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60 free Karate trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This karate trivia quiz starts in the Ryukyu Kingdom and ends in an Olympic arena. The history questions cover the invasion of 1609, the three towns behind Shuri-te, Naha-te and Tomari-te, the schoolboys who first showed the art to judo's founder, Motobu's fight with a foreign boxer, and the 1936 meeting that changed 'Chinese hand' to 'empty hand'. Gichin Funakoshi gets a run of questions, from his pen name to the belts he borrowed from judo and the maxim on his memorial. Then come the training and the styles: kihon, kata and kumite, the makiwara, the original three belt colours, Gōjū-ryū and Kyokushin, Mas Oyama's bulls and the 100-man kumite. The sport questions take in the World Karate Federation, the eight events of Tokyo 2020, Ryo Kiyuna and Sandra Sánchez, Karate Combat's pit, and the karateka who made it in MMA. Karate Champ, The Matrix and The Karate Kid round it off. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on karate, its founders, its styles and the Olympic competition, and each explanation adds one detail worth passing on. BrainPickle has separate quizzes on martial arts generally and on The Karate Kid films.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which island realm, now part of Japan, did karate develop?
Ryukyu
The islands are today's Okinawa; the art grew out of a local fighting system called te, meaning 'hand', under Chinese influence.
Q 02What does the modern spelling of 'karate' literally mean?
Empty hand
The older characters meant 'Tang hand', a nod to China; the homophone was adopted officially at a 1936 meeting of masters in Naha.
Q 03What did the original characters for karate, changed in the 1930s, mean?
Tang or Chinese hand
Rising Japanese nationalism and tension with China made a martial art named after a Chinese dynasty awkward, so a homophone was swapped in.
Q 04What is a karate practitioner called?
A karateka
The suffix -ka simply denotes a person who practises something, as in judoka.
Q 05Which Japanese domain invaded the island kingdom in 1609 and turned it into a vassal state?
Satsuma
The islanders were later banned from carrying swords, which is traditionally credited with encouraging unarmed fighting methods.
Q 06In which year was the island kingdom formally annexed by Japan as Okinawa Prefecture?
1879
The Ryukyuan samurai who had carried the art lost their privileges, and karate nearly died out before it was taught in schools from 1905.
Q 07Which three Okinawan towns gave their names to the three early styles of karate?
Shuri, Naha and Tomari
Each area's teachers had their own kata and principles; Naha-te was founded by Higaonna Kanryō after years of study in China.
Q 08Who is known as the 'father of modern karate' and founder of Shotokan?
Gichin Funakoshi
He gave a demonstration at Kanō Jigorō's Kodokan in 1922 and published the first book on karate the same year.
Q 09Shotokan takes its name from Funakoshi's pen name Shōtō, which means what?
Waving pines
Kan means training hall, so Shōtōkan is 'the house of Shōtō'; Funakoshi himself never named his style, calling it simply karate.
Q 10From which martial art did Funakoshi borrow the white uniform and coloured belt ranks?
Judo
Kanō Jigorō, judo's founder, originated both innovations, and Funakoshi consulted him while modernising karate for mainland Japan.
Q 11In which year did Funakoshi adopt the kyū/dan rank system?
1924
Originally karate had only three belt colours, with ranks inside each.
Q 12Which three belt colours made up the original karate belt system?
White, brown and black
Many Shotokan schools still use that scheme; the rainbow of colours came later.
Q 13What is the Japanese term for the first-degree black belt?
Shodan
It literally means 'beginning dan'; beginners start at a high-numbered kyū, such as tenth, and count down.
Q 14Karate training is commonly divided into three parts. Which is the sparring part?
Q 21Which martial arts term, meaning roughly 'the way of', is added to karate to stress its spiritual side?
Dō
The same suffix appears in judo, aikido, kendo and kyūdō; jutsu, by contrast, means art or technique.
Q 22What is Karate Day, marked by the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly?
25 October
It commemorates the 1936 roundtable in Naha at which the masters agreed on the art's modern name.
Q 23Which full-contact style did Masutatsu Oyama formally found in 1957?
Kyokushin
It blends Shotokan and Gōjū-ryū and, since the 1980s, has written 'karate' in katakana to seem modern.
Kumite
The word literally means 'meeting of hands'; kihon is basics and kata is forms.
Q 15What does the word 'kata' literally mean?
Shape or model
A kata is a formalised sequence of movements; demonstrating its applications against real opponents is called bunkai.
Q 16Which Okinawan master created the simplified Pinan (Heian) kata for schoolchildren?
Ankō Itosu
He helped get karate into Okinawa's public schools in 1905, teaching the forms at elementary level.
Q 17Which style was founded by Chōjun Miyagi, a student of Naha-te's founder?
Gōjū-ryū
Miyagi went on using the old word te in conversation until the Second World War, long after the name karate was settled.
Q 18Kanbun Uechi, founder of the fourth great Okinawan influence, went to China at 20 for what reason?
To escape Japanese military conscription
In Fuzhou he studied under Shū Shiwa, a leading figure of a southern Shaolin style.
Q 19What did the founder of judo witness in Kyoto in 1908 that first exposed him to karate?
A demonstration by Okinawan schoolboys
Students from the Okinawa Prefectural Middle School performed at the Butokuden; Funakoshi's own demonstration at the Kodokan followed in 1922.
Q 20What event made karate suddenly famous across mainland Japan?
A magazine story about Motobu Chōki beating a foreign boxer
The fight took place in Kyoto; until then karate's popularity on the mainland had been sluggish.
Q 24Where was Masutatsu Oyama born?
Korea
Born Choi Yeong-eui, he took a Japanese name transliterating Baedal, an ancient Korean word for Korea.
Q 25What did Oyama famously do in public demonstrations to prove his power?
Knock live bulls unconscious with his bare hands
He sometimes grabbed them by the horns first; he also claimed to have completed the 100-man challenge three days running.
Q 26What is the ultimate test in Oyama's full-contact style, the '100-man challenge'?
100 continuous rounds against fresh opponents
It takes two and a half to four hours; former students dispute Oyama's claim to have done it three times in a row.
Q 27What is prohibited in most knockdown-karate competition?
Hand and elbow strikes to the head
Kicks to the head and knees to the body are fine, which produces the style's distinctive punishing bouts.
Q 28Which international body is recognised by the IOC as governing sport karate?
WKF
It admits only one national federation per country and runs the senior and junior world championships.
Q 29Roughly how many member countries does the World Karate Federation have?
About 200
It grew out of the World Union of Karate-do Organizations, which passed 150 members in the 1990s and renamed itself.
Q 30At which Olympic Games did karate make its debut?
Tokyo 2020
It was one of four optional sports added just for that Games and was not kept for Paris or Los Angeles.