Mas Oyama

Mas Oyama, born Choi Yeong-eui in Gimje, Korea, on 27 July 1923, and dead on 26 April 1994, was a Korean-Japanese karateka who founded Kyokushin Karate, regarded as the first and most influential style of full contact karate. He moved to Japan in 1938, took the Japanese name Masutatsu Oyama and studied Shotokan under Gigo Funakoshi and later Goju-ryu under Nei-chu So. After the war he enrolled at Waseda University to study sports science, trained alone for fourteen months on Mount Minobu and won the karate section of the Japanese National Martial Arts Championships. His 1958 book What is Karate became a best-seller that was translated into several languages, and his life inspired the manga Karate Baka Ichidai.