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Between the Ruins and the Beginning

Gichin Funakoshi and the Paradox of an Art with No First Attack

Tokyo, spring 1945.
This is not a scene of victory, nor a heroic ending. It is devastation. The city is a desert of ash and rubble after the firebombings of March. Through the ravaged streets walks a 76-year-old man, slowly, in silence, observing what remains of the place where he had concentrated his entire life. His home. His dōjō. Everything reduced to dust.

That man is Gichin Funakoshi.

The image is powerful because it condenses his entire trajectory: the end of a war and, at the same time, the ultimate test of a philosophy that never depended on walls, roofs, or external recognition.

From Fragility to the Path

Funakoshi was not born strong. Quite the opposite. He was a sickly, fragile child, of poor health. He was barely five years old when family doctors delivered a devastating diagnosis: a weak body, a need for calm, constant care. His family belonged to the shizoku class, descendants of the old aristocracy of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, but lineage offered no protection to the body.

The medical recommendation was paradoxical: to learn tō-de—the local martial art of Okinawa—not to fight, but as a strategy for survival.

During his childhood he spent more time indoors than in training yards. He studied calligraphy, classical literature, poetry. This was not a secondary pastime: it was where his patience, his capacity for observation, and above all a quality that would mark his entire life as a teacher were forged—the ability to listen.

Karate did not come to him as a path of violence, but as a moral and spiritual way.

Two Masters, One Synthesis

The art he learned did not come from a single source. He was formed in the tension between two great masters, as different as they were complementary.

On one side, Ankō Asato: aristocrat, strategist, expert in fencing and military tactics. With him, Funakoshi trained at night, in secret. He repeated a single movement for hours, sometimes days, until it ceased to be technique and became part of the body. Asato did not teach forms; he taught internalization.
His essential lesson was clear: it is not enough to learn the kata—you must become the kata.

On the other side, Ankō Itosu: the great reformer. Closer to the people, obsessed with pedagogy. He was the one who brought the art out of the shadows and into public schools. He understood that traditional katas were too complex for young bodies and, between 1901 and 1905, created the five Pinan katas, designed to educate, calm, and shape character. They did not seek aggression, but balance.

Itosu was also the one who, in 1908, sent his famous Ten Precepts to the Japanese Ministry of Education, affirming something revolutionary for his time: karate was not a weapon, but a tool for human formation.

Funakoshi was there, helping to teach, absorbing that vision. Thanks to this standardization, the art ceased to be a regional secret and became transmissible.

The Leap to Japan and Radical Humility

In 1922, Funakoshi was invited to Tokyo to give a demonstration as part of a national event. He was 54 years old and a complete unknown on the Japanese mainland. Despite the respect he inspired among key figures of modern budō, his daily life was harsh.

To survive, he accepted a job as a janitor in a student residence. A man of samurai lineage sweeping floors to pay for a room.
At night, when everyone slept, he went out into the courtyard and practiced advanced katas under the moonlight.

That contrast defines his character better than any biography.

From those silent practices emerged the first university clubs. In time, the Shōtōkan would arise, the “House of the Wind-Swayed Pines,” a name taken from his poetic pen name and from the sound of the wind among the trees of Shuri, his native home.

The Symbol and the Message

The famous tiger emblem—designed by an artist friend—is not merely an image of strength. The imperfect circle drawn in a single stroke symbolizes harmony. And a key detail often goes unnoticed: the tiger’s tail points downward, like a rolled scroll. It is a direct reference to the ancient scrolls of secret teachings.

The message is clear: power exists, but it is contained. Revealed only to those who know how to look.

In 1935, Funakoshi published Karate-dō Kyōhan, making public what had previously been transmitted in a reserved manner. A gesture consistent with his idea of a transparent, ethical, and responsible budō.

“In Karate, There Is No First Attack”

We return to 1945. To the ruins. A student asks him the inevitable question:
How can one justify learning to fight when the ideal is peace?

The answer defines his entire legacy and was carved in stone:

Karate ni sente nashi.
In karate, there is no first attack.

To master devastating techniques without ever initiating a conflict forces a constant inner struggle. The true battle is against ego, anger, pride. If you can avoid the fight—or end it without having begun it—you are closer to mastery.

True victory leaves no visible scars.

Tradition, Change, and the Spirit That Endures

That same tension lived within his own dōjō: between students who defended immutable tradition and his own son, Gigo Funakoshi, a brilliant innovator who transformed modern karate with deep stances and dynamic techniques.

Funakoshi did not choose sides. He understood that tradition is not the forms, but the principles that sustain them. As long as the spirit remains, change is not betrayal—it is continuity.

That same principle is expressed in the concept of embusen, the line of the kata: to begin and end at the same point. If you do not return to the origin, something has failed in your balance, your attention, your spirit.

When the Dōjō Disappears

Before the rubble, Funakoshi gathered his students and said something that summarizes his entire life:

The dōjō is nothing more than a place that shelters us from the rain.
What matters is not the walls. It is being together.

He had lost the building, but not the path. His inner embusen remained intact.

And he left us with a question that still resonates:

If your life were a kata,
what inner principles allow you to return, again and again, to your moral point of origin
when everything around you collapses?

That, perhaps, is the deepest teaching of Gichin Funakoshi.

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