Are We Practicing Karate or Borrowing from Kendo? Did Modern History Shape Our Training?

 

Posted by ADAM CARTER on OCT 23, 2025

Are We Practicing Karate or Borrowing from Kendo? Did Modern History Shape Our Training?

(Approx 1 minute 55 second read)

If you’ve spent any time defending the practicality of Okinawan karate, you’ve probably run into detractors. I know I have.

When karate moved from Okinawa to mainland Japan, pioneers like Gichin Funakoshi faced a challenge: how to get an unknown martial art accepted into a national system built around Budo.

Both Judo and Kendo were already established, so to be taken seriously, karate needed to look the part.

Judo supplied the uniforms and belt ranks. Kendo, the way of the sword, supplied the framework, the ideas of distance, timing, and competition.

Kendo is a long-range weapon art. You need space to maneuver the shinai, the bamboo sword, and generate the force for that single, decisive strike, the ippon. Its philosophy is ikken hissatsu, “to kill with one blow”. That requires disciplined, committed, linear movement.

In Okinawan karate, however, the idea behind a single, decisive action was never about killing or ending everything with one strike. It reflected efficiency, doing only what was necessary, and if one technique failed, following immediately with another. The Japanese interpretation emphasized finality, while the Okinawan view was more about adaptability.

When Japanese instructors began formalizing karate, they were taking a martial art rooted in close-range, flexible, unpredictable encounters and fitting it into the structural mindset of Budo.

The sparring drills that emerged in the 1930s, step-kumite and other pre-arranged exercises developed by Yoshitaka, known as Gigo Funakoshi, were designed to teach timing, distance, and commitment in a way that looked orderly, measurable, and safe in a classroom setting.

Distance, linear attack and retreat, and single-strike focus, hallmarks of Kendo, may have shaped how karate was taught in Japan. Over time, different schools developed their own interpretations and emphases, yet much of what we see today still carries traces of that early influence.

Standardization, grading, teaching large groups of students, and making karate legible within the Japanese Budo system, perhaps required by the DNBK, also played a major part.

For me, I see parallels. The art was being reshaped in a way that reflected long-range, weapon-based thinking. Budo in Japan already had the up close and personal stuff, why would they need another?

Modern karate, especially the way it’s sometimes practiced today, still carries traces of sword-art structure: linear movements, committed stepping attacks, and formalized distance. That may look impressive on the dojo floor, but it is not necessarily what prepares a practitioner for the unpredictable, close-range reality of self-defense.

Yes, I know not everyone practices for self-defense. Still, we should be aware of the history, understand why these patterns exist, and ask ourselves whether we are training for the close encounter, or just following a long-distance performance borrowed from a sword art.

What do you think? Did Kendo influence your karate?

Written by Adam Carter – Shuri Dojo