James Masayoshi Mitose History, Influence and Controversy in Kenpo Part 1 by Michael Mulvihill

Introduction

This podcast essay examines the life, teachings, and legacy of James Masayoshi Mitose, the Hawaiian-Japanese martial arts teacher associated with Kosho-ryu Kenpo.

Mitose occupies an important and controversial place in the history of modern Kenpo. During the 1940s in Hawaii, he taught what he described as Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu, an art he said came from the Kosho-ryu tradition of Japan.

Among those associated with his school was Professor William K. S. Chow, who later developed what became known as Chinese Kempo Karate. Chow in turn taught Ed Parker, who first taught Kenpo Karate and later created the highly systematized art known as American Kenpo.

Today there are hundreds of Kenpo-derived systems practiced throughout the world. These systems evolved in many directions, but the early Hawaiian Kenpo movement traces in large part to the influence of James Mitose, whose teachings helped spark the development of modern Kenpo traditions.

To understand Mitose is therefore to understand a key turning point in the evolution of Kenpo: the moment when older martial traditions, immigrant life in Hawaii, and modern self-defence methods began to merge into something new.

Part 1: The Japanese in Hawaii

Mitose’s Japanese-Hawaiian Heritage

James Masayoshi Mitose was born in Hawaii to Japanese parents. To understand his background, it is necessary to understand how a large Japanese community came to exist in Hawaii in the first place.

The Shogunate Era (1603–1868)

Before 1868, Japan was under military rule during the Tokugawa shogunate. During much of this period, emigration from Japan was severely restricted under the policy commonly called sakoku. As a result, there was no significant Japanese diaspora in Hawaii before the late nineteenth century.

Why, then, did Hawaii become such an important destination later on?

Hawaii’s land was increasingly developed for sugar and pineapple plantations. These plantations became major economic enterprises, largely controlled by powerful landowners and commercial interests. Native Hawaiians often resisted plantation labour, regarding it as exploitative and degrading. As a result, plantation owners increasingly relied on imported labour from abroad.

The Meiji Era

The restoration of imperial rule in 1868 transformed Japan. The Meiji era brought rapid modernization, industrial development, and social upheaval. Railways, mechanization, and economic changes altered traditional life and displaced many rural workers. Emigration became one path toward survival and opportunity.

The Gannenmono and the Issei

In 1868, the first official Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawaii. They became known as the Gannenmono, meaning “first-year people,” because they arrived in the first year of the Meiji era.

They were also Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants. Many more would follow in the decades ahead, including people from prefectures such as Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima.

Nisei and Kibei

James Mitose belonged to the Nisei generation, meaning second-generation Japanese American. He was also associated with the Kibei experience: people born in the United States, sent to Japan for education, and later returned.

His father, Sukichi Mitose, and his mother, Tome Mitose, came from Kumamoto Prefecture. Like many Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, they were shaped by rural poverty, land pressures, crop failures, and debt. Conditions in parts of Kumamoto were severe, and plantation work in Hawaii, though harsh and demanding, often promised better wages than life at home.

Mitose later claimed that his family descended from samurai in Kumamoto, a region with strong warrior associations. That claim remains part of Mitose family tradition, though independent documentary proof is difficult to establish. It should also be remembered that after the Meiji Restoration many former samurai families lost status and entered ordinary civilian life, including farming.

Early Life of James Masayoshi Mitose

James Masayoshi Mitose was born in 1916 in Kailua-Kona, on the west coast of the island of Hawaii in the North Kona district. Kailua-Kona had once served as a royal residence of Hawaiian rulers, including Kamehameha.

Mitose had two sisters, including Fusae Mitose. Later Kosho-ryu circles would regard Fusae as a senior figure in the family tradition. Within those circles, she strongly maintained that William Chow had indeed been a student of James Mitose.

Kibei Experience

As a Kibei, Mitose belonged to a generation that lived between two worlds. Born in Hawaii but educated in Japan, such individuals often returned carrying Japanese language, discipline, and cultural habits back into Hawaiian society. This could create both strength and strain: strength in identity and education, strain in belonging.

Mitose, along with members of his family, spent formative years in Japan. This experience helps explain why, when he later returned to Hawaii, he may have felt both native and foreign at the same time.

Kumamoto, Japan, and the Kosho Tradition

At a young age, Mitose was taken to Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. There he would have lived in rural Japan during the Taisho and early Showa periods.

Life in Kumamoto at that time was demanding. Agriculture, fishing, and small family farming shaped everyday life. Education emphasized literacy, arithmetic, discipline, moral instruction, and physical training. As Japan became increasingly militarized during the 1930s, schools also stressed patriotic duty, marching drills, and loyalty to the state.

Mitose later claimed that while in Kumamoto he studied a family tradition or temple-linked art called Kosho Shorei-Ryu Kenpo or Kosho-ryu Kenpo. He associated this system with old religious and martial traditions. However, historians have long noted that clear documentary evidence for a formal public “Kosho-ryu” institution in Kumamoto is difficult to establish.

This does not necessarily mean Mitose invented everything. It may mean that what he inherited, if he inherited something, belonged more to family transmission, private teaching, or a hybrid body of ideas than to a well-documented public school.

In his 1953 book What Is Self-Defense? Mitose wrote in a way that blended martial instruction, spiritual symbolism, and historical claim. He referred to Bodhidharma and sacred transmission narratives in language that, taken literally, can sound historically uncertain. Yet such writing was not unusual in martial arts literature. In many traditions, myth, philosophy, and technical teaching were intertwined.

For that reason, Mitose’s writings are best read not simply as modern academic history, but as a mixture of martial philosophy, cultural memory, and self-presentation.

What Is Self-Defense?

Kumamoto had strong martial traditions, including judo, kendo, and older Japanese fighting methods. Whether or not Mitose’s exact lineage claims can be fully verified, the environment in which he was educated was one in which martial discipline, hierarchy, and physical culture were taken seriously.

Mitose presented his system as a highly refined art. In What Is Self-Defense? He wrote that Kenpo was more complete than other methods of self-defence and possessed its own distinct principles.

The techniques he described included grab defences, lapel-grab counters, wrist releases, responses to punches, club attacks, and knife threats. The method emphasized short striking combinations, direct punches, low kicks, follow-up chains, and economy of motion. At the same time, there was a strong circular element: yielding, bending, redirecting force, and using the opponent’s motion against him.

These characteristics are part of what made Mitose’s teaching distinctive and influential.

Part 2: Return to Hawaii, 1936–1953

Mitose returned to Hawaii in 1936. In many ways he may have felt like an outsider returning home. Though Hawaiian-born, he had been shaped deeply by Japanese education, language, and culture. As a Kibei, he stood between identities.

This may help explain some features of his later writings. Much of Mitose’s writing is spiritual, abstract, and philosophical. He emphasized the sanctity of life, the need to avoid violence, and the moral burden attached even to justified self-defence. His language often drew on religious symbolism, metaphysical reflection, and ethical discipline.

At the same time, Hawaii in the 1930s and 1940s was not a peaceful paradise. Honolulu was a busy port city shaped by class tensions, racial mixing, vice, dockside roughness, and the pressures of wartime society. It was a place where practical fighting skill had real social value.

Hawaii at the time was a crossroads of Chinese, Okinawan, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and American influences. In such an environment, it is not difficult to imagine martial systems evolving through contact, exchange, and pressure from real-life conditions.

Herbal Remedies

Mitose did not appear to rely solely on martial arts instruction for income. Like many people in immigrant communities, he was also associated with herbal remedies and traditional health practices. This was not unusual in itself. Kampo-style herbal knowledge and home remedies were familiar within Japanese communities.

Later in life, however, herbal medicine would become entangled with the criminal case that destroyed his public reputation. That darker chapter belongs to the final part of this essay.

Wartime Hawaii and Internment

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans came under intense suspicion throughout the United States. On the mainland, over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were interned. In Hawaii, the pattern was different. The mass internment seen on the mainland did not occur in the same way, but selected community figures were detained, including teachers, priests, and other people seen as influential or politically suspect.

Mitose was detained during the war and held in internment camps. Given his Japanese language ability, Kibei background, and status as a martial arts instructor, he was vulnerable in that climate of suspicion.

He was first held at Sand Island, a former quarantine site turned detention facility, enclosed by barbed wire and military guard. He was later transferred to Honouliuli internment camp on Oahu, a camp located in a gulch surrounded by dry hills.

This period forms an important part of his biography. Whatever one thinks of Mitose’s later claims, he lived through the trauma of wartime detention as a Japanese American in Hawaii.

Martial Arts School in Hawaii

After the war, Mitose resumed teaching. He taught at the Beretania Mission YMCA in Honolulu, where students from varied backgrounds could attend.

This was an important phase in the development of Hawaiian Kenpo. The school stood within reach of working-class districts, Chinatown, and the rougher social worlds that shaped much of Honolulu life. It was in this environment that Mitose’s teaching reached figures who would later have a major impact on the martial arts.

Students associated with Mitose’s Hawaii years include Thomas Young, William K. S. Chow, Arthur Keawe, Paul Yamaguchi, and Jiro Nakamura.

The precise teacher-student relationships in early Hawaiian Kenpo are sometimes debated, but there is little doubt that Mitose’s school was an important node in the development of the art.

James Mitose Leaves Hawaii

At some point, Mitose left Hawaii and turned the school over to Thomas Young. Why he stepped back from public teaching is not entirely clear.

Some later accounts suggest disappointment with students who did not pursue the deeper philosophical side of the art. Others suggest that Mitose became disillusioned with the direction martial practice was taking around him.

There are also stories of violent incidents among people connected to this circle, including the killing of George Young, brother of Thomas Young, in a confrontation involving Arthur Keawe. The details of that episode remain murky and are better treated cautiously. It survives more in martial arts oral history than in clear historical record.

What can be said with confidence is that by the time Mitose left Hawaii, the foundations of modern Hawaiian Kenpo had already been laid.

Quanfa, the Law of the Fist

By the early 1950s, Mitose had published and defined his martial philosophy in print.

He used the term Quanfa, or “law of the fist,” to describe a system that was not merely about combat, but about natural law, movement, leverage, timing, and moral responsibility. The fist, in this conception, was not to be displayed carelessly. It was to remain concealed and reserved for extreme necessity.

For Mitose, martial movement was linked to larger principles of motion, balance, gravity, and efficient force. The goal was to use maximum effect with minimum effort.

The Octagon and Moral Philosophy

Mitose’s system also included symbolic teachings such as the Octagon and the Ogami gesture. These reflected his effort to place self-defence within an ethical and spiritual framework.

 Mitose wrote that even when one is compelled to hurt another in self-defence, one still has duties as a human being and citizen. His writing stresses responsibility, restraint, and the sanctity of life.

The Octagon represented an eightfold moral path within his teaching:

Right path

Right understanding

Right imitation

Right speech

Right livelihood

Right effort

Right meditation

Right action

Whether one interprets this as Buddhist influence, ethical teaching, or personal philosophy, the larger point remains clear: Mitose did not present Kenpo merely as a system of violence. He presented it as a discipline meant to restrain violence.

He believed that bitterness, resentment, and hatred were enemies in themselves. The highest victory was not simply defeating another man, but avoiding conflict where possible and preserving life.

The salutation known as Hiken, in which one hand covers the fist, symbolized the idea that martial skill should not be flaunted. The fist was to be concealed, not displayed. This is one of the most revealing symbols in Mitose’s teaching: power hidden, not paraded.

At the same time, Mitose did not deny the severity of the art. Kosho-ryu, as he described it, included destructive methods, close striking, damaging blows, and serious combative knowledge. Yet he insisted that understanding when to move, how to move, and whether to move at all was more important than aggression.

Part 3: Mainland America

Private Teaching and Nimr Hassan

On the American mainland, Mitose appears to have taught more privately than he had in Hawaii. Later accounts suggest that he preferred selective instruction rather than large public classes.

One of the figures associated with this phase is Nimr Hassan, who later described training directly with Mitose. Hassan’s recollections offer a picture of a teacher who emphasized observation, independent practice, coordination, and practical body mechanics.

According to Hassan, Mitose would sometimes demonstrate a kata briefly, leave the student alone to work, and then return later. The method forced attention and responsibility onto the student. Hassan also recalled Mitose’s use of the makiwara, his interest in structure and balance, and his insistence that self-defence should not require elaborate chains of movement or injury to training partners.

This image of Mitose is consistent with the larger themes found in his books: economy, precision, balance, and restraint.

Possible Okinawan Influence

Some writers have argued that Kosho-ryu Kenpo, whatever its claimed family roots, shows signs of Okinawan karate influence.

This argument usually points to the use of Naihanchi kata, the emphasis on close-range fighting, the use of the makiwara, and similarities between Mitose’s material and broader Okinawan-Japanese karate traditions. Motobu Choki is sometimes mentioned in this context because of his own focus on Naihanchi and practical combat.

These comparisons are important, but they should be presented carefully. It is safer to say that Mitose’s art appears to share features with Okinawan karate and Japanese jujutsu traditions than to claim a direct, proven line of influence in every case.

What seems likely is that early Pacific martial arts culture was not neatly sealed off. Hawaii, especially, was a meeting point of many traditions. Cross-influence would not have been surprising.

The State of California v. James Mitose

The final chapter of Mitose’s life is the most troubling and controversial.

In 1974, Mitose became involved in a serious criminal case in California. He was convicted in connection with the killing of Frank Namimatsu and was also linked to extortion-related charges. The case resulted in a life sentence.

This episode cannot be ignored. It changed the final chapter of Mitose’s life and permanently altered the way many martial artists viewed him.

The circumstances remain debated in martial arts circles. Supporters of Mitose have argued that the case involved heavy reliance on testimony from the admitted killer, Terry Lee, who received a lighter sentence after cooperating. Others have raised concerns about language barriers and the clarity of testimony.

Whatever one’s interpretation of the controversy, the legal result is clear: Mitose was convicted, imprisoned, and his reputation was deeply damaged.

Some former students distanced themselves from him. William K. S. Chow later denied that Mitose had been his instructor and instead emphasized learning from his father. Yet many practitioners and historians still maintain that Mitose played an important role in the early formation of the Kenpo lineage from which Chow emerged.

The case also affected the broader Mitose family. The stigma attached to the name was considerable. Yet within Kosho-ryu circles, some relatives and later followers continued to insist that the criminal case should not define the entire martial legacy.

Folsom and Final Years

Mitose spent his final years in prison, including time at Folsom. His health deteriorated. He suffered from diabetes and severe eyesight problems. He died in prison in 1981.

That is where the historical record leaves us: not with a simple hero, not with a simple fraud, but with a deeply influential and deeply controversial figure.

Conclusion

James Masayoshi Mitose remains one of the most debated names in Kenpo history.

His influence on the development of Hawaiian Kenpo and, indirectly, on later Kenpo systems is too significant to dismiss. At the same time, many of the claims surrounding his lineage, his teachings, and his life remain contested. His later criminal conviction makes his legacy even more difficult to assess.

Yet history is not served by simplification.

Mitose matters because he stands at the intersection of immigration history, Japanese-Hawaiian identity, martial transmission, philosophical self-defence, and modern controversy. He belongs to that class of historical figures whose influence is real even when the surrounding narrative is unstable.

For students of Kenpo, Mitose is important not because he offers an easy legend, but because he forces hard questions: Where does a martial tradition truly come from? How much is lineage, how much is adaptation, and how much is myth? And how should we judge the legacy of a man whose technical and historical importance remains undeniable, even as the story of his life ends in tragedy?

References

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Pekina, James, and Larry Delano. Footnotes to Kenpo Jujutsu and the Okinawan-Te Connection to James Mitose.

Durbin, W., and Hassan, Nimr H. (2007). The Kenpo History of James Masayoshi Mitose. Lulu.

Juchnik, Bruce. The History of Kosho-Ryu Kenpo.

Mitose, James M. (1953). What Is Self-Defense? Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu. Self-published.

Bishop, Mark. (1989). Okinawan Karate: Teachers, Styles and Secret Techniques. A & C Black.

McCarthy, Patrick. (2016). Bubishi: The Bible of Karate.

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