空手 karate Karate - Empty Hand

空手 names the art of fighting with bare hands and empty fists, and it is also plain Japanese for empty-handed. 空 is empty, and in Buddhist use the emptiness of all things, and 手 is the hand. A reader of Japanese sees both lives in the two characters: the art, and a person holding nothing.

空手 is composed of the kanji 空 (read kara) meaning "empty" and 手 (read te) meaning "hand".

The art's name can also be written 唐手 Karate - China Hand (karate) meaning "China Hand".

The two characters were an ordinary word for empty-handed for more than a thousand years before they named an art; the Okinawan fighting art, written 唐手 and already read karate, took this spelling in Tokyo from about 1929 among Funakoshi Gichin's students at Keiō, and his book of 1935 explained the change as a break from the impression that the art was Chinese boxing and as a choice of the Buddhist sense of 空.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 空手.

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