Virtue Kempo Karate System

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RIP Dr Kam Yuen DC
I started training in Tai Mantis Kung Fu under Sifu Richard Bash in the late 80s. Our school was in downtown Kailua. This was the mural on our wall paying respect to our founder. He had a great impact on my martial arts career. Probably more than he (or I). could have imagined. You see, Dr Yuen was the technical advisor on this little TV series back in the day called Kung Fu. Other than Bruce Lee movies, Kung Fu was probably the biggest reason I started martial arts. I never would have imagined that I would one day be training in that system. Today I mourn the loss of my Teacher's Teacher. RIP Sigung 😞

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Kenpo, Kempo and Chuan Fa...

So in the US and other western countries there are all kinds of Kenpo. There is Tracy Kenpo, Cerio Kenpo and a dozen others styles that were the inspiration of Parker’s original black belts. Of course when most people think of Kenpo, they think of Ed Parkers Kenpo style. And in 1963 he christened his ever-evolving concept art Chinese Kenpo Karate. Of course there was some redundancy in that name.

So while Ed Parker clearly possessed a Japanese – English dictionary, he clearly wasn’t a native speaker because if he was he’d have known Ken Po is the Japanese reading of the Chinese characters “Chuan Fa” which mean roughly “fist method” but are usually an equivalent translation for “boxing” and especially boxing with a Chinese connotation. So what he literally expressed was “Chinese Chinese Boxing Empty Hand.”

To compound this usage error he chose an alternate translation for Ken Po as “Law of the Fist.” So in his mind he had expressed Chinese “Law of the Fist” Karate, which sounds impressive in English, but very, very awkward in Japanese. It’s a bit like me declaring my Karate Do style to literally mean “Streets of Karate” because it was founded on the “mean streets of Japan” or some ridiculousness. And while it sounds impressive in English, it mostly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the Japanese words you are attempting to use.

So what about those other Kenpo’s, and especially Kempo? Well the first problem is Kenpo and Kempo are exactly the same character in Chinese / Japanese with identical readings in both languages and it is nothing more than a romanization of the same word that has altered over time. If you find a World War II vintage map you might discover that the capital of Japan is Tokio. That’s not a typo, that is how we used to render the word in English and it was standardized. So Tokio and Tokyo and the exact same word referring to exactly the same place and the only difference exists in how we express it in English. And so it is for Kenpo / Kempo, but of course in the west the distinction has many connotations.

Usually when you see Kempo people are talking about Shorinji Ryu Kempo Karate and in English they use an “M” to differentiate themselves from all those other Kenpo styles. But if you know a little bit about Japanese you know “Shorin” is Japanese for Shaolin, “Ji” is Japanese for “temple”, “Ryu” means “school or style”, we remember that Kenpo/Kempo means “Fist Method” and “Karate” means “Empty Hand.” So when correctly expressed in English it becomes Shaolin Temple School/Style Fist Method (or Chinese Boxing) Empty Hand. But as a post war invention of a Japanese martial artist who wanted to give his new method a Chinese connotation he felt he needed that grand sounding name.

And knowing that, you now know “Shorin Ryu” means “Shaolin Style”, of which there are many and since it already comes with a Chinese connotation there is no need to combine it with “Ken Po” which is just another older word the Okinawan’s and Japanese used to name their martial arts, especially those with a Chinese origin. When they weren’t calling things Kenpo they often used To Di or To Te, which meant “China Hand” or “Chinese Boxing.” You would also encounter Shuri Te, Naha Te and Tomari Te if they were attributing boxing styles to various villages in Okinawa. And in China, where most of it came from to be practiced as an orthodox method in Okinawan or incorporated with indigenous methods it was called “Chuan Fa” which was the Chinese expression of the characters found in “Ken Po.”

But then the Chinese had a civil war which ended in 1949 and that changed how everyone referred to their martial arts. If you were in Hong Kong most styles were still referred to as “Chuan Fa” methods. But if you were in Taiwan, which considered itself the true Republic of China, they generally called martial arts Kuo Shu which means “National Art” and ironically the most correct term for martial art in Chinese is Wu Shu (literally “military / martial art”) is now synonymous with the Gymnastic Demonstration Sport that is the communist approved version of classical martial arts.

While we are at it, Kung Fu has no meaning specifically related to martial arts, it means a “Man of extreme skill or expertise” and that can be a painter. Many arts express themselves at levels the Chinese would call “Kung Fu” but that is what we were calling things in the early 1970s so even in Hong Kong schools realized if they wanted to attracts students who came from America, they had to put the words “Kung Fu” outside even if it didn’t really make a lot of sense to the people of Hong Kong.

We have a tendency to misapply or misuse the words of other countries and then force them to adopt or at least tolerate our poor usage. A simple example is “Bo staff”, well you just said “Stick Stick” but you used two different languages to say exactly the same thing. Correctly it is either a “bo” or it’s a “staff” depending upon what language you wish to engage in. While we are on the subject “karate weapons” is another excellent western misnomer. Given that the modern translation of “kara te” means “empty hand” you have just said “Empty Hand Weapons.” Unfortunately Fumio Demura wrote a book called “Nunchaku: Karate Weapon of Self Defense” and while the literal rendering is contradictory almost nobody in this country understood that and it became standard usage like everything else.

So understand “Kenpo” is just another term of classification like Karate, Bugei, Bujutsu and about a dozen other words that by themselves mean nothing terribly specific just as Jui Jitsu, Ju Jitsu and Ju Jutsu are exactly the same thing but rendered in English in different ways over time and that there are many schools and styles of the “gentle method” or “gentle technique.”