Investigations into the history of karate

For many decades it has been believed that Itosu Ankō‘s letter (1908) had been the only writing preserved from the venerable master who died in 1915. Due to the strenuous efforts by the research team of the prefectural Karate Promotion Division, a poem written by Itosu Ankō 糸洲安恒 (1831-1915) has recently been found – a further proof of Itosu‘s higher education and his following of the Bunburyōdō 文武両道 concept, the dual way of literature (bun) and the sword (bu).

I got the information about this precious finding a couple of weeks ago, but it was unfortunately too late to incorporate the poem into my book which had already been prepared for print. The poem originally is included in the The University of Taiwan’s collection of Ryūkyūan poetry. This “Ryūka Taikan“ (琉歌大観) is a collection of poems compiled by Okinawan historian Majikina Ankō 真境名安興 (1875–1933) before the war, but it was never published before.

愛情にまかせて言った言葉は、そのまま他人に語ってくれるな

Itosu’s poem translates as follows: “The words I said to you out of love [because they were purely emotional], please don’t say them to anyone else.”

This discovery is a wonderful result achieved through the peerless research by Nakamura Akira and his colleagues. In the meantime, it seems that many more poems by different authors (such as Asato Ankō, Funakoshi Gichin, Chibana Chōshō and Yoshimura Chōgi) have also been preserved and are waiting to be evaluated, so that I expect more to come in the next weeks and months by this esteemed research team.