Kem(n)po Karate

The title looks odd doesn't it. People ask me, referring to the name of my dojo, the Academy of Kempo Karate, what is the difference between Kempo, Kenpo, and Karate.

Well, it can be an easy answer, but we can also make it really complicated. How about easy?

As an aside, Kenpo, with the ken being used to mean "sword" is used in the old sword disciplines of Japan to simply describe ways of using the sword. "Po" means method. However, kenjutsu, iaido, battojutsu, and kendo are more popularly chosen when referring to the style.

Ken, when using another character, means fist, so, Kenpo means methods of using your fist. In Chinese, the same characters are pronounced "Chuan Fa".

Okinawa has cultural ties to China. When Chinese martial arts were introduced to Okinawa, the term Kenpo was often used to describe what they were doing. But, Di, Ti, and Todi in the Okinawan dialect were also used. Todi means "China hand" and the implication is similar to that of Kenpo, ways of using your fist or Chinese hand techniques. However, it is not denoting a style... it is simply a way of describing a martial art in general.

The characters for Todi are pronounced "Kara Te" in Japanese.

So what is the difference? Nothing. Typically, the difference is a time period. At some time in Okinawa's history, certain terms were used to describe the martial arts.

As far as pronunciation goes, Kenpo and Kempo are the same. As an example "number 1" is "I Pon" and "number 4" is "Yo Hon". The P becomes an H depending on how the word sounds... kinda like how we use "a" before a consonant and "an" before a vowel.

Additionally, when not using kanji and using hiragana (using characters organized by syllables and not by idea) there is no "m"... but there is a "n". So, the word Kempo would be written in hiragana as "Ke N Po" instead of trying to make the m work like this: "Ke Mu Po". Again, there is no "M" syllable in hiragana. So "mu, ma, me, or mi" would have to be injected.

That's the easy...they are the same. Different teachers like using Kempo to imply or more classical approach with the word Karate being a more modern term.

It gets complicated when we start talking about Karate's migration to Hawaii in the early 20th century. They preferred to use Kempo, and further William Chow chose to use Kenpo to differentiate his art from the Kempo of James Mitose. Ed Parker, a student of Chow's, used Kenpo, thus the terms "American Kenpo" was founded. American Kenpo is different in many ways that Okinawan Kenpo, which leads to the confusion and the question "What's the difference?"

Notable Okinawans who chose to use the term "Kenpo/Kempo" are Choki Motobu, Shuguro Nakamura, Shinsuke Kaneshima, Seiyu Oyata, and Seikichi Odo.

The terms Kempo, Kenpo, Karate, and Kempo-Karate are used all over, but cannot today be distinguished from the other based on name alone as they used to be.