American Kenpo

The modern history of American Kenpo began in the 1940s, when Great Grandmaster James M. Mitose (1916-1981) started teaching his ancestral Japanese martial art, Kosho-Ryu Kenpo, in Hawaii.^[2] Mitose's art, later called Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu, traditionally traces its origin to Shaolin Kung Fu and Bodhidharma.^[3] Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu emphasizes punching, striking, kicking, locking, and throwing.^[3] Mitose's art was very linear, lacking the circular motions in American Kenpo.^[4]

William K. S. Chow studied Kenpo under James Mitose, eventually earning a first-degree black belt.^[3] He had also studied Chinese Kung Fu from his father.^[5] Chow began teaching an art, which he called Kenpo Karate, that blended the circular movements he had learned from his father with the system he had learned from Mitose.^[4][6] Chow experimented and modified his art, adapting it to meet the needs of American students.^[4]

Ed Parker learned Kenpo Karate from William Chow, eventually earning a black belt,^[7] though Chow was later to claim Parker had only earned a purple belt.^[5] Others have claimed Parker had only earned a brown belt from Chow, possibly because this was his rank when he started teaching in Utah in 1955.^[8] Al Tracy claims that Chow promoted Parker to sandan (3rd-degree black belt) in December 1961.^[9]

The system known as American Kenpo was developed by Ed Parker as a successor to Chow's art. Parker revised older methods to work in modern day fighting scenarios.^[10] He heavily restructured American Kenpo's forms and techniques during this period. He moved away from methods that were recognizably descended from other arts (such as forms that were familiar within Hung Gar) and established a more definitive relationship between forms and the self-defense technique curriculum of American Kenpo. Parker also eschewed esoteric Eastern concepts (e.g. qi) and sought to express the art in terms of scientific principles and western metaphors.