Ryuei-ryu
劉衛流The Okinawan karate of the Nakaima family, taught within the family alone for three generations. It was opened to the public only in 1971.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Ryuei-ryu
Ryuei-ryu is the Okinawan karate associated with the Nakaima family. Its beginning lies in China: Nakaima Norisato travelled to Fuzhou at nineteen and trained for seven years under a Chinese master known as Ryu Ryu Ko, from whom he received formal certification. He came home around 1875 with not only a fighting method but also the Chinese medicine and herbal healing that formed part of the teaching. What is distinctive is the manner of transmission. Norisato passed the art to his son Kenchu, who passed it exclusively to his own son Kenko — for three generations the method existed as a family inheritance, with no public school and no name. Only in 1971, at the age of sixty, did Nakaima Kenko conclude that secrecy no longer served a purpose; he accepted a group of twenty schoolteachers as the first students outside the family, and from that moment the name Ryuei-ryu has been used for the art. This page therefore gives no single founding year: 1875 belongs to the arrival of the method on Okinawa, 1971 to the birth of the school in the modern sense. Technically the style stands closer to its Chinese roots than most Okinawan lines; it keeps a set of kata that other schools do not have, and alongside empty hand it carries the Okinawan weapons. It is precisely the Ryuei-ryu forms, above all Anan and Paiku, that have become a frequent choice at world kata championships in recent decades, giving the style a visibility out of all proportion to its small number of practitioners.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.