Kanbun Uechi then left for Japan to find employment. Three years later, Kanbun Uechi returned to Okinawa, determined never to teach again because one of his Chinese students had killed a neighbor with an open-hand technique in a dispute over land irrigation. In modern times, the katakana version of pangainoon (?) has been used in Japanese writing rather than the kanji (?).Īfter studying 10 years under Sh? Shiwa/Zhou Zihe, Kanbun Uechi opened his own school in Nanjing. The Cantonese language pronunciation is bun ngaang yun.
The standard Japanese pronunciation of the three characters is han k? nan (?), while the standard Mandarin pronunciation is bàn yìng ru?n. It is not a Japanese, Okinawan nor Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of the original characters. The exact provenance of the romanization "Pangai-noon" is not clear, and it may be from the lesser-known Min Chinese language. Some have suspected he had connection with the secret societies which worked for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the restoration of Ming dynasty. Sh? Shiwa/Zhou Zihe's life is not well documented. Kanbun Uechi studied a style of Southern Chinese kung fu Pangai-noon (traditional Chinese characters: ?) meaning "half-hard, half-soft" in the Fujian province of China, in the late 19th century and early 20th century under a teacher and Chinese medicine hawker known in Japanese as Sh? Shiwa (Chinese: Zhou Zihe ? 1869-1945).