The history, and how this dataset reads it

Karate's history is usually told as a lineage chart on a dojo wall. This project treats it as a dataset instead, and every figure on this page is computed from it rather than typed.

What follows is the shape of that history as the data records it, not as any school tells it: 1,459 people, 1,881 teacher-to-student links, 388 styles and 493 kata. Where the record is thin it is left thin. 199 of the links are marked low confidence because they rest on oral tradition or on a single interested source, and 162 people sit outside the main tree entirely because no reliable chain to them exists.

Three towns

Before karate had that name it was ti, and it was practised in the Ryukyu Kingdom in three places a few miles apart and quite distinct: Shuri, the royal capital; Naha, the port; and Tomari, the smaller harbour between them. The distinction is not geographical trivia. It is the deepest division in the data, and almost every style alive today traces to one of them, or to Kanbun Uechi's separate importation from Fujian.

A person is counted under every group whose styles they practised, so the columns are not exclusive: a Shitō-ryū teacher who also holds kobudō appears twice. That is the honest way to count a tradition in which people trained widely.

The Chinese input

Every Okinawan tradition names Chinese teachers, and almost none of them can be identified with confidence. Ryu Ryu Ko, who taught Higaonna Kanryo, has no securely established Chinese name. Kusanku is a title rather than a name. The dataset records these figures because the tradition does, marks them at low confidence, and does not pretend the identification is settled.

The founding of the styles

Almost nothing called a ryu is older than the twentieth century. The names arrived when the art was formalised, taken to Japan and taught in schools and universities, which is why a style's founding date is so often decades after the death of the man it claims descent from.

248 styles here carry both a founder and a founding year.

That ordering is also a warning about lineage charts. A style founded in 1956 cannot have been practised by a man who died in 1915, however genuinely he stands in its ancestry. The pipeline enforces this: a style tag that postdates a person's lifetime is dropped, on the principle that descent is not membership.

The oldest people in the record

The earliest person with a recorded birth year is Mao Yuanyi (1594–1640). Beyond roughly 1750 the record becomes tradition rather than documentation, and the chart says so: undated people are placed by inference from their teachers and students, and shown with an estimated cohort rather than a false precision.

Kata as evidence

Kata carry history that the lineage charts lose, because a form travels even when the teaching relationship is unrecorded. Each is held with its meaning, era, likely creator and modifier, the styles that practise it, and its relationship to similarly named forms: the same kata under another name, a close variant, a later derivative, a shared ancestor, or merely a shared name.

493 kata are held here. Kata written with the same characters are treated as one form read differently, which is how Heian Sandan and Pinan Sandan are shown as what they are.

How to read the chart

People sit in the decade they were born, so the chart is a timeline as well as a tree. Line weight and pattern carry meaning: a solid line is the teacher whose style the student went on to carry, a dash-dot line is study that did not carry the style, and dots mean the claim is thinly evidenced. Colour is the originating tradition. The full key is in the chart itself.

Open the cladogram