The History of Fighting

Title: Capoeira Drawings
Artist: Kalixto Cordeiro
Date:  c.1906
Info:  A series of drawings that depict a couple of well-dressed Capoeira fighters in battle.
Note the use of the ‘navalha’ (barber’s razor) in the centre picture, a weapon synonymous
with the ‘o malandro’ (criminal/bad boy)

Prince Narusuan was a key figure in the development of the martial arts in Thailand (formerly Siam). In c. 1585, Narusuan succeeded in reorganizing a defeated Thai army. He made sure his men all learned martial arts leading to successful campaigns against the Burmese soldiers who had occupied the country since 1568.

Then, in a dramatic final showdown, he faced the leader of the Burmese army in open battle, both on the backs of war elephants. After a violent fight, Narusuan’s martial arts skills won through and he cut his opponent in half, from his shoulder to his waste. After this, the Burmese army left, liberating the Thai people and making Prince Narusuan a martial arts legend.

Kanku (Looking into the sky) Sho (minor) and Dai (major) are advanced kata in the Shotokan syllabus and practiced by many styles including those of Japanese, Okinawa and Korean karate. Kanku Sho (Performed above by Takayuki Mikami) is the younger of the two Kanku kata and was probably developed from kanku Dai and handed down as a part of Master Anko Itosu’s teachings.

It contains moves that are typical of Itosu kata, such as double punches and moves that are designed to control and or disarm someone with a stick. The older of the two, kanku Dai (Performed below by Hirokazu Kanazawa) is said to have been the favourite kata of Sensei Gichin Funakoshi and was one that he often used to demonstrate karate in Japan during the period when he popularised the martial art there in the 1920s.



According to Funakoshi, the kata has all of karate’s essential elements which was why he liked it so much. Originally called Kushanku but renamed in the 1930s by Funakoshi, his student, Masatoshi Nakayama stated that it represents modesty in karate, hence the humbling name, ‘Looking to the Sky’.

Kanku Dai is believed to have been first introduced to Okinawa in the 18th century by a Chinese diplomat and kendo expert named Kung Hsiang Chun, who passed it on to Tode Sakugawa of the Shuri-te school (teacher of Sokon Matsumura).

The same diplomat seems to have been of some importance in the history of the martial arts on Okinawa and may have also brought the original kata that the Heian kata were derived from, (it may even have been the same one), a kata called ‘Chiang Nan (Channan in Japanese). An alternative theory is that the kata was actually created by Sakugawa and named in honour of his teacher (Whose name is pronounced Ku Shan Ku in the Okinawan dialect).

More Kata History

Title: Emperor Akbar tames an elephant

Date:  c.1609

Artist:  Unknown

Infomation:  The 16th century Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great is shown training a war elephant.

Title: Tomoe Gozen

Date: 1899

Artist: Toyohara Chikanobu (1838–1912)

Infomation: This painting depicts the legendary female warrior Tomoe Gozen at the Battle of Awazu
in 1184. So the story goes, she killed one of the warriors shown with her, Uchida Ieyoshi, and
escaped capture from the other, Hatakeyama Shigetada.

During the Yi dynasty (1392 – 1910), interest in learning martial arts in Korea faded considerably, partly as a result of a growing emphasis on classical learning on subjects such as music, art, literature and poetry, as opposed to physical pursuits that were favoured in earlier periods.

By 1790, the martial art forms that would later develop into Taekwondo were at risk of dying out so in a bid to retain their knowledge, King Chong Jo ordered Lee Duk Mu, one of his generals and a martial arts expert, to write an illustrated textbook on the subject.

The book was called the Muye Dobo Tongji, and was a masterpiece that clearly and succinctly discussed and defined techniques of both armed and unarmed combat. The work was approximately forty pages long and covered all the major martial arts styles practiced in Korea at the time, including Tae Kyon and Soo Bak.

Anko Itosu (just left of centre sporting a big white moustache), at a martial arts exhibition in 1908.