Ryu and Ken No Longer Practice Shotokan Karate
I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but I got through the entire previous post, about the Street Fighter characters Sheng Long, Akuma and Gouken, without actually naming their martial art. That’s because in researching that post I was very surprised to learn that neither these characters nor series protagonists Ken and Ryu actually practice Shotokan karate, even though this was cornerstone lore back in the heyday of Street Fighter II. As a fighting game vet, I felt like discovering that Ryu and Ken were no longer the video game ambassadors of Shotokan karate was like discovering Mario and Luigi were no longer plumbers. (Spoiler: Mario and Luigi are not actually plumbers.)
For those of you who don’t know, the fighting game boom of the 1990s meant a preponderance of player’s guides, and virtually all of them came with bios for the various playable characters in these games. Profiles included what country a fighter hailed from, their basic physical stats, their blood type, their likes and dislikes and, of course, their style of martial arts. Because Street Fighter II was the most popular fighting game from this era, I read many times that Ryu and Ken both practiced Shotokan karate. I didn't know what that was, really. As someone who played a lot of fighting games but didn’t pay much attention to real-life martial arts, I didn’t even know it was real outside the game.
It was actually an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that made me realize that Shotokan was not Street Fighter-specific. In the season five episode “Love Hurts,” Will’s pride is hurt when he’s defended in a fight by his girlfriend Lisa, who reveals that she studies Shotokan — and refers to it by name.
This is a very on-brand realization for me to have, BTW. In case you didn’t know, when I’m not writing about old video games, I host a podcast about sitcoms.
But yeah, in doing research for the Sheng Long post, however, I was surprised to find that Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Gouken were listed on the Street Fighter wiki as practicing not Shotokan but instead Ansatsuken, which I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of before. I started looking into when and why this changed happened, and the post you’re reading now began as a bit in the miscellaneous notes section of the previous post, but it just kept growing until it became a post in its own right.
Because I’d fallen out of the practice of obsessively reading bios of fighting game characters, I didn’t know that at least as far as localizations outside Japan were concerned, all these Street Fighter characters stopped being canonically Shotokan fighters quite some time ago. And in Japan, they’d never been Shotokan fighters in the first place. In fact, in the promotional literature for the first Street Fighter game, Ryu and Ken are merely described as being “young genius” fighters who studied various disciplines and fused them into their own, shared style.
Translation: Studying martial arts from a young age, Ryu and Ken are gifted martial artists who developed their own unique styles. The two rivals set out on a journey to become the best in the world of martial arts. Facing off against the strongest and most skilled Street Fighters from around the world, who will be the one to claim the title of ”The Strongest Man in the World”? Will it be Ryu, or Ken?!
Ryu: Studying martial arts from a young age and developing his own unique style, he was dubbed a ”martial arts prodigy.” Risking life and limb, he set out to be a Street Fighter, aiming for the title of the world's strongest.
Ken: Like Ryu, he's a prodigy martial artist, studying from a young age and developed his own unique style. He's able to stand toe to toe with Ryu. He is also aiming for the title of ”Strongest Man in the World” and set out on a journey.
(If you want to know the history of Ryu and Ken’s names — and why Ken’s is being represented with kanji here, rather than katakana, read this post.)
It’s actually Gen, the elder of the two Chinese fighters in Street Fighter, who is identified as practicing Ansatsuken, initially described as a martial art he created.
Translation: It would be more accurate to call him an assassin rather than a martial artist. He studied Chinese martial arts from a young age and developed his own style called Ansatsuken. Considerable skill is necessary in order to break through his Ansatsuken and defeat him.
So what is Ansatsuken? Well, it’s not any one thing in particular, generally speaking. The term literally means “assassination fist,” and has been used to name more than one murderous martial arts practice in various fictions. One of the earliest (if not *the* earliest) is the first volume of the original Fist of the North Star manga, which describes protagonist Kenshiro’s martial arts style as Fearsome Assassin’s Fist (恐るべき暗殺拳 or osorubeki ansatsu ken), though its translated in the English version as “dreadful ancient Chinese martial art.”
In the actual manga, Kenshiro’s discipline is more properly referred to as Hokuto Shinken (北斗神拳 or Big Dipper Divine Fist), so I think in this case referring to it as an assassin’s martial arts style is more of general description than a technical name, but that also appears to be the case in many franchises. In fact, this tweet notes that the term has been used to describe Andy Bogard’s discipline in the Fatal Fury games, even though his specific martial art is more properly called Shiranui-ryuu Ninjutsu.
Ansatsuken doesn’t figure into the Street Fighter canon until Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the installment that introduced Akuma. As explained in the previous post, Akuma and Gouken (Ryu and Ken’s master) trained under Goutetsu, and Akuma grew frustrated with the fact that Goutetsu was teaching them a less severe version of a martial art that was originally designed to kill. As the story goes, Akuma killed Goutetsu, and Gouken meanwhile passed on the less lethal version of the discipline to Ryu and Ken. This means that the trademarks of the form — the Shōryūken uppercut, the Hadōken fireball and the Tatsumaki hurricane kick — all originated in an Ansatsuken in that they all come from something that was at one point used to kill. To this day, if you look up, say, Ryu’s character history on a Japanese website, it won’t align him with one specific martial art. Rather, it’s more like how it was put in the text for the first Street Fighter, and he combines various practices into something unique. (Ryu’s Japanese Wikipedia page, for example, it’s noted that in addition to Gouken’s teachings, he incorporates karate, judo and taekwondo.)
By the time Street Fighter IV was being localized, however, someone on the localization team apparently mistook these references to Ansatsuken for a specific martial art, and all references to Shotokan were dropped in favor of this new thing. As a result, if you look up Ryu, Ken, Akuma or Gouken on the Street Fighter wiki, they’re all listed as practicing martial arts rooted in Ansatsuken, with Akuma practicing Ansatsuken with an awakened Satsui no Hado (殺意の波動 or Wave Motion of Murderous Intent).
Linguistically speaking, this shift creates an interesting phenomenon, because although apparently no one in the Street Fighter canon officially practices Shotokan anymore, the term is fossilized both in Street Fighter and in fighting games in general as a result of the shotoclone. Also sometimes just called a shoto, a shotoclone is any character who plays like Ryu and Ken in that they have more or less all-around stats and their special moves include an uppercut and a fireball, if not the hurricane kick as well — often with joystick inputs identical to the ones that originated in Street Fighter.
So Ryu and Ken are shotos, as is Akuma. Less clear are Dan, Sean and Sakura, who all come close but have variations that might classify them as shotos or just merely shoto-adjacent, depending on where the line is being drawn. Morrigan and Demitri in Dark Stalkers are also shotos, but it’s not limited to Capcom fighters at all. They abound on the Neo Geo fighters, including Kyo Kusanagi in King of Fighters, Andy Board in Fatal Fury and possibly Terry Bogard as well, Ryu Sakazaki and sometimes Robert Garcia in Art of Fighting, Haohmaru in Samurai Shodown and Hanzo and Fuuma in World Heroes. In Guilty Gear, Ky Kiske is a shoto. In Killer Instinct, Jago is a shoto. In fact, Mario and Luigi in the Smash Bros. games arguably qualify as shotos based on their core moveset: jumping uppercut, fireball and spinning rush attack.
Basically, shoto is a misnomer that has endured nonetheless. Whoever at Capcom USA decided to classify Ryu and Ken as Shotokan fighters back in the day would have had no idea they’d be responsible for not only affecting the Street Fighter canon but also creating a term that would be used in series that have connection to Street Fighter. In a way, the pervasiveness of this term serves as evidence of how foundational Street Fighter II is to fighting games in general; as with many other concepts, the shoto did not exist before Street Fighter II but is now so integral to the DNA of fighting games that it’s reused and reused without a second thought to being pulled directly from Street Fighter II. And I’m willing to bet that it will continue to exist, long after most fighting game fans forget that Ryu and Ken were ever purported to be Shotokan practitioners, no doubt prompting future players to stop and wonder, “Hey, why are they called shotos?”
As much as I like a history lesson, I like an etymological mystery waiting to happen even more. At the very least, I’m hoping anyone wondering will end up here.
Miscellaneous Notes
Likely because I don’t know much about martial arts aside from what I’ve seen in fighting games, I couldn’t figure out a reason why the people who localized Street Fighter II would have assigned Shotokan as Ryu and Ken’s discipline. First of all, it’s not necessary because many Street Fighter II characters don’t practice a specific, IRL martial art. E. Honda is obviously a sumo wrestler, for example, but Blanka does… jungle stuff? (Early localizations identified his fighting style as capoeira, and that’s probably just because it’s associated with Brazil and Blanka is essentially from Brazil? I mean, he’s not, but that’s hardly the only mystery about Blanka.) Presumably there’s something that made someone at Capcom USA think that Shotokan was well-known enough or had the right connotations that English-speaking gamers would want to associate it with the game’s two heroes, but I have no idea what. I’m all ears if you have suggestions.
The below video incorrectly asserts that the localizers assigned Ryu and Ken Shotokan because Ansatsuken sounded too dark and violent for heroic characters. That can’t be the motivation, because Shotokan ended up in English-language materials before Ansatsuken showed up in the Japanese ones, but the video does correctly point out that there’s nothing in the way Ryu and Ken play that looks anything like Shotokan. However, there is a Street Fighter character whose martial arts better matches Shotokan: Makoto, one of the few Street Fighter III refugees, practices Rindo-kan karate, which looks much more like Shotokan than anything Ryu or Ken ever did.
Underscoring that Ansatsuken is more of a category of martial arts than a specific discipline, the character Gen, who appeared in the first Street Fighter, showed up again in Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter IV, where it’s specified that he practices two different styles of kung fu: Mantis, otherwise known as Assassination Fist: Mourning Style (暗殺拳・喪流 or Ansatsuken Sō Ryū) and Assassination Fist: Abhor Style (暗殺拳・忌流, Ansatsuken Ki Ryū). But the use of Ansatsuken here is rather literal, because Gen works as an assassin. Neither looks anything like how Ryu and Ken fight but they’re Ansatsuken nonetheless because Gen uses them to kill people, even if he doesn’t do so in actual in-game matches. (Also he’s apparently chummy with Chun-Li, who is a cop but must be aware that Gen kills people for money? Huh.)
According to The Fighting Game Glossary, the Japanese term for a shoto is a dōgi (道着), referring to the outfit that Ryu and Ken wear but presumably used even when a character is wearing something else.
Finally, why do so many fighting game profiles from the 90s list characters’ blood type? That’s because in Japan, there’s a belief that blood type dictates personality traits. It’s no more scientific than western belief in the zodiac, but it’s still around today.