Martial arts wear their traditions proudly, and some of those traditions are younger than they look. These stories run from an ancient Olympic fighter said to have been crowned after his death to karate's only Olympic appearance so far, by way of a judo school that began in a Buddhist temple, a jujutsu teacher who trained the suffragettes' bodyguards, colored belts that started in London, and a movie mentor who shares his name with a karate founder.
Every tile in a Martial Arts game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Arts and Styles
nine stories
1Karate once meant Chinese hand
On the tile: Karate1936
The word karate once meant Chinese hand. The art grew up in Okinawa, where local fighting methods absorbed Chinese martial arts, and its name carried that debt. As karate spread to mainland Japan and tensions with China rose, the written character was replaced in 1933 by one pronounced the same way but meaning empty. On October 25, 1936, a meeting of masters in Naha, Okinawa, officially adopted the new name. In 2005 the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly declared October 25 the Day of Karate.
When Arthur Conan Doyle revived Sherlock Holmes in 1903, the detective explained that he had survived his struggle with Moriarty through "baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling." Doyle had misspelled a real art. Bartitsu was created by Edward Barton-Wright, an English engineer who came home from Japan in 1898 and blended jujutsu with boxing, the French kicking art of savate and fighting with a walking stick. He named it by blending his own surname with jujitsu. His London club was no longer active by mid-1902.
3Brazilian jiu-jitsu began with a judo man called Count Koma
On the tile: Jiu-jitsu1914-1925
Brazilian jiu-jitsu traces back to a Kodokan judo expert known as Conde Koma. Mitsuyo Maeda invented the name in Spain while short of money, taking koma from komaru, Japanese for being in difficulty, and adding conde, Spanish for count. After years of matches across the Americas he reached Brazil in 1914 and settled in Belém. There Gastão Gracie asked him to teach his son Carlos, who trained with Maeda for about four years and in 1925 opened an academy in Rio de Janeiro with members of his family. Maeda never went back to Japan.
4The Olympic champion said to have won after dying
On the tile: Pankration648 BCLegend
Pankration joined the ancient Olympic Games in 648 BC and allowed nearly everything: strikes, kicks, locks and chokes. Biting and gouging were the only fouls, and a beaten fighter could concede by raising a finger. Its strangest champion, as the ancient story goes, was Arrhichion of Phigalia. Caught in a chokehold, he broke his opponent's ankle, or his toe in other versions. The opponent signaled defeat at the moment Arrhichion died, and the dead man was crowned the winner.
5Taekwondo auditioned twice before its Olympic debut
On the tile: Taekwondo2000
Taekwondo had to audition for the Olympics twice. It appeared as a demonstration sport at Seoul in 1988 and again at Barcelona in 1992. On September 4, 1994, the International Olympic Committee, meeting in Paris, voted it onto the program for Sydney 2000, where it made its official debut. The world federation later named September 4 Taekwondo Day. To limit the number of competitors, the Olympics hold just four weight classes for each gender, half the number at the world championships.
Tai chi's favorite origin story credits Zhang Sanfeng, a legendary Taoist immortal. Historians are doubtful. The earliest text linking him to martial arts dates from 1669, and the other claims appeared no earlier than the 1800s. The documented history begins with Chen Wangting, who returned to Chen Village after the fall of the Ming dynasty. When UNESCO added taijiquan to its heritage list in 2020, it described the practice as originating in the mid-17th century in Henan province.
UNESCO describes capoeira as simultaneously a fight and a dance, and its players speak of playing rather than fighting. The Afro-Brazilian art was listed as a crime in Brazil's penal code of 1890. In 1932 Mestre Bimba became the first master to open a formal capoeira school in Bahia, and by 1937 it had won official recognition from the government. In 2014 UNESCO added the capoeira circle, where players sing, clap and play instruments around two others in the middle, to its list of humanity's intangible heritage.
Morihei Ueshiba began teaching martial arts in Tokyo in 1927, and his art formally took the name aikido in 1942. Its first public demonstration, according to the Aikikai Foundation's own timeline, came in 1955, and it was held not in a great hall but on the roof of a department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district. The foundation, where Ueshiba's grandson now holds the title of Doshu, says aikido has spread to 140 countries. Ueshiba had doubts about martial arts aimed only at winning.
9Korea's dance-like martial art, protected by UNESCO
On the tile: Taekkyeon2011
Taekkyeon looks gentle. UNESCO, which added it to its list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2011, describes fluid, rhythmic, dance-like movements used to strike or trip an opponent, with the feet as important as the hands. Its ideal is restraint: a skilled player can quickly dominate an opponent, but a true master can make one withdraw without harm. When Choi Hong-hi pushed for the name taekwondo in the 1950s, one point in its favor was how closely it echoed taekkyon.
1Judo's founder won Tokyo an Olympics he never saw
On the tile: Kano Jigoro1909-1938
Kano Jigoro did not stop at founding judo. In 1909 he became the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee, and he was instrumental in having the 1940 Games awarded to Tokyo. He never saw them. In May 1938, returning from an IOC session in Cairo, he died at sea aboard the ship Hikawa Maru. That July, as Japan's war with China intensified, the government gave up the Games. Judo did not become an Olympic sport until Tokyo finally hosted in 1964.
2The poet and schoolteacher who carried karate to Tokyo
On the tile: Funakoshi1922
The father of modern karate was an unlikely missionary. Gichin Funakoshi, an Okinawan schoolteacher and poet, came to Tokyo in 1922 to demonstrate karate at an exhibition organized by Japan's Ministry of Education. He stayed. To pay for a tiny room in a dormitory for Okinawan students, he worked as its watchman, caretaker, gardener and sweeper, while his teaching slowly won over university students. His style became known as Shotokan, from his pen name, Shoto, which means pine waves, the sound of wind in the pines. He died in 1957.
Keiko Fukuda's grandfather, a jujutsu master, had been one of Kano Jigoro's teachers, and when she was 21 Kano himself instructed her at the Kodokan. In 1966 she moved to the United States to teach and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she taught judo. In 2011, at 98, USA Judo promoted her to 10th degree black belt, the highest grade in the sport, and she became the first woman to reach it. She was then the last living student of the founder. She died at home in San Francisco in 2013, at 99.
4The 4-foot-11 jujutsu teacher of the suffragettes
On the tile: Edith Garrud1909-1914
Edith Garrud stood 4 feet 11 inches, while London's Metropolitan Police officers had to be at least 5 feet 10. She was one of the first women to teach martial arts in the West, and in the years before the First World War she taught jujutsu to the suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union. She also trained the Bodyguard, a group of up to 30 women who protected Emmeline Pankhurst from arrest. Punch published a cartoon of her standing alone against several policemen.
Judo entered the Olympics at Tokyo in 1964, and Japanese judoka won three of the four events. The fourth, the prestigious open class, belonged to Anton Geesink of the Netherlands, already the first non-Japanese world champion. Only nine men entered. Geesink beat Akio Kaminaga in their pool, then met him again in the final at the Nippon Budokan, countered a throw, pinned him and won by ippon. Geesink later played Samson in an Italian film and became an IOC member.
In 1959 Rena Kanokogi, known as Rusty, won a medal at a YMCA judo tournament while disguised as a man. When she acknowledged that she was a woman, she had to give it back. She kept at it. Traveling to Japan, she became the first woman allowed to train in the men's group at the Kodokan. In 1980 she organized the first women's judo world championship, held at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum, and paid for it by mortgaging her own home.
7A 203-match streak and a rival who chose fair play
On the tile: Yamashita1984
Between 1977 and his retirement in 1985, Yasuhiro Yamashita won 203 judo matches without a single defeat, a run that included four world titles. His Olympic gold came at Los Angeles in 1984, and the openweight final is remembered as much for his opponent. Mohamed Ali Rashwan of Egypt avoided attacking Yamashita's injured right calf, and Yamashita won. Rashwan took silver and received an international fair play award for his conduct, along with the lasting respect of Egyptian and Japanese fans.
8Three siblings, three taekwondo medals, one Olympics
On the tile: Steven Lopez2008
Steven Lopez of the United States won taekwondo gold at Sydney in 2000, the sport's first Games as an official event, then moved up a weight class and won again at Athens in 2004. At Beijing in 2008 he had family on the team: his brother Mark and sister Diana. All three won medals. Mark took silver at 68 kilograms, while Steven and Diana each won bronze. Steven also won five world titles, the last four in a row at welterweight.
9Before aikido, its founder was a frontier settler
On the tile: Ueshiba1912-1919
Before he created aikido, Morihei Ueshiba led a group of pioneers to Shirataki on Hokkaido, Japan's northern frontier island, in 1912. Three years later he met Takeda Sokaku, the founder of the Daito-ryu school of aiki-jujutsu, at the Hisada Inn in nearby Engaru, and stayed about a month to study with him, leaving his family and his duties as a settlement leader behind. He later built a dojo at his home and invited Takeda to live there. In November 1919 word came that his father was gravely ill, and he left Hokkaido.
Early judo belts came in few colors, chiefly white, brown and black. The rainbow arrived from London. In 1926 Gunji Koizumi, who in 1918 had opened Europe's first dojo, the Budokwai, beside the back wall of Buckingham Palace, introduced extra colored belts, and by 1927 they appeared in the club's reports. The International Judo Federation says the colors may have been based on billiard balls, though that cannot be verified. In 1935 Mikinosuke Kawaishi brought colored belts to France, and the model quickly became the standard.
Karate's white uniform and colored belts look ancient, but they date from the 1920s. In old Okinawa there were no uniforms, colored belts or ranking system. When karate moved to mainland Japan, Gichin Funakoshi and his followers adopted the trappings of judo, including its training uniforms, belts and rankings, to make the imported art feel familiar. In 1924 Funakoshi took up the dan ranks of judo's founder, Kano Jigoro. The International Judo Federation calls the judogi the first modern martial arts training outfit.
Dojo means the place where one studies the way, and the word began in religion, not sport. The International Judo Federation traces it to the Sanskrit bodhimandala, a place of awakening, which was translated into Chinese characters. A dojo was first a hall for practicing Buddhism, and only gradually did martial arts halls take the name. By tradition the place of honor sits at the north end, facing south. Cleaning mattered too: in the past it was an honor, and elders with high grades could be seen sweeping the mats.
In 1974, worried that the popularity of kung fu movies and shows was putting nunchaku in the hands of muggers and street gangs, New York banned possessing them. The ban lasted 44 years. James Maloney, a lawyer and amateur martial artist, challenged it in federal court in 2003. He had devised his own style built on the nunchaku, and by trial he wanted to teach it to his twin sons. In December 2018 a federal judge declared the ban unconstitutional, finding virtually no evidence that nunchaku had been used in crime since it was passed.
5A martial arts hall built for judo, played by the Beatles
On the tile: Budokan1964
Tokyo's Nippon Budokan was built for the 1964 Olympics, where it hosted judo's first Olympic tournament. The building was modeled on the Hall of Dreams, an ancient Buddhist hall at the Horyu-ji temple in Nara, and its octagonal roof was shaped to echo Mount Fuji. The hall became a revered center for Japanese martial arts, home to the first World Karate Championship in 1970 and to the judo and karate events of the Tokyo Olympics that followed decades later. It also hosts concerts. The Beatles performed there in 1966.
6Judo made its Olympic debut, then missed the next Games
On the tile: Mexico 19681964-1972
Judo reached the Olympics at Tokyo in 1964, in the country where it was born. Then it vanished. The 1968 Games in Mexico City left judo off the program, and it did not return until Munich in 1972. It has been held regularly ever since. Women waited far longer. Their world championships began in 1980, they competed as a demonstration event at Seoul in 1988, and they won their first official Olympic medals at Barcelona in 1992. A mixed team event followed at the Tokyo Olympics.
A story repeated in judo circles says Kano Jigoro, the founder, was awarded the 12th dan after his death, a rank shown by a wide white belt, meaning that a master who has learned everything must learn it all again. It is a legend. The Kodokan says Kano held no dan grade at all, because as founder he was the one who granted grades, and nobody could grant one to him. Tenth dan is the highest grade ever awarded, and the 11th and 12th have never been given.
In judo's past both competitors wore white and were told apart by a red or white belt added over the grade belt. In 1986 Anton Geesink, the Dutch Olympic champion, proposed colored uniforms to help referees and make bouts easier for spectators to follow. Several colors were considered, and blue proved the most practical. The debate was heated, since white stood for purity and tradition, and the idea met resistance in Japan, which still holds its big traditional competitions in white alone. White is also the only color allowed on the podium.
One of karate's famous sayings is karate ni sente nashi, which translates as there is no first move in karate. Okinawan teachers emphasized restraint and avoiding confrontation, and that principle was later codified in the phrase. It is the second of Gichin Funakoshi's twenty precepts. At Engaku-ji, a temple in Kamakura, a memorial stone to Funakoshi bears the words. Okinawa has its own monument to the saying, erected in Onoyama Park in 2007 and moved to a shrine entrance there in 2015.
Akira Kurosawa made his debut as a director in 1943 with Sanshiro Sugata, about a young man learning judo in the 1880s. He had seen an advertisement for the novel and bought a copy the day it went on sale. Its author was the son of Tsunejiro Tomita, one of Kano Jigoro's most trusted early students. Wartime censors found the film too British-American. A 12-minute sequence was lost for many years, and a restoration that brought it back premiered at Cannes in 2026.
Bruce Lee's first American fame came as a sidekick. From 1966 to 1967 he played Kato, the partner of the hero in ABC's The Green Hornet, which lasted a single season of 26 episodes. Born in San Francisco but raised in Hong Kong, Lee later returned there and was surprised to find that the show had been a big success, so much so that it was known there as The Kato Show. He soon starred in The Big Boss, released in 1971, which was a huge hit.
3Kung Fu Fighting was recorded as a throwaway B-side
On the tile: Carl Douglas1974
Kung Fu Fighting was not supposed to be the hit. Producer Biddu recalled that sessions ran three hours, and after he and singer Carl Douglas spent two hours on the intended A-side, they rushed the B-side in two takes. Assuming nobody would listen, Biddu went over the top with the huhs, hahs and chopping sounds. Robin Blanchflower of Pye Records heard the rest of the reel and said it should be the A-side. It reached number one in Britain in 1974 and sold 11 million records.
Michelle Yeoh studied ballet in London and won Miss Malaysia in 1983 before her first job, a watch commercial with Jackie Chan. A Hong Kong production company saw it and cast her. Her dancer's training let her learn fight movements quickly, and she was soon leading action films, doing her own stunts, including a motorcycle jump onto a moving train in Police Story 3: Supercop, though she did not know how to ride a motorcycle. In 2023 she became the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for best actress.
The Karate Kid grew out of its screenwriter's life. Robert Mark Kamen took up martial arts as a teenager after being attacked by bullies and later trained in Okinawan Goju-ryu under a teacher who had learned from the style's founder, Chojun Miyagi. The producers first brought in Toshiro Mifune to play the mentor, but he did not speak English, and the actor who got the part, Pat Morita, was best known as Arnold on Happy Days. Morita earned an Oscar nomination. The film's fight choreographer admitted the crane kick was not realistic.
Before he was a star, Jackie Chan spent about ten years at a Peking opera school, training in acrobatics and martial arts as one of the Seven Little Fortunes. He broke into movies as an extra and stuntman, including in Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon. Later he was given a stage name meaning becoming the dragon, to emphasize a likeness to Lee, whose own stage name meant little dragon. Guinness World Records credits Chan with the most stunts by a living actor.
Ang Lee wanted classical mainland Mandarin for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but only one of his four stars, 19-year-old Zhang Ziyi from Beijing, spoke anything like it. Chow Yun-fat came from Hong Kong, Michelle Yeoh from Malaysia and Chang Chen from Taiwan. The martial arts romance, made for less than $20 million, still became a subtitled hit, taking in more than $100 million at the North American box office. It won four Academy Awards, including best foreign language film, along with prizes for cinematography, art direction and score.
8The Matrix cast trained under a kung fu film director
On the tile: The Matrix1997
The Wachowskis were fans of Hong Kong action movies, so for The Matrix they brought in Yuen Woo-ping, who had directed Drunken Master, Jackie Chan's 1978 kung fu breakthrough. Beginning in the fall of 1997, before filming, the cast spent months in a bare Burbank warehouse in daily sessions with Yuen's team: hours of stretching, kicks and sparring, plus wire work over a pile of mattresses. Hugo Weaving, cast as Agent Smith, recalled that after the first day he was "so shattered and so shocked." The directors wanted the actors to handle most of the action themselves, so the camera would not have to cut away to stunt doubles.
9Jackie Chan's New York breakthrough was shot in Canada
On the tile: The Bronx1996
Rumble in the Bronx was Jackie Chan's big bid to crack the American market. The film, about a visitor from Hong Kong caught up in a street war with gangs in the Bronx, was actually shot in Vancouver, and the Chicago Tribune's critic called its Bronx backgrounds brashly unrealistic. It did not matter. When New Line Cinema released a dubbed version in North America in February 1996, it opened at number one with about $9.9 million.