Sankukai
三空会A karate style created in France in 1970 by the Japanese master Yoshinao Nanbu. It builds on evasion with a countermove rather than a hard block.
Quick Facts
FranceCharacter & 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 Sankukai
Sankukai is a karate style created in 1970 by Yoshinao Nanbu. It came into being in France, where Henry Plée had invited Nanbu in 1964, and this page therefore lists France as the country of origin even though the founder and the technical roots are Japanese. Nanbu came from a martial family — his great-grandfather was a yokozuna and his father held a fifth dan in judo — and he began judo at four, adding kendo, aikido and weapons work. At the economics faculty in Osaka he trained Shito-ryu under Chojiro Tani and became university champion in 1963. In Europe he was the first Japanese to enter a European competition, at Cannes in 1966. Late in 1966 he studied Shukokai in Japan under Tani and Shigeru Kimura and promoted it in Europe, but after organising the third world championships of that style in Paris he abandoned it and created his own. The technical principle of sankukai is to replace the hard block with an evasion that is at the same time the beginning of the counter. The practitioner does not try to stop the incoming technique with force but to leave its line in such a way as to arrive in a position from which the counter merely has to be completed. The syllabus consists of kihon, its own kata and kumite. Nanbu withdrew from martial arts for some years and at the end of the 1970s founded Nanbudo, which goes further still from classical karate. Sankukai remained independent and has held on mainly in France, in Canada and in other French-speaking countries.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.