Originally Posted by
cerebus
Well, MK is very correct about the history of the art currently known as "Shorinji Kempo". However this has very little to do with most of the Kempo/ Kenpo arts taught in the U.S. today.
All of the modern American Kenpo/ Kempo (except those deriving directly from Japanese or Okinawan lineages) is composite in nature. It began in the 1930s in Hawaii with James Masayoshi (Masakichi) Mitose. Mitose originally called his art "Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu" and claimed to have learned it at his family's temple in Japan (though this has been in dispute for awhile). He claimed that it originally came from the Shorin Ji (Shaolin Temple) in China (he also told some of his students that he had learned it from the famous Okinawan Kenpo master Choki Motobu). Wherever it came from, it looks like a blend of Okinawan Karate (which was often referred to as "Kenpo" or "Kempo" at the time) and Japanese Jiu-Jitsu.
Mitose trained several people to the level of Black Belt in his art. The most important of these for the modern American Kem/npo arts was William Kwai Sun Chow. Chow went on to add circular "Kung-Fu" type movements to the art to make it smoother and more "flowing". Chow claimed to have learned Kung-Fu from his father, however Chow's siblings denied that their father had ever trained in the martial arts. It has been revealed by many who were close to Chow that he actually claimed that his father taught him Kung-Fu in his dreams (his father being deceased by that time). Wherever his "Kung-Fu" knowledge came from, he blended it with the Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu he had learned from Mitose and called his art "Kenpo Karate" because few people had heard of Kenpo but many had at least a rough idea of what Karate was (this was the 1940s/1950s).
Chow went on to teach Edmund K. Parker who created American Kenpo Karate, Ralph Castro who created Shaolin Kenpo (spelled with the "n"), Nick Cerio whose student Fred Villari created Shaolin Kempo (spelled with the "m"), and Adriano Emperado one of the founders (and currently the leader) of Kajukenbo.
Mitose's top student Thomas Young continued to teach the original Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu (which Mitose started calling "Kosho Ryu" Kenpo after he moved to the mainland U.S.) in Hawaii. Mitose's son, Thomas Barro Mitose (a former student of Adriano Emperado) currently claims to be the head of his father's art. Also Bruce Juchnik (who was, I believe, a former Ed Parker or Al Tracey Kenpo instructor) spent time visiting Mitose in Folsom Prison (where he was incarcerated for extortion and murder until his death in the 1980s) and currently claims to be the head of the "Kosho Shorei" Kenpo.
Anyway, all of the current instructors have had students break away and "create" their own versions of the arts they learned, so there are now over a hundred versions of these arts in the U.S., all derived from Mitose's Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu.
Hope that helps to clear matters up. Peace.
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