“The Monkey Man”

Choki Motobu 1870 – 1940 DW 

“Motobu The Monkey Man”

Motobu Choki is known as the founder (Soke) of Motobu-ryu. The style is a combination of Shuri-te and Tomari-te. His teachers were several of Okinawa’s most prominent karate practitioners: Sokon Matsumura, Sakuma Pechin, Anko Itosu, and Kosaku Matsumora.

Motobu Chōki was an Okinawan karateka from Akahira Village in Shuri, Okinawa, capital of the Ryūkyū Kingdom when he was born.

As the last of three sons, Motobu Chōki was not entitled to an education in his family's style of Te (an earlier name for karate). Despite this Motobu was very interested in the art, spending much of his youth training on his own, hitting the makiwara, pushing and lifting heavy stones to increase his strength. He is reported to have been very agile, gaining him the nickname Motobu no Saru, or "Motobu the Monkey."

Reputed by his detractors to have been a violent and crude street fighter, with no formal training, his training under Okinawa’s most prominent practitioners renders this a questionable judgment at best. Though some teachers may have found his habit of testing his fighting prowess via street fights in the red light district to have been undesirable, they could not doubt his strength and agility. Popular myth holds that Motobu only knew one kata, Naifanchi, while the facts will show that while he favored this kata, calling it ‘the fundamental of karate’, he also commented on the practice of Passai, Chinto, and Rohai. Other sources describe Sanchin, Kusanku, and Useseishi as having been part of his repertoire. He reportedly developed his own kata, Shiro Kuma (White Bear). Though he lived and taught karate in Japan from 1921 until 1941, the spread of karate into Japan from Okinawa did not start until the early 1920’s making him a prominent teacher in that movement.

But perhaps he became most famous when he had a fight in 1925 when a Russian Boxer put out a challenge to anyone and Motobu accepted the match. He knocked him out making him famous in all of Japan for knocking out the foreign fighter. These matches were popular at the time, often pitting a visiting foreign boxer against a jujutsu or judo man. It is reported that early rounds in the match involved evasion by Motobu, but after a few rounds, he moved in on the taller, larger boxer and knocked him out with a single hand strike to the head. Motobu was 52 years old.

The popularity generated by this unexpected victory propelled both Motobu and karate to a degree of fame that neither had previously known in Japan. As a result Motobo was petitioned by several prominent individuals to begin teaching.

Motobu trained many students who became noteworthy karate founders: Hirinori Otsuka, Tatsuo Shimabuku, and Shoshin Nagamine.