剛柔流空手道 gōjūryū karatedō Goju-ryu Karate-do

Gōjū-ryū is a style of karate, the Naha line of Miyagi Chōjun, senior pupil of Higaonna Kanryō, and a Japanese encyclopedia names Miyagi its founder. 剛 (read gō) is hard and unyielding, 柔 (read jū) soft and yielding, and 流 (read ryū) is a school or lineage of an art. A story is told of the name: a senior pupil of Miyagi's was asked at a demonstration what his school was called and, as the Japanese Wikipedia tells it, could not answer, and Miyagi then took the name from a line of the Bubishi, the boxing manual Okinawan karate hands down: the method is hard and soft, swallowing and spitting. The tellings date that day anywhere from 1929 to 1937. The Japanese Wikipedia dates the first paper to carry the name to 1931; other sources, and its own list of his papers, give 1932; and the name is in print by 1934.

An Okinawan history of 1941 names Miyagi of the Gōjū-ryū as the authority in the prefecture. 空手道 karatedō is the way of the empty hand.

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