kung fu or gong fu???

In the West, almost everyone knows it as kung fu. The classic song “Kung Fu Fightin’”, the recent movie “Kung Fu Panda”, even a terrible cartoon when I was young referred to it – Hong Kong Phooey.

But in the system of Romanization used in China, called pinyin, it is rendered as gong fu, and that is how I write it here. (Experienced practitioners may/ should know all this already and may skip ahead a bit…) As has been written endlessly elsewhere – yet still has not seeped into general consciousness outside of Asia - is that the words “gong fu” (功夫) refer to a deep level of accomplishment in almost anything – not necessarily martial arts. And these characters, 功夫, are best rendered as “gong fu” in my opinion.

But whether kung fu or gong fu, it is a convenient way to refer to Chinese martial arts (especially if you want to highlight the difference from modern, sports-oriented wushu…but that opens up hours of discussion…) All of this puts me in a funny position here in Japan, with its mania for adopting semblances of foreign words. Two native Japanese can understand each other’s use of words like “sarada” / サラダ, “raito” / ライト (right? write?), and “konsento” / コンセント (electric outlet / socket). But don’t ask any native English speakers to follow these usages any time soon.

Then add in more fake words altered from languages such as French and German, and pretty soon the entries in the Japanese dictionary are more than 10% of these adopted foreign words.

And then there is カンフー, pronounced like “kan fu” (the first word sounds like con, as in con man), taken from the Chinese. Or is it? 1.3 billion Chinese (and growing) pronounce it and write it in Roman letters as “gong fu”. So it seems the Japanese have taken the mistaken “kung fu” from western countries and changed it to fit Japanese pronunciation styles, and the word has thus been doubly distorted.

Recently I have noticed a very small number of publications using ゴンフー, with two volumes of the excellent 達人の道leading the way, which is a much better approximation of the actual pronunciation within the constraints of the sounds of Japanese language (there is no “ng”, for example). But 99% of Japanese people would not recognize this usage, since “kanfu-- / カンフー” has entered standard usage.

Because there have been different systems of Romanization over the years, we have different spellings such as tai ji quan – t’ai chi chuan; ba gua zhang – pa kua chang; xing yi quan – hsing yi chuan; and even names, such as Mao Ze Dong – Mao Tse Tung.

Again, the standard on mainland China is pinyin (the first example in each pair above), but in the West the influence of the Wade-Giles system lingers, offering alternate romanizations. Things get more complicated because on the island of Taiwan, pinyin is not used (go read your history books/ internet if necessary). And a fair number of prominent martial artists … relocated…. from the mainland to the island of Taiwan around 1949 (once again, do some quick googling if necessary).

I don’t know if we’ll ever all agree on how to spell/ Romanize the arts names above, but I do think that “gong fu” should be adopted universally.

(another picture from the Beijing subways)