The Man Who Became Water: Kenwa Mabuni and the Birth of Shito-Ryu

He was a weak, sickly boy from an old samurai family. At 14, he started training to survive — and ended up creating one of the four great styles of karate.

Kenwa Mabuni was born in 1889 in Shuri, Okinawa, a 17th-generation descendant of the warrior Kenyu Ugusuku. Because of his poor health, he began studying Shuri-te under the legendary Anko Itosu. His days were brutal: up at 5 a.m., two hours of kata and makiwara before school, training until sunset, homework, then karate again until 1 a.m. Six years. Rain or wind. No days off.

At 19, his close friend Chojun Miyagi — the future founder of Goju-Ryu — introduced him to Kanryo Higaonna, master of Naha-te. Mabuni spent seven more years under him, then received permission from both teachers to teach.

In the early 1930s, Mabuni founded his own style. He named it Shito-Ryu — from the first characters of his two teachers' names: ItoSU and HIgaonna. It fused the hard, linear power of Shuri-te with the soft, circular motion of Naha-te.

Compare the warrior to water. Avoid the opponent's strong points, strike his weak points. Change with the opponent and win — that is the essence of Shito-Ryu.

In the 1990s, Mabuni's handwritten notebook — his personal record of kata and technique — was believed lost in the 1995 Kobe earthquake. But his student Sadachi Tsujikawa had kept a copy. It was published in 2009, for the 120th anniversary of the master's birth.

From a frail boy training at 5 a.m. to the founder of a world style. That is what karate can do.

Sources: JKFan magazine №1/2014 (Federation of Shito-Ryu Karate-do of Kazakhstan); cross-checked with encyclopedic sources. Note: JKFan dates the founding of Shito-Ryu to 1934; some sources cite 1931 (registered 1939).

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