Kata Names

The Myth of Shorin and Shorei Kata

One evening while sitting in a restaurant in Nagoya philosophizing with my instructor, we discussed the kanji used in the names of the kata and the meaning of the names of the kata. He said, "One day someone should study the kata from a bibliographical perspective. Maybe you can do that when you go back home."

The topic came up because we were talking about how strange it is that most Japanese don't know what their own names mean, despite the obvious use of kanji and the self-evident meanings. For example, Tanaka is composed of two kanji: Ta, which means rice paddy, and naka, which means middle of. Tanaka obviously means the middle of the rice paddy. It's probably a name given to a rice farmer. No expatriate living in Japan can explain it, but we all discuss and laugh about the fact that we never met a Japanese who was not utterly shocked to learn their last name has a meaning. Perhaps only descendants of the Roman Empire have the tendency to question something as trivial as the meaning of someone's name.

When I returned to the US, I experimented with publishing on the Internet, and one of my first projects was to translate, as best I could, the names of all of the Shotokan kata.

Some of the karate books on my shelves contain translations for the names of the kata. For example, Nakayama, or more accurately, the translator that works for Kodansha International, translated the name of Bassai Dai as "To Penetrate a Fortress" in Best Karate Volume 6. However, other kata names, like Jion, he left un-translated. Other books follow the same pattern. The books translate some kata names, but not others, and the translations don't seem to be correct when you check them with a dictionary.

Kata Names

Even though many famous and respected works on karate present translations of the names of the kata, when I started attempting to translate the kata names on my own, I was surprised at just how wrong some of the translations are. Most works in English that contain translations of the kata names are written by authors who either do not read Japanese or who lack the courage to present information that is contrary to the work of famous instructors from Japan. Some Japanese authors simply don't have very good English. As a result, some of the common interpretations of the names of the kata we have all come to accept as givens are completely invalid.

Who am I to question this stuff? I'm someone with a stack of Japanese dictionaries and Shotokan Karate books who went to school for three years practicing Japanese every day before living in Japan for an additional two years. During my stay, I spoke, read, wrote, and listened to almost nothing but Japanese all day long.

Because my translations disagree with some of the published authorities of karate, such as Nakayama, I've been accused of trying to teach the Japanese how their own language works. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Translating is best done by someone working with a foreign language working to put it into their own native language. As any translator will tell you, good translating is a pull action, not a push activity. The worst translations, such as some Japanese-authored martial arts books, are usually the result of someone trying to translate from their native tongue into a foreign language. Since this method is notorious for producing poor reading, usually such translators are followed by native speakers who attempt to clean up the translation so that it sounds more natural. However, this is not really an acceptable substitute for pulling from the foreign language into your own. The native speaker should be the one doing the translating into their own lingo.

For over eleven years, I have asked for anyone who can to contradict my translations citing published dictionaries or standard kanji numbers that I can use to verify the validity of the claim. So far, my translations seem to stand up to scrutiny. So, what does the name of a kata mean? No one really knows for sure, since the Okinawans and Japanese who named them are all dead, and most of the names were created out of thin air. While the name "McCary" may be thought to mean "Son of the Dark One," it must have evolved from whatever word it was originally into the name we know today. Names are hard to validate after the people who thought them up have been dead for 500 years. Just like a person's name, the kata names are usually not real Japanese words that any Japanese would recognize. What does Richard mean? Do you know? I don't. Most Japanese wouldn't know what Bassai or Kanku means, either. Some of the kata names come from the names of famous places in Japan, China, and Okinawa. Jion is one such name. Jion is a common name for Buddhist temples in Japan. Bassai is thought to have probably been the name of an Okinawan or Chinese named Passai. Sochin is probably invented. Show

Kata Names

any of these words to a Japanese, and unless they are interested in karate, they will have no idea what the words mean. They will do what I did: Look at the kanji in the word, try to understand each, and then try to understand what the kanji mean in combination with each other. Some of the names have some sort of reference to the movements of the kata. For example, Unsu means "Cloud+Hand(s)." There are two times in the kata that one performs the "Spreading Clouds Block." Obviously, this kata was named for this movement.

I went out and looked up every character in every possible writing of every possible name for the accepted 26 style Shotokan Karate kata that I could find. I took several logical steps. First, I tried to find as many different kanji characters as I could that were used in various works to write the names of the kata. I translated them all without picking a best choice. The sources for the kanji I used were:

 Funakoshi, Gichin. Ryukyu Karate Kenpo, 1922. (Japanese).  Kanazawa, Hirokazu. All Kata of Shotokan, 1981 (Japanese sections).  Sugiyama, Shojiro. 25 Shotokan Kata, 1989 (Japanese sections).  A list of kata in Japanese from the dojo where I trained in Nagoya, Japan written by my instructor, Katayama Hitoshi.

After getting the name of the kata in written Japanese, I then proceeded to translate each and every character of every possible combination that I was able to find. I took the characters and tried to find them in dictionaries as whole words where possible, but usually there were none. There is no such word as Bassai. Once I gave up finding whole words, I built many different potential meanings out of the combination of the two characters as independent entities, and I had a couple of Japanese friends of mine review my work. In the articles about each of the kata I have presented my translations of the kata's name. I have interpreted them using the kanji in the name, and the meanings of those kanji to guess at what the creators might have intended. In some cases, I have taken into consideration the Japanese tendency to transpose kanji that are homonyms when they don't know which one is appropriate. I have also considered the possibility that some of the kata names are meaningless in Japanese due to being Okinawan or even Chinese words which, much like my last name, “Redmond,” no longer mean anything to anyone alive.

Kata Names