The art of Karate, as it is now known, originated on the island of Okinawa off the southern coast of mainland Japan. However, fighting systems had existed in Asia for thousands of years before the name 'Karate' was ever used.

When the various martial arts that existed in China were practiced on Okinawa, they were collectively known as Tode, or Chinese Hand. However, Okinawa also had its own systems of combat known as Te; the main ones being Naha-te, Shuri-te and Tomari-te. It was the fusion and development of these arts that became widely known as Kara-te when a council of Okinawan-te masters agreed the term in 1936.

Karate, or empty hand, was therefore never meant to be a 'style' in its own right; rather a global term to represent all unarmed fighting arts. Therefore, although the name 'Karate' is relatively new, the fighting art that we practice has a heritage of several thousand years.

Late in the 19th Century an Okinawan Naha-te exponent called Kanryo Higaonna travelled to Southern China where he trained under a White Crane master named Ryu Ryu Ko. On Higaonna's return to Okinawa he continued to teach where one of his students began to emerge as exceptional. This student's name was Chojun Miyagi.

After Higaonna Sensei's death in 1915, Chojun Miyagi combined his knowledge of the Chinese systems with that of his own native Okinawa-te. Miyagi Sensei went on to transform Naha-te into a system of Karate instruction, which he later named Goju-Ryu - the system of martial combat which we still practice today.

When Miyagi Sensei passed away in 1953, Ei'ichi Miyazato took over as the head of the Jundokan and head of the Okinawan Goju Ryu system.

The name Goju is derived from two contrasting terms - Go, meaning hard and Ju, meaning soft. Goju-Ryu differs from most other Karate systems in its proximity of fighting, where great emphasis is placed on the ability to fight and grapple at close quarters, both standing and on the ground