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Origins & connections

The atlas of martial arts

Where was each art born, and how did it travel the world? Thirteen true journeys told as an ink comic.

1. From the white crane to the empty hand

  1. XIX — Okinawa, then the Ryukyu Kingdom, had its own fighting art: "te". Masters such as Higaonna Kanryō went to Fuzhou, in Fujian, studied Chinese boxing and brought it back to Naha.
  2. 1922 — May 1922: Gichin Funakoshi presents karate at an exhibition in Tokyo and stays to teach on the Japanese mainland.
  3. 1936 — 25 October 1936: at a meeting of masters in Naha, the writing 空手, "empty hand", is officially adopted.
  4. 2021 — The island art reaches the Olympic Games: karate makes its debut at Tokyo 2020, held in 2021.

2. From the Kodokan to Copacabana

  1. 1882 — Tokyo: Kanō Jigorō founds the Kodokan and builds judo from older jujutsu schools.
  2. 1914 — Kodokan judoka Mitsuyo Maeda reaches Brazil in November 1914 and settles in Belém. In 1917 a teenage Carlos Gracie watches him and becomes his student.
  3. 1925–30 — The Gracie brothers open an academy in Rio de Janeiro. The official date is 1925; newspapers of the time point to 1930.
  4. 1993 — 12 November 1993, Denver: at UFC 1, Royce Gracie wins the tournament and the world discovers Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

3. From Tokyo to Moscow: the birth of sambo

  1. 1910s — Vasili Oshchepkov studies judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo and earns a black belt.
  2. 1920–30 — In the USSR, Oshchepkov, Viktor Spiridonov and later Anatoly Kharlampiev build a fighting system that blends judo with the folk wrestling of the Soviet peoples.
  3. 1938 — 16 November 1938: the USSR All-Union Sports Committee recognises sambo, "self-defence without weapons", as an official sport.
  4. 1966 — The international wrestling federation (FILA, today UWW) recognises sambo as an international style.

4. Korea: taekwondo and hapkido

  1. 1945 — Korea is liberated. The first "kwan" (schools) open in Seoul; many founders had learned karate in Japan. Choi Yong-sul returns from Japan to Daegu and teaches a jujutsu linked to Daitō-ryū.
  2. 1955 — The kwan leaders begin to unite their schools; the name taekwondo appears, linked to General Choi Hong-hi. In 1959 Choi Yong-sul’s art takes the short name hapkido.
  3. 1973 — The World Taekwondo Federation (today World Taekwondo) is founded in Seoul.
  4. 2000 — Sydney 2000: taekwondo becomes an official Olympic sport.

5. From Foshan to Los Angeles: Bruce Lee’s journey

  1. 1949–50 — Ip Man leaves Foshan for Hong Kong and begins to teach wing chun there.
  2. 1950s — In Hong Kong the young Bruce Lee trains wing chun in Ip Man’s school.
  3. 1959 — Bruce Lee moves to Seattle. He later teaches in Oakland and Los Angeles.
  4. 1967 — He names his approach jeet kune do, "the way of the intercepting fist": wing chun, boxing and fencing ideas with no fixed style.

6. From Lancashire to the cage: catch wrestling

  1. XIX — In northern England, above all Lancashire, "catch-as-catch-can" wrestling becomes popular: grab where you can, win by pin or submission.
  2. 1904 — Catch-as-catch-can enters the St. Louis Olympic Games; its amateur rules became today’s freestyle wrestling.
  3. 1970s — Karl Gotch teaches catch in Japan; it shapes "shoot" wrestling, then Pancrase (1993) and modern MMA.

7. From Bangkok to Amsterdam: kickboxing

  1. 1966 — Japan: promoter Osamu Noguchi founds the Kickboxing Association, mixing Muay Thai and karate. The first event is held in Osaka on 11 April 1966.
  2. 1978 — Dutchman Jan Plas, a student of Kenji Kurosaki, founds Mejiro Gym in Amsterdam. The Netherlands becomes a kickboxing powerhouse.
  3. 1993 — Kazuyoshi Ishii founds K-1 in Japan. Dutch fighters such as Ernesto Hoost and Peter Aerts go on to win several world titles there.

8. From Angola to Bahia: the capoeira circle

  1. XVI–XIX — The slave trade carries millions of Africans to Brazil, and with them dances and combat games. Researchers such as T. J. Desch-Obi link capoeira to the engolo of southern Angola; it remains a debated hypothesis.
  2. 1890 — The penal code of the new Brazilian Republic makes capoeira a crime.
  3. 1932–41 — Salvador: Mestre Bimba opens a formal school in 1932 (capoeira regional); capoeira is legalised in 1937; in 1941 Mestre Pastinha founds his capoeira Angola school.
  4. 2014 — UNESCO inscribes the capoeira circle on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

9. Twelve mats in a temple: the way of judo

  1. 1882 — May 1882: Kanō Jigorō opens the Kodokan in the Eishō-ji, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Twelve mats and nine disciples. His roots: the jujutsu schools Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū and Kitō-ryū.
  2. 1926 — Women begin training at the Kodokan, at first always apart from the men.
  3. 1964 — October 1964: judo enters the Olympic Games for the first time, in Tokyo, at the Nippon Budokan, built for the competition. Men only, four categories.
  4. 1964 — The open category, the one without weight limits, is won by a Dutchman: Anton Geesink beats Akio Kaminaga. The art of the temple now belongs to the world.
  5. 2006 — The Kodokan awards Keiko Fukuda the 9th dan: she becomes the first woman to hold that rank in any recognised judo organisation.

10. Sailors' slippers, Paris boots: savate

  1. XIX — Early 19th century. In Marseille, sailors fight with their feet, since the law punished the closed fist: the "jeu marseillais", later called "chausson", after the slippers worn on board. In Paris, street savate kicks low, in heavy boots, and slaps with the open hand.
  2. 1825 — Michel Casseux opens the first hall for a regulated version: no headbutts, no eye-gouging, no grappling.
  3. 1838 — Charles Lecour watches the English boxer Owen Swift fight Jack Adams in France and spars with Swift. He trains in boxing and joins fists and feet: French boxing is born.
  4. 1899 — Charles Charlemont, son of Lecour's student Joseph Charlemont, fights the English boxer Jerry Driscoll and wins in the eighth round. The French say it was a kick to the body; the English, a blow below the belt.
  5. 1924 — Paris Olympic Games: savate appears as a demonstration sport.

11. From the rice fields to UNESCO: pencak silat

  1. trad. — In the Minangkabau highlands of West Sumatra, "silek" is fought low, with kicks: a stance said to suit the slippery ground of the rice fields. In this matrilineal society, women practised it too.
  2. ~1760 — West Java. According to tradition, Embah Kahir first teaches penca Cimande in public, in the village of Cimande: a close-range art, elbows tight to the body.
  3. 1948 — "Pencak" (the word of Java) and "silat" (the word of Sumatra and the Malay world) are joined into one name, and IPSI is founded to bring the styles of Indonesia together.
  4. 1980 — 11 March 1980, Jakarta: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei found PERSILAT, the international federation.
  5. 2018 — Pencak silat makes its debut at the Asian Games, held in Jakarta and Palembang.
  6. 2019 — December 2019: UNESCO inscribes the "Traditions of Pencak Silat" on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

12. From a snowy inn to the Way of harmony: aikido

  1. 1915 — March, Hokkaido. Morihei Ueshiba, leader of a pioneer village, meets Takeda Sōkaku of Daitō-ryū at the Hisada Inn in Engaru. He drops his errand and studies with him for a month, then builds a dojo at home for his teacher.
  2. 1920 — Ayabe, near Kyoto. Ueshiba moves his family to the Ōmoto-kyō compound. Its leader, Onisaburo Deguchi, makes him the martial arts instructor: a dojo is built, the first of many he would lead.
  3. 1925 — A naval officer attacks him with a wooden sword. Unarmed, Ueshiba defeats the attacks without hurting him. Then, alone in the garden, he describes feeling "a golden spirit" rise from the ground. From then on his art grows softer.
  4. 1927 — October: the family settles in Tokyo. The dojos keep getting too small, until a purpose-built hall in Shinjuku, the Kobukan, which would become the Aikikai Hombu Dojo. Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, visits him nearby while it is being built.
  5. 1942 — The art takes the name aikido. Ueshiba leaves Tokyo for a farm cottage in Iwama, where he founds a dojo and the Aiki Shrine. After the war, when martial arts are banned, training goes on there in secret, among the fields.
  6. 1948 — The ban on aikido is lifted with the creation of the Aiki Foundation, approved by the Ministry of Education. The Hombu Dojo reopens the next year; his students then carry aikido abroad.

13. A walking stick, a jacket and jujutsu: bartitsu

  1. 1898 — Edward William Barton-Wright, an English engineer, comes home after three years in Japan, where he was one of the first Europeans known to study jujutsu. He announces a "new art of self-defence" and names it after himself and jujitsu: bartitsu.
  2. 1901 — 67b Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho. A journalist describes the club as a huge underground hall of white tiles and electric light. The young Yukio Tani teaches jujutsu, Pierre Vigny the walking stick; boxing and savate keep the distance until the throw.
  3. 1902 — By mid-year the club is closed; fees were probably too high. Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi beat bigger men in music-hall challenges and start a jujutsu craze. Their pupil Edith Garrud will later teach it to suffragettes.
  4. 1903 — In "The Adventure of the Empty House", Sherlock Holmes explains that he survived Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls thanks to "baritsu". Conan Doyle probably copied the misspelling from a 1901 Times report on a bartitsu demonstration.
  5. 2002 — After a century asleep, the Bartitsu Society is founded to research and revive the art from Barton-Wright's magazine articles.