Ōyama Masutatsu

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Ōyama Masutatsu
Japanese name
Kanji 大 山 倍 達
Rōmaji after Hepburn Ōyama Masutatsu
Choi Hyung-yee
Korean name
Hangeul 최영의
Hanja 崔永宜
Revised Romanization Choe Yeong-ui
McCune-Reischauer Ch'oe Yŏngŭi
Choi Bae-dal
Korean name
Hangeul 최배달
Hanja 崔 倍 達
Revised Romanization Choe Bae-dal
McCune-Reischauer Ch'oe Paetal

Ōyama Masutatsu (born July 27, 1923 in Gimje near Gunsan (now South Korea ), † April 26, 1994 in Tokyo ) (in the western sequence of names Masutatsu Ōyama or often Mas Ōyama for short ) founded the karate style Kyokushin , a Full contact style. He was born Choi Hyung-yee , but preferred the name Choi Bae-dal , as Baedal emphasized his Korean descent as a name for Koreans . As a member of the Zainichi , the Korean minority in Japan, he spent most of his life in Japan , despite having both South Korean and Japanese citizenship.

biography

Masutatsu Ōyama (1951)

At a young age he lived on his sister's homestead in Manchuria . Ōyama began studying martial arts at the age of 9 and first learned the South Chinese Kung Fu system of 18 hands from a worker named Li Soushi on the said homestead . (also referenced under the name “The 18 Hands of Wing Chun”). When Ōyama returned to Korea at the age of 12, he continued his training in the traditional Korean martial arts Taekgyeon and Gwonbeop .

Korea has been a de facto colony of Japan since the First Sino-Japanese War and de jure since 1910. The Korean language and culture was suppressed by the Japanese occupiers; the whole country should be Japaneseized. Therefore Ōyama wanted to go to Japan, because he could expect better future prospects there than in his homeland.

In 1938 Ōyama actually traveled to Japan at the age of 15 in the hope of becoming a fighter pilot in the Japanese Army Air Force . He could not realize these ambitions (see Shimpū Tokkōtai ), especially because he had not reckoned with the then prevailing discrimination against the Korean minority in motherland Japan. He went to Tokyo , where he worked as a clerk in a restaurant and trained judo until one day he saw students practicing karate techniques. Ōyama then went to the dojo of Funakoshi Gichin in Takushoku University and began there to train the karate style Shōtōkan . Due to his extensive training in various martial arts, he made rapid progress and was able to take the examination for 1st Dan in Shōtōkan karate as early as 1940. Ōyama left Funakoshi's dōjō a little later because he had a different idea of ​​fighting. The reason for this was the practice fight between Funakoshi's son and So Nei-chu (소 네이 쥬, 1907-2001), a master student of Miyagi Chōjun , the founder of the Gōjū-ryū karate style. With So Nei-chu, who came from Korea like himself and had his own dōjō, he practiced Gōjū-ryū karate from this point on. When he was drafted into the Japanese army in 1943, he had already reached the 4th Dan in Gōjū-Ryū karate. For Ōyama Masutatsu, the war meant an interruption in his development. He was part of the ground crew at a military airfield near Tokyo. He was detained for hitting a supervisor who wrongly insulted him.

After the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II, Ōyama fell into a serious life crisis. Due to the extreme shortage of food immediately after the end of the war, he joined a criminal gang. He was eventually jailed for six months after beating up some American soldiers to show that he was personally not defeated. It was only at this time that Ōyama decided to devote his entire life to karate. His master So Nei-chu, who was a follower of Nichiren Buddhism , encouraged him to consider the spiritual aspect of the path of a martial art, which he had neglected up to now, and to withdraw into solitude in order to correct his lack of control.

So Ōyama trained alone on Mount Minōbu in Chiba , Japan. Allegedly he had shaved an eyebrow so that he could not leave the mountain. He is said to have spent fourteen months there and then was forced to leave the mountain because his patron refused him any further support. After winning the Japanese National Martial Arts Championships in karate months later, he returned to the mountains for 18 more months, this time to Mount Kiyosumi, as he had not yet achieved his original goal of training in solitude for three years. Although these reports of Ōyama's alleged stay in the mountains have been reiterated by many of his followers, yama has never personally confirmed these circumstances.

Some parts of Ōyama's early biography are contested by Jon Bluming , one of his early students.

The Kyokushinkaikan-Hombu-Dōjō in Tōkyō

In 1953 he opened his own Dōjō in Tōkyō called Ōyama Dōjō. He continued to travel around Japan and the world giving martial arts demonstrations allegedly fighting and killing bulls with his bare hands. His dōjō first trained outdoors in an empty lot and later moved to a ballet school in 1956 . His teachings soon developed a reputation as a tough, intensive and hands-on martial arts school, which was named "Kyokushin" in a ceremony in 1957. However, he was also said to have been very rough with his students and to have injured them more often during training. As the Dōjō's reputation grew, so did the number of students who came to Ōyama from Japan and abroad to train. Many of the later heads of today's organizations that emerged from the Kyokushin began training around this time. In 1964, Ōyamas Dōjō moved to another building, which from then on served as the Hombu Dōjō and the world headquarters of his school. In this context, he also founded the International Karate Organization Kyokushinkaikan (IKO or IKOK for short) to organize the many schools that were teaching his style at the time.

After giving the Kyokushinkai a formal framework, Ōyama led the organization into a further phase of growth: he himself and the trainers carefully selected by him showed great skill when it came to marketing the style and attracting new association members. If Ōyama had chosen a lecturer, he should open a dōjō in another city and hold public screenings there, for example in city gyms, the local police school, a park, in schools or on the occasion of festivals, whereby he quickly a number of students for could win his newly founded dōjō. Thereafter, word of mouth was relied on in the local area to create a dedicated student body.

Ōyama also sent trainers abroad, for example to the United States and Brazil , where Kyokushin was spread in the same way. Another method for spreading his style were the open-style karate world championships that he organized.

Until his death, he built his IKOK, based in Tōkyō, into one of the world's largest martial arts associations, with branches in more than 120 countries and more than 10 million registered members. In Japan, books were written by and about him, full-length feature films colorfully told his life story, and a manga also tells of his (alleged) adventures.

Ōyama died of lung cancer on April 26, 1994 at the age of 70, although he was a non-smoker .

Ōyama in the media

  • The manga about Ōyama's legacy called Karate Baka Ichidai (literally: "The karate-crazy generation") by Ikki Kajiwara with illustrations by Jirō Tsunoda and Jōya Kagemaru was published in 1971 in Shōnen Magazine .
  • A 47-part anime series based on the manga was published in 1973, although larger parts of the plot were changed and May Ōyama's name was exchanged for a fictional character named Ken Asuka.
  • Based on the manga, Ōyama was played by Japanese actor Sonny Chiba in a trilogy of martial arts films. Ōyama himself can also be seen in the first two parts of the trilogy:
  • Another work about Ōyama's life is the South Korean film Baramui Fighter (in Germany Fighter in the Wind ) from 2004.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 최영의 는 싸움꾼 이 아니라 진정한 무술인 . Retrieved January 20, 2007 (Korean, requires JavaScript). An interview with his son
  2. ^ History of Mas Oyama. In: mas-oyama.com. Retrieved November 19, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Sosai Oyama Masutatsu - Sosai's History. Archived from the original on July 14, 2011 ; accessed on September 14, 2008 (English).
  4. ↑ a b c Werner Lind: The Lexicon of Martial Arts . Sportverlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-328-00898-5
  5. ↑ a b Ōyama Masutatsu: The Kyokushin Karate Way . ISBN 3-921508-23-1
  6. ↑ a b RealFighting.com - Reality-based self-defense. Jon Bluming, Europe's first mixed martial artist "Bluming finds, through personal acquaintance with Ōyama, that most, if not all, of the stories that revolved around Ōyama's early years were misrepresented by his followers and not by himself."

Web links

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Ōyama is the family name, Masutatsu the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Ōyama, Masutatsu
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 大 山 倍 達 (Japanese); Ōyama, Mas; Choi, Hyung-yee (maiden name); 崔永宜 (maiden name, Hanja); 최영의 (maiden name, Hangeul); Choi, Bae-dal; 崔 倍 達 (Hanja); 최배달 (Hangeul)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese karateka, founder of the Kyokushin karate style
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH near Gunsan (now South Korea )
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1994