Japan Karate Association (or in Japanese, the Nippon Karate Kyokai). World governing body for Shotokan
karate. The basis for the JKA was the group of
clubs in and around Tokyo
studying Gichin Funakoshi's karate.
The JKA was formally established when it was incoroporated by Yoshinosuke Saigo in 1949 with
the then 81 year-old Funakoshi named chief instructor. Masatoshi Nakayama handled
the main body of the actual teaching and Hidetaka Nishiyama was appointed chief of the
instruction committee.
Nakayama Sensei and
Nishiyama Sensei developed the JKA Instructor Training Course in 1956. This produced the next
generation of karate instructors such as Takayuki Mikami,
Hirokazu Kanazawa and later
Keinosuke Enoeda, Yutaka Yaguchi and Hiroshi Shirai.
It was in 1986 that the then head of the JKA, Masatoshi Nakayama,
passed away and leadership was passed to Nobuyuki Nakahara. However his appointment was challenged by a number of JKA masters,
and subsequent in-fighting lead to a major split resulting in to main factions:
One lead by Tetsuhiko Asai, who appointed Mikio Yahara as Chief Instructor and and the other headed by Nakahara who named
Motokuni Sugiura Chief Instructor.
Following the split legal disputes continued for many years over
everything including who could legally use the JKA name and who had ownership of the
headquarters building, the JKA Honbu. In 1999 the Sugiura group won the exclusive
right to the JKA name in Japan and the Asai group renamed themselves Japan Karate Shotokai (JKS).
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