American Kenpo vs. Everybody

[Mr. Mike]

oh, no doubt. if you do the research, you will see that it was in china for eons before it ever came to the us. It was chuan fa or fist law. Parker just applied scientific principles to it and made the learning process much more systematic, so the typical attention starved american mind could learn it quickly enough.

[UpTheIrons]

So is Kenpo simply kung fu then? If it came from China (which is what everyone says) then why is it not called "kung fu"? Or what differentiates kenpo from kung fu?

[Mr. Mike]

Kung fu means energy time. In and by itself, it has no connection, as a phrase, to Chinese martial arts. It relates as a term to anything that takes time and energy to learn or get skillful at doing.

Gong fu (kung fu) means skill acquired through hard work. Only in recent times has it become related to any meaning associated with martial arts.

Both of these terms have come to describe any of the various methods of empty hand combat.

Chuan Fa or fist law(method) is what has come to be known as Kenpo/Kempo. This is also primarily an empty hand combat form.

Since both of these styles, Kenpo and Kung Fu, are empty handed and descended from China, there is really no difference between the two. Why isn't it called Kung Fu? I couldn't tell you that. I can only assume it has something to do with the Americanization of the art. We know that the term Karate is Japanese...so why did the Chinese art end up with an American and Japanese moniker? Again, I couldn't tell you...My guess is that it has something to do with marketing and what terms were popular in America in the 60's and 70's.

[parkerlineage]

Well, if you want to be all technical about it, GM Parker learned Kung Fu, JuJitsu, and Karate from William Chow, who learned from James Mitose, Henry Okizaki, and his father. So, in reality, Kenpo is Kung Fu/Jujitsu/Karate. On our dojo, my professor has hung a sign that says "Karate Kung-Fu", because it is just that.

Peace;

Parkerlineage

[Mr. Mike]

precisely. Karate is Kung Fu. The origins of each term are different, but both are describing empty hand combat forms.

that's gonna start an argument somewhere

the term Kara-te originates in Japan where they primarily use hard, linear styles.

Kung Fu is from China where they use softer, more circular form. Kenpo is more of an eclectic blend of the two. Which is why when you go to tournaments, you are in a division called kenpo/polynesian. The polynesian simply refers to a blend of hard/soft and linear/circular.

[FETKD]

In my studio we have a few set forms of offense/defense

that arn't really considered kata but we use for conditioning and application, plus we have our self-defense wich is real life situations and the students have to find ways to get out of them. Includes Holds, pressure points, joint locks and basic grappling

[Shorin Ryuu]

Kenpo is basically a general Japanese term for empty-hand fighting, much in the way that kung fu is now erroneously used to mean Chinese martial arts (as pointed out earlier). There is a tendency for kenpo to refer to Chinese empty hand systems, however.

If you look at the term karate, the "kara" means empty and the "te" means hand. However, this term was only officially adopted in 1936. Before the character for "kara" actually meant "China" so karate meant Chinese hand. On Okinawa (where karate came from, not Japan), the "kara" was more commonly pronouced as "tou", so you had people usually referring to it as toudi (ti being the Okinawan way to say "te", changed to a "di" because of compound word rules) or simply ti.

Hard and linear karate is more of a Japanese version of it. Even then, some of the Japanese styles of karate (and certainly other types of non-karate Japanese martial arts) employ circular concepts to varying degrees. Okinawan karate has always been much more "Chinese" and employed both hard and soft techniques, linear and circular. When people say karate is basically kung fu (sic), they are referring to the fact that karate is a mixture of indigenous Okinawan arts (influenced gradually by Chinese arts) and other more prominent Chinese martial arts influences. In some cases, ti (which usually referred to more "purely" Okinawan arts) was actually softer and circular than some toudi (which usually referred to more Chinese-Okinawan mixes).

Plus, there is always the fact that there are hard Chinese martial arts, soft Chinese martial arts, hard and soft Chinese martial arts and internal and external Chinese martial arts. Using the term "kung fu" to describe them all is a bit of a mistake, anyway. All too often I feel it is more of a marketing tool to claim that by combining hard karate and soft kung fu a better art is formed. Regardless of the virtue of the art in question, it is a bit of a misconception to make such kind of claims generalizing and mislabelling the characteristics of both streams of martial arts (which sort of flow together in many places).

My bottom line is this: I pipe up every once in a while when someone characterizes karate as hard and linear while Chinese martial arts are soft and circular. Oftentimes the distinction between the two are blurred. Certainly some karate styles tend to be more hard and linear than others, but if you look at traditional Okinawan karate, you may be surprised at what you find. The softness and circular nature of Okinawan karate isn't an exception to what karate is, it's more of a characteristic.

[FETKD]

Take Goju for example...

Goju literally means hard/soft

so it employs both hard and soft in order to adapt to the cirumstances