Meibukan Goju Ryu Karate

Meibukan Home Dojo, Okinawa

Goju-Ryu Karate is perhaps the most popular style of Karate and roughly translates to Hard-soft style. It has numerous organizations around the world that practice it. Even Japanese movie star Sonny Chiba holds a Black Belt in Goju Karate. The tricky part to understand is though that each Karate style has different organizations and they all practice it a different way, which results in even more sub-styles.

The easiest way to explain this is that Karate is a tree with many branches and Goju-Ryu is one of them and then smaller branches are coming out of this big branch which the sub-styles of Goju-Ryu Karate. Goju-Ryu Karate was invented by a man named Chojun Miyagi who had many students and each one of them went onto teaching Karate themselves.

But they all had a different understanding of Miyagi taught, thus creating their own style based on the teachings of Miyagi. When Chojun Miyagi passed away, his uniform and Black Belt were given to his top student Meitoku Yagi by Miyagi’s family.

This meant that he had been chosen to carry on the teachings of his Sensei. A Sensei is not only a teacher, but a father figure, a guide, and an example to follow. Yagi went onto creating his own school which he called Meibukan Goju-Ryu Karate. Meibukan translates to “House of the Pure Minded Warrior”. Yagi went back to Chinese roots of Karate and incorporated more “soft” or “open hand” techniques into his style unlike his contemporaries who were more focused on punches and kicks. More on Meibukan Goju in the next post. Here is the link to the organization's website,http://www.imgka.com/.

Sensei Akihito Yagi in St. Catharines

Road sign to Home Dojo in Okinawa