of mirror it reflects all, what is before him, and as through a silent valley it carry a weak sound, so a Karate pupil has to empty from his mind any selfishness and wrongs trying to suitable respond to whatever he may met with. This is the meaning of the word kara or “an empty hand” in Karate.

The Karate origin
The Karate had been demonstrated for the Japanese public the first time in 1922, when Funakoshi, a professor of the Okinawa pedagogic high school, was invited to teach and demonstrate examples of the traditional fighting art under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Education. His examples impress the spectators and listeners in such a way that he had been asked all the time to stay and teach in Tokio. Instead of his return to Okinawa Funakoshi had been teaching the Karate at various universities as well as at Kodokan (the Mecca of Judo) till the time, when he had been able to set up in the year 1936 the Shotokan, a great important point of the Karate history in Japan.

More deeply into the history
The Japanese Karate Association has been grounded in the year 1955 with Funakoshi as the main instructor. At the time this organisation possessed only few members and some instructors, who have studied the Karate under leading of the growing old master.

The Association was recognised by the Ministry of Education in the year 1958. In the same year the Association arranged the first whole Japanese Karate championship which has been then the every year action and it helped to establish the Karate as the competed sport.

The role of the Karate in the modern time seems to be versatile. As a practical self-defence tool has been generally teaching in private clubs and in Japan it is a part of a training programs for policemen and members of armed forces. A sufficient number of the universities involve now the Karate in their programs of the physical culture and its techniques have been teaching among an enhanced number of women.

In Japan the Karate has been received a big popularity as the competed sport, which emphasises a mental discipline in the same way as the physical abilities. Those, which has been originally formed in the Far East as the fighting art, then it overlived changes during the centuries not only to become an effective self-defence meal without arms. It is also an excited and provocative sport satisfying enthusiastic people in the whole word.

Gichin Funakoshi as the “father Karatedo” seems to be a connecting link between the time, when the Karate was exclusively the Okinawa self-defence art, and the present time, when the fighting art has been trained for all the word. He was very modest and therefore he did not write his biography. He decided to do it, only in his age of almost 90 years. Originally he has been a teacher, but after decades of his study leaded by the most prominent masters he has dealt with the publicity of the Karate Way for all the rest of his life. Under his leadership the Karate techniques have been systematised and modernised, and its spirit significance has been brought into prominence and the Karate has been developed in the real fighting art.

The correct understanding of the Karate and it correct use is called Karatedo. Everybody who has been indeed training this do and really understand Karatedo he never easily take part in a fight. The pupils of any art, especially of the Karatedo, must not never forget to cultivate his mind and body.

Achievement of the hundred victories in the hundred fights does not seem to be the highest skilfulness. The highest one consists in the subjection an enemy without fight.