The Name of the Kata Wansū

Images from the books Karate Jutsu (English translation of Gichin Funakoshi's Rentan Goshin Karate Jutsu, 1925, by John Teramoto), and Karate Kenpo Zen by Mutsu Mizuho, 1933, as well as from footage of Hironori Otsuka performing wansu.

In Funakoshi karate, wansū was later (by 1935) called enpi, meaning “flying swallow”. It is a relatively swift and light form, and resembles the flight of a bird, specifically a swallow. In Chinese martial arts, and as wansū was originally Chinese, as with many of the Okinawan karate kata, any bird system is within the crane / white crane style as a matter of generality. 

In Karate Jutsu, and therefore in Rentan Goshin Karate Jutsu, Gichin Funakoshi used kanji for wansū when listing the kata, and katakana later when describing it. There are only a few kata listed with kanji, such as gojūshiho and kūsankū, despite the fact that sēsan, for instance, is known to be “13 [hands / skills]” for certain. It must be, then, that the kanji for wansū were known, unusually. Was it someone’s name, or were they chosen in Okinawa (Ryūkyū) a long time ago? 

Apparently wansū was [potentially] a system taught in Tomari village in 1683 or from the 1600s. There are a few versions, so it may have been a system of techniques that were formalised by various experts in Okinawa, or there was one kata / quan which was changed over time by several exponents. 

The ideograms used by Gichin Funakoshi in Rentan Goshin Karate Jutsu are not listed in Collins Chinese Dictionary within W and J, as in Wang Ji. Those meaning “prince” are different characters, and are written “wángzi” (the “i” has an upsidedown arrow above it) when Romanised. Andreas Quast wrote an article about wansū. However, with respect, the characters used for Wang Ji are different to those used by Gichin Funakoshi and Mutsu Mizuho, so, assuming accuracy of the characters written by Gichin Funakoshi, wansū is not from that Wang Ji. Additionally, again with respect, and also considering that Quast’s article is from 2015, and a researcher might form one conclusion at one point, but a different one later with further research, the article states that Gichin Funakoshi used only katakana for the name wansū, while he actually used kanji in his kata list and katakana in addition when describing the kata later, as I have already noted. Mutsu Mizuho, a student of Gichin Funakoshi’s, used the same characters as his teacher, but Hironori Otsuka seems to have used different symbols that mean “late” based on the translation provided by Google Translate, which seemed to manage to accurately scan the symbols. In Collins Chinese Dictionary, the first symbol used by Otsuka reads as “wan” (with an upsidedown arrow above the “a”) and means “late”, but the second character doesn’t appear anywhere you would think it should, such as ji, shu, su, shou, zhi, zi, and others. However, they’re different to the ideograms used by Gichin Funakoshi, so I would suggest that they are incorrect. Also according to Google Translate, the kanji noted by Gichin Funakoshi and Mutsu Mizuho are Wāng Jí in Mandarin, meaning Wang Ji in English. So even with different symbols there is a similarity to the suggestion that wansū is Wang Ji. Though, of course, the accuracy of the characters is important. Therefore, I would suggest that wansū is named after a Chinese person called Wang Ji who was an expert in Chinese boxing and who taught some Okinawans, maybe in the 1600s.

Sean Marshall