In Japanese, "te" means hand, and "kara" means both "Chinese" and "empty", so karate originally meant "Chinese hand", since it was derived from the Chinese kung fu, but its meaning later was changed into "empty hand".
> On a related tangent, apparently modern karate originated in Okinawa
it's well documented actually, before 1900 or so no one in mainland Japan knew anything about what would later be called karate.
Gichin Funakoshi (father of shotokan karate, even though he never called it that himself) moved to mainland Japan in 1922 to popularize it. Before then only a few people in the Japanese navy and the prince/emperor-to-be had seen it while visiting Okinawa.
Yes, there are other styles other than Funakoshi but he is undisputably the one who broke into mainland Japan first
Before about 1932, karate was written with the characters 唐手 (Tang/China hand). Then it was written with 空手 (open hand) - same sound, different characters.
This is also one of the reasons why Japan the Country has historically supported Judo more so than Karate (support via the Japanese government to promote it internationally, to the Olympics, etc).
Re:Who are the Japanese? (2008)
by reallyRaoul on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:49PM
(#9220818)
or the Ainu.
On a related tangent, apparently modern karate originated in Okinawa, where it was locally called something like Tang-style (of the Chinese Tang dynasty). But it was re-branded Karate to make it more palpable to Japan (since they happened to be in the middle of invading China).