Where is karate from
OKINAWA (Motherland of Karate)
The Ryukyu Kingdom was not a nation apart, but rather a participant in cultural exchange with its neighbors, most notably the Japanese and Chinese. If Okinawa was able to maintain a relative autonomy even though it was the site of exogenous cultural influences combining or playing off of the host community, then is it any surprise if karate, as a practice, defies attempts to be classified as simply Japanese, Chinese or Okinawan in descent? Krug's positioning of Okinawa eloquently stresses the ideas of exchange and flux, but he ascribes all agency to the foreign influences on Okinawa:
Caught in the middle of the turbulent history of Sino-Japanese realtionships, invaded during the Japanese civil wars and in 1945 by the Allied Forces, Okinawa has been constantly transformed and its cultural practices threatened by the waves of different cultures that washed over the island. Thus, from its inception, karate was never a single thing but an evolving set of practices linked to local knowledge as well as prevailing cultural beliefs. It was, as well, actively evolving in many directions and idiolects or styles (Krug 2001: 396).
The syncretic nature of karate (Donohue 1993) is in large part linked to the different periods of intense cultural interaction (an academic euphemism for invasion and occupation and/or domination in this context), between Ryukyu and China, or Ryukyu and Japan at different times. These interactions became more regularized, following the consolidation of mainland Japan by Ieyasu Tokugawa.
At this time, Japan and China both viewed Ryukyu as one of their vassal kingdoms (Kerr 2000), and in the years directly following the consolidation of mainland Japan in 1603, the Satsuma clan of Kyushu launched an offensive upon the Ryukyu Kingdom in the name of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In 1609, the Satsuma clan invaded the Ryukyu islands and captured Shuri Castle on the island of Okinawa in May of the same year (Friman 1998). This military action and the beginning of formal oversight by the Japanese mitigated the influence that China had previously exerted upon the Ryukyu Kingdom. Mottern contends that following this conquest, there were many routes for Japanese martial practice and implements to enter the Okinawan culture and lead to the development of te, perhaps through Ryukyu vassal lords traveling to Kyushu to acquire military training by the Satsuma (2001: 288).
In contrast to this view- in what Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls 'the maintenance of difference'- the Japanese overlords instructed their Ryukyu subjects to wear their “distinctive brocade robes, strange headgear” and carry their “Chinese weaponry” so that they could not “'be mistaken for Japanese'” (1996: 84) when visiting the royal court. Clearly, if the Okinawans had “Chinese Weaponry”, and were known for having such weaponry, then this casts some suspicion on the claims that the weapons system within te comes from distinctively Japanese origins. On the other hand and in support of Mottern's contentions, the Ryukyu emissaries from Okinawa had to be instructed to bring their distinctive clothing and weapons. For some reason, the members of the Shogunate felt they must take deliberate steps to prevent the Okinawans from showing up with Japanese weapons and in Japanese clothing, thus challenging the whole demarcation between superior and subordinate cultures. This would suggest that, even at this time, the difference between Japanese and Okinawan was negotiable.
Culture and nations are often envisioned as monolithic, enduring, structural entities that socialize and normalize their participants. Anthropologists have brought this understanding of structural entities into question (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 1990), arguing that such structural entities are, upon closer inspection, shown to be items in flux. When such constructs are viewed as malleable frameworks the way that participants make us of these frameworks, adapting and modifying them to their own ends, comes into focus.
very detailed!
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