Origins of American Kenpo
The modern history of American Kenpo began in the 1940s, when Great Grandmaster James Mitose (1916–1981) started teaching his ancestral Japanese martial art, Kosho-Ryu Kenpo, in Hawaii. Mitose's art, later called Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu, traditionally traces its origin to Shaolin Kung Fu and Bodhidharma. Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu emphasizes punching, striking, kicking, locking, and throwing. Mitose's art was very linear, lacking the circular motions in American Kenpo.
William K. S. Chow studied Kenpo under James Mitose, eventually earning a first-degree black belt. He had also studied Chinese Kung Fu from his father. Chow began teaching an art, which he called Kenpo Karate, that blended the circular movements he had learned from his father with the system he had learned from Mitose. Chow experimented and modified his art, adapting it to meet the needs of American students.
Ed Parker learned Kenpo Karate from William Chow, eventually earning a black belt, Al Tracy claims that Chow promoted Parker to sandan (3rd-degree black belt) in December 1961.
The system known as American Kenpo was developed by Ed Parker as a successor to Chow's art. Parker revised older methods to work in modern day fighting scenarios. He heavily restructured American Kenpo's forms and techniques during this period. He moved away from methods that were recognizably descended from other arts (such as forms that were familiar within Hung Gar) and established a more definitive relationship between forms and the self-defense technique curriculum of American Kenpo. Parker also eschewed esoteric Eastern concepts (e.g. qi) and sought to express the art in terms of scientific principles and western metaphors.
Read more about this topic: American Kenpo
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or american:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.”
—William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925)