One Hit Certain Kill

The four characters name the ideal of the single decisive technique, the whole self committed to one strike, and the spirit that trains for it.

The phrase is younger than it sounds: it entered print in 1941, in the practice reports of the wartime elementary schools and the army's short sword course, was the war correspondents' word for the rest of the war, and after the war belonged to karate, where the Kyokushin, Shōtōkan and Japan Karate Association lines made it their own and, to their credit, at once began explaining what it does not mean.

Nakayama Masatoshi, who gave the phrase to English, wrote in 1978 that to assume from kill with one blow that killing is the objective is dangerous; the aim is to finish in the shortest time with one decisive technique, and Kanazawa Hirokazu added that one attack is usually not enough against an equal, which is why one trains for the one that is.

Japanese writes these four characters; the English-speaking Shōtōkan world hears the same phrase as ikken hissatsu, with the fist named, which the house sells as its own design, Kill with One Blow. The English title is the house's own literal; the sniper's one shot, one kill is a fair comparison and no ancestor. The Japanese phrase 一撃必殺 meaning "One Hit Certain Kill" is composed of the words 一撃 (read ichigeki) meaning "one blow; a single hit" and 必殺 (read hissatsu) meaning "certain kill".