October 28, 2019

HISTORY OF SHOTOKAN

During the late 1930s, Funakoshi’s students built a rather large Dojo for their teacher. Over the front door, one of them mounted a wooden plaque that said “Shotokan.”

In Japanese, the word “kan” means house or building, so “Shotokan” is literally “Shoto’s House,” or “Shoto’s Place” (basically, the Funakoshi Building).

Funakoshji’s students never referred to the karate that they practiced as “Shotokan.” Instead, they only used the word “Karate” or “Karate-Do” to refer to their art. It was Japanese people outside of Funakoshi’s circle who referred to his system as Shotokan.

Since other instructors were naming their styles of karate things like Shito-Ryu, Wado-Ryu, or Goju-Ryu, it must have seemed strange that the other major style was just “Karate,” so they started referring to it as “Shotokan Karate.”

This basically amounts to “The karate they do in the Shotokan.” This came to represent Funakoshi’s system of martial arts as we practice it today.