Tegumi (Okinawan Wrestling)
手組Okinawan folk wrestling without strikes, today all but extinct. Funakoshi devoted a chapter to it — as a boy he practised it as often as karate.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
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.
Catalogs & Databases for Tegumi (Okinawan Wrestling)
About Tegumi (Okinawan Wrestling)
Tegumi is Okinawan folk wrestling, today all but extinct as an independent practice but historically important for understanding karate. It has no strikes and no kicks; it is purely grappling, won by putting the opponent down and holding him there. It has no grades, no dojo and no uniform. It was wrestled in ordinary clothes on a beach or a village square, often as amusement after work, and its only rule was that no blow may be struck. The most valuable evidence is the autobiography of Gichin Funakoshi, who devoted a separate chapter to tegumi and stated that as a boy he practised it as often as karate. That is the heart of the matter. Okinawan karate contains elements of gripping, dragging and locking known as tuidi, and these are usually explained by reference to tegumi as the native wrestling layer onto which the Chinese striking was laid. Tegumi must be distinguished from Okinawan sumo, called shima, which is wrestled with a belt grip and is still held as a competition. The date of origin in the fourteenth century is not documented; tegumi is known from oral tradition and from nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.