Gigō Funakoshi

Through his teaching position and understanding of Japanese martial arts, Gigō became the technical creator of modern shotokan karate. In 1946 the book Karate Do Nyumon by Gigo and Gichin Funakoshi was released. Gigo had written the technical part, whereas his father Gichin wrote the preamble and historical parts.

Gigō Funakoshi (Japanese: 船越義豪, Hepburn: Funakoshi Gigō, Funakoshi Yoshitaka) (1906 - 24 November 1945) was the third son of Gichin Funakoshi (船越 義珍) (the founder of Shōtōkan 松濤館流 karate) and is widely credited with developing the foundation of the modern karate Shotokan style.

The difficult living conditions of World War II weakened Gigo, but he continued training. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 39 on 24 November 1945, in Tokyo, Japan.

When his father's Shihan (senior assistant instructor) Takeshi Shimoda died, Gigo assumed his position within the Shotokan organization teaching in various universities. Gichin Funakoshi transformed karate from a purely self-defense fighting technique to a philosophical martial Dō (way of life), or gendai budo, but his son Gigō began to develop a karate technique that definitively separated Japanese karate-do from the local Okinawan arts. Between 1936 and 1945, Gigo gave it a completely different and powerful Japanese flavor based on his study of modern kendo (the way of the japanese sword), and Iaido (the way of drawing the japanese sword) under sensei Nakayama Hakudō. Gigo's work on japanese Karate development was primarily popularized by masters Shigeru Egami and Genshin Hironishi, who later formed the shotokai karate style