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The name before the change to, “Empty Hand.” Both are pronounced the same but the two have the first character/ideogram that is different. The change came about only because of Okinawa’s drive to belong, to belong to Japan. It is understandable because in the sixteen hundreds the Japanese took possession of the island. The use of China Hand was to give due honor to the culture and country that helped the Okinawans develop their indigenous system or discipline of Te or Ti or Toudi.
When ti, or simply the Okinawan language for hand, began to be morphed into a more diverse system they would call, “China Hand,” it might have been because the discipline is a synthesis of the Chinese discipline of boxing and that the use of the hand whether weaponized or empty is generic enough for a solid description. There may be other reasons and understandings of the what, when, where, how and why of the name but that is lost in history for there is little documentation prior to the eighteen hundreds on karate.
When I first teach, as did my Sensei, a newbie to karate the first thing is, “How to make a fist.” Today, and more appropriately, giving honor to the discipline of China Hand I instead talk and teach about the hand.
The Hand: It is a wondrous device that allows humans to handle, manipulate and receive tactile information, etc. Open, closed or held in a variety of ways consisting of a bunch of bones, tendons, cartilage, nerves and covered by our largest organ - skin it is a very unique and wonderful tool. You can grasp, twist, spiral, shake and make it useful when the body mass is used. The hand is the very first thing thought of when hearing the term, “Karate.” For karate-ka of ever level the thoughts of karate fist and karate knuckles always comes to mind and is thought of as symbolic to the entire discipline.
We can transmit and receive all sorts of stimuli through touch, tactile sense signals, but especially through the hands themselves. They are strong and yet susceptible to injury all dependent on muscles, tendons and their stabilizing ability along with conditioning ergo why karate also springs to mind the art of hojo-undo with specificity to the makiwara disciplines.
I have spent considerable time and mental gymnastics to find a more appropriate term to symbolize the vasty-ness of karate-do and to date I have not found or discovered one adequate to the challenge. I admit that those who changed the name from China to Empty had a most difficult obstacle to overcome and feel I understand in part why they took the route they did.
When teaching I always start with mechanics, such as holding out the hand and then demonstrating the various hand manipulations to form for various methodologies in applying power and force to a target - with just the hand. I always stress that the connection between the name karate and the use of the hands is not just the karate fist but a variety of ways the hand is used to apply methodologies with a goal of ending an attack.
I also stress that using the hands involves principles, principles to be learned in stages through the kyu levels along side basics, drills, kata and much later kumite or fixed patterned drills. I tell them the hard-to-soft/soft-to-hard rules of using the hands and how the open hand is far more effective then the closed fist regardless of how it appears and feels otherwise to our sense and instincts.
I explain how the fist is often a communications tool of the tribe where certain lessons and rules are enforced and punished and that the fist, especially the way it is constructed, was not meant to kill or maim but to communicate and enforce. When a tribe must defend against others outside the rules change and more often, almost exclusively, humans prefer to use weapons or what some might refer to as hand enhancers or extensions. I can refer to some of the violence professionals that through experience will tell you if a fight is on, whether they get involved is determined as to which tool is in use, the fist or the open hand. Fist, not so much but hand open - time to step in to stop grave harm or death.
We humans like things simple and nature programmed our brains, our minds, to work with simplicity for that is how we gain speed and trigger tapes fast enough to survive. If that fails, we die and our genes don’t get evolved and transferred to our children. It is quite simple in its complexities.
See the graphics that follow for a view of the complexities and wondrous nature of the human hand then the next as it displays some of the karate hand techniques made in karate-do.
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“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)
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