3. Miyagi and Kyoda (C)

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By Graham Noble

Chojun Miyagi, the founder of Goju Ryu, was born in 1888 into a wealthy Okinawan family. His given name was Machu (he is sometimes referred to by this name in old stories) and his daughter, Yasuko Kojiro, wrote that the house where he was born housed a pharmacy that sold, or used to sell, medicines to the royal household: medicines were brought in from China on two ships owned by the family. When the young Machu was three or four he was adopted by the main house of the family, headed by his father’s oldest brother, and this was when he was given the name Chojun. It was a rich household, and so I guess he was in a privileged position. According to Yasuko, her father was not very healthy as a child and that was why he began to learn karate, but that is a story common to many of the old karate masters.

Although he is said to have started karate training with Kanryo Higaonna at around the age of fourteen he seems to have had some basic training a little before that with a person called Ryusho Aragaki, (1875 – 1961). Aragaki, apparently, didn’t have much formal training in karate but he practised by himself on the makiwara, the chishi and so on, and had a reputation as a good street fighter. Meitatsu Yagi wrote that Miyagi’s association with Aragaki went back to an incident he (Miyagi) witnessed in his youth, when he saw a big man fight and defeat four attackers. Two or three policemen came to arrest this man, but they couldn’t control him. Then Ryusho Aragaki happened to pass by and he captured the man easily and handed him over to the policemen. Miyagi, who liked martial arts, asked Aragaki to teach him and then became his student for a year or two; from twelve to fourteen years of age according to Meitatasu Yagi.

Morio Higaonna met Ryusho Aragaki when Aragaki was an old man, in his eighties then and still in good health. Higaonna wrote that in his younger days Aragaki had been famous for having defeated Choki Motobu. Aragaki had told Higaonna that as a young man he had trained mainly for fighting, practicing on the makiwara, the sashi-ishi and so on. He had considered Chojun Miyagi such an outstanding student that he had introduced him to Kanryo Higaonna for further training. According to the accepted history that was when Miyagi was fourteen, in 1902.

Like many young men, Miyagi had a wish to be strong and he trained by such methods as lifting heavy stones. Morio Higaonna wrote that Miyagi could eventually lift stones weighing 220 pounds, though he gives no evidence for this. Whether ”lift” means just off the ground, or to the shoulder, Higaonna doesn’t say, but 220 pounds is a heavy stone. Later, in his own teaching, Miyagi emphasized supplementary training and building a strong body for karate techniques. There is a photo of 1920s training equipment at the Okinawa Karate Club in Kenwa Mabuni’s 1934 “Goshin Karate Kempo” and besides the specific equipment used for karate there is also what appears to be a quite large rounded stone, presumably used for lifting and building up overall bodily strength.

Miyagi left school before graduation, and although he may have been able to fall back on the family business the only job he ever had was for just a year when he worked in a bank; probably his head was always in the dojo. He was married at twenty and in the following years had a large family of eleven children. Between 1910 and 1912 he carried out his military service in Kyushu, and Soke Ura, the old student of Higaonna, told Iken Tokashiki that he had heard “some rather boastful talk” about Miyagi’s time in the army, including the story that “When Machu (Miyagi) was a soldier he was said to have crossed a river in training that none of the other soldiers could cross.” Apparently he had vaulted over the river using a pole.

The usual history is that both Miyagi and Juhatsu Kyoda studied with Kanryo Higaonna from 1902 up to Higaonna’s death in 1915, but that appears to be another assumption: we don’t know about Higaonna’s state of health in the years before he died, or just how much teaching he was doing in his later years. Also, Miyagi carried out his military service between 1910 and 1912, ao that would have taken him away from his teacher for a couple of years. The brief biography of Miyagi in the Hawaiian newspaper “Yoen Jiho Sha” (1934) stated that he had learned from Higaonna up to October 1915. That would have been up to Higaonna’s death, but presumably the information would have come from Miyagi himself.

One of the oral sources picked up by Akio Kinjo stated that Kanryo Higaonna had gone to Chojun Miyagi’s home to teach him, so that may have been in the later years of his life, and Seibun Nakamoto ((1892 – 1984), who had studied with Higaonna in the early 1900s, told Morio Higaonna (1984) that he had met Chojun Miyagi at Kanryo Higaonna’s home dojo, but that “later on, Kanryo Sensei would go to Chojun Miyagi’s house and teach him there.” Chogi Yoshmura recalled Kanryo Higaonna travelling to his family home to teach him too, so those stories are believable. But overall, again, we have little real information on the extent or detail of Miyagi’s study with Kanryo Higaonna.

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