The birth of karate championship

Added: 12/30/2005

Karate is one of the most famous and wide-spread martial techniques and philosophic trainings at the same time. It was emerged and developed in Japanese Island Okinawa. Today all international karate competitions are controlled by the World Karate Federation and include three disciplines: sparring (kumite), forms (kata) and weapon technique (kobudo).

That were 1950s when karate got its worldwide popularity and at the moment it is one of the most famous cultural experiences exported from the Far East. It seems to be even impossible at the moment to count all schools that are associated with karate. The existences both of national karate championship and world karate federation prove that karate became to be really universal event.

Karate as one of the martial arts that traces to Okinawa Island that was situated on the crossing of trade routs and was the item of endless local and international pretensions from the side of China and Japan itself during many centuries. So there was nothing to do for the local citizens but develop new special martial technique for self-defense. And sure there was no even any hint for karate championship in future or something.

At the first stages of its existence karate was just a set of techniques that helped in self-defense without using of any means, such as weapon. The secret was hidden in skillfulness of human?s hands and feet. As it was invented long ago it inherited some parts from Chinese martial art tradition. The legend says that the creator of long liver karate was some Master and his follower Funakoshi helped to spread this art. Many centuries karate had a supplement ?jutsu? that means ?art? but afterwards it was changed into Japanese variant traditional to almost all martial arts ?do? ? ?way, path?. The combining of budo (the way of the warrior, martial way) and karatedo creates the Japanese martial art substance that influenced not only political life long ago, but even social and private life today.

Karate word origin?s meaning explains its content: kara (empty) and te (hand). It means that the person following this way uses nothing for the self-defense except hands, feet and other parts of body. Another very important meaning leads to oriental philosophy and psychology. Your soul should be free (empty) of secular vanity. Just pure thoughts and blessed motives can fill it. And the human has to feel himself as emptiness as he is a grit of universe representing only emptiness.

Today the karate in its both realizations: philosophy stream and martial technique found its fulfillment in karate championship that takes place not only in Japan. The existence of karate championship is connected with development of numerous karate schools. Unfortunately that causes emergence of not only qualified instructors but also a set of not very honest teachers that first of all do not understand all through the essence of karate itself and significance of karate championship so the result is useless trainings and empty promises of getting the rank belt after the certain number of attendances. The statistics shows that these unpleasant facts are more common to the USA.

Karate championship is represented by three different events (disciplines): sparring (in Japanese ?Kumite? that means a team of hands), forms (in Japanese ?kata? that means shape, form the demonstration of different techniques) and kobudo (weapon technique). Both team and individual competitions are judged by the set of experienced judges that behave in accordance with the World Karate Federation rules.

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