Question 020: Chito ryu

I was reading on your site and noticed something that did not seem correct, the biggest being that Chito ryu was named after its founder. Chito ryu refers to the lineage of karate coming from Chinas tang dynasty 1000 years ago which is something Chitose sensei was told by Aragaki sensei. Chi=1000, To=tang as in the tang dynasty, Ryu= style together it becomes 1000 year china style.

Reply

I made a change to the site's Chito-ryu information to reflect the origin of the arts name. As to how the name Chiti-ryu came to be chosen , the story of its origin sounds suspicious. In my research and study of the martial arts, I find a lot of BS, so I try to use logic, reason, and plain common sense when dealing with what I hear, see, and read about the martial arts (while growing up, I admired the Dr. Spock character in the Star Trek television series).

Many times the claims made by martial arts do not hold up under scrutiny. I was once an instructor on the use of the PR-24 Prosecutor police baton; a baton with a side handle. The weapon looks like a tonfa and is used like a tonfa but the creator says it is not at all related to the tonfa, that he knew nothing of the tonfa and invented the weapon on his own.

Taekwondo was developed and named after the ancient Korean martial art of Taekkyon in the 1950’s by a group of Korean Shotokan back belts whose primary martial arts training was in Shotokan. Early Taekwondo used mostly karate techniques and used patterns based on those used in Shotokan karate. However, nowadays, people claim that Taekwondo is a purely Korean martial art that was developed thousands of years ago.

 

In the case of Chito-ryu, the claim is that the name was selected by Chitose because "chi" means "one thousand" from the approximate age of the martial art, "to" means from the "era" of ancient China, and "ryu" means "style”; that the art was not named for Chitose. Is it only a coincidence that chito is also a part of the Chitose’s name, that he chose the term chito completely independent of it being a part of his name? This would be similar to President Bush creating Bushto-ryu and claiming the term had nothing to do with his name but refers to the creosote bush which lives thousands of years, such as the estimated 11,700 years old "King Clone" bush, which is located on BLM land near Victorville, CA.

Also, if Chiti-ryu was developed in the 1920’s by Chitose using his medical expertise and his knowledge of Shori-ryu and Shorin-ryu, how may Chito-ryu be thousands of years old. Many martial arts claim to be thousands of years old merely because they claim a linage from some other martial art that also claims an ancient linage, such as the claims made by some Taekwondo practitioners. They claim that since Taekwondo is based upon Taekkyon, which is based upon Subak, which is thousands of years old, then its theories and techniques must be thousands of years old, even though many of the techniques it espouses were only perfected in the last 50 years due to advent of competition free-sparring.