So I train in Karate and some of us at the dojo have been trying to figure out what exactly is written on our style patch. With my limited education in Japanese, I have been able to figure out the kanji but the squiggly line at the top of the tree has us all stumped. It’s supposed to represent Unity and my 先生 says it’s rotated but I still can’t find anything close when looking under Unity in several places. Could this just be someone’s artistic interpretation of a kanji that may represent Unity?
Is this teacher actually Japanese or fluent in Japanese? This reeks of the gaijin who gets a kanji tattoo that is either pure gibberish or means nothing close to what they are told it means.
If your 先生 knows Japanese, he would probably know what it is.
If he doesn’t, and just heard someone say it represented unity, sometimes they just have the wrong word.
The house of my friend’s grandma has a bunch of framed kanji that don’t exactly mean what they have written below them.
With a lot of imagination, it looks like the 致 in 一致 if you rotate the image to the right. (And that word can mean unity)
That’s all I can think of at the moment…
The style patch was originally designed by our style creator who was American but did train in Okinawa for several years. It’s been a good 60 years since then so the meaning behind the symbol may have been passed down incorrectly through time.
I have seen this a lot at other dojos to be honest. It’s probably left up to the interpretation of the creator at the time they were made.
Interesting… we were thinking along the same lines that is was a symbol they saw somewhere and decided they wanted to use it.
Ah… will look into that… Thanks!
We understand the rest, it was just the thing at the top that was confusing. The center image is a fist which was supposed to represent the style at the bottom: Shorei-joju-ryu but we know that doesn’t translate well.
rotated to the right.
