His dōjō first trained outdoors in an empty lot and later moved to a ballet school in 1956. He continued to travel around Japan and the world giving martial arts demonstrations allegedly fighting and killing bulls with his bare hands. In 1953 he opened his own Dōjō in Tōkyō called Ōyama Dōjō. Some parts of Ōyama's early biography are contested by Jon Bluming, one of his early students. Although these reports of Ōyama's alleged stay in the mountains have been reiterated by many of his followers, yama has never personally confirmed these circumstances. After winning the Japanese National Martial Arts Championships in karate months later, he returned to the mountains for 18 more months, this time to Mount Kiyosumi, as he had not yet achieved his original goal of training in solitude for three years. He is said to have spent fourteen months there and then was forced to leave the mountain because his patron refused him any further support. Allegedly he had shaved an eyebrow so that he could not leave the mountain. So Ōyama trained alone on Mount Minōbu in Chiba, Japan. His master So Nei-chu, who was a follower of Nichiren Buddhism, encouraged him to consider the spiritual aspect of the path of a martial art, which he had neglected up to now, and to withdraw into solitude in order to correct his lack of control. It was only at this time that Ōyama decided to devote his entire life to karate. He was eventually jailed for six months after beating up some American soldiers to show that he was personally not defeated. Due to the extreme shortage of food immediately after the end of the war, he joined a criminal gang. He was detained for hitting a supervisor who wrongly insulted him.Īfter the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II, Ōyama fell into a serious life crisis. He was part of the ground crew at a military airfield near Tokyo. For Ōyama Masutatsu, the war meant an interruption in his development. When he was drafted into the Japanese army in 1943, he had already reached the 4th Dan in Gōjū-Ryū karate. With So Nei-chu, who came from Korea like himself and had his own dōjō, he practiced Gōjū-ryū karate from this point on. The reason for this was the practice fight between Funakoshi's son and So Nei-chu (소 네이 쥬, 1907-2001), a master student of Miyagi Chōjun, the founder of the Gōjū-ryū karate style. Ōyama left Funakoshi's dōjō a little later because he had a different idea of fighting. Due to his extensive training in various martial arts, he made rapid progress and was able to take the examination for 1st Dan in Shōtōkan karate as early as 1940. Ōyama then went to the dojo of Funakoshi Gichin in Takushoku University and began there to train the karate style Shōtōkan. He went to Tokyo, where he worked as a clerk in a restaurant and trained judo until one day he saw students practicing karate techniques. He could not realize these ambitions (see Shimpū Tokkōtai ), especially because he had not reckoned with the then prevailing discrimination against the Korean minority in motherland Japan. In 1938 Ōyama actually traveled to Japan at the age of 15 in the hope of becoming a fighter pilot in the Japanese Army Air Force. Therefore Ōyama wanted to go to Japan, because he could expect better future prospects there than in his homeland. The Korean language and culture was suppressed by the Japanese occupiers the whole country should be Japaneseized. Korea has been a de facto colony of Japan since the First Sino-Japanese War and de jure since 1910.
When Ōyama returned to Korea at the age of 12, he continued his training in the traditional Korean martial arts Taekgyeon and Gwonbeop. (also referenced under the name “The 18 Hands of Wing Chun”). Ōyama began studying martial arts at the age of 9 and first learned the South Chinese Kung Fu system of 18 hands from a worker named Li Soushi on the said homestead. At a young age he lived on his sister's homestead in Manchuria.