*How Kajukenbo Became An American Martial Art - The Unknown Story*

Mitch Powell and How Kajukenbo Became an American Martial Art

For decades, the origin story of Kajukenbo has been told and retold—often with confidence, conviction, and dramatic flair. The familiar narrative describes five young men, each a master of a different martial art, coming together in post-war Hawai‘i to forge a new fighting system. It is a powerful story. It is also, according to Grandmaster Mitch Powell, incomplete.

With the release of How Kajukenbo Became an American Martial Art, The Unknown Story, Powell offers something rare in martial arts history: a disciplined, source-driven re-examination of how Kajukenbo actually became a martial art, stripped of embellishment and grounded in documentation, interviews, and investigative rigor.

Powell is uniquely positioned to tell this story. A lifelong Kajukenbo practitioner with more than fifty years of experience, he is also the officially appointed historian for the Kajukenbo Self-Defense Institute, an organization established by Kajukenbo’s founder, Adriano Emperado. His professional background as a retired law enforcement officer and trained investigator informs the book’s methodology: careful sourcing, cross-referencing of accounts, and a clear distinction between what can be verified and what remains uncertain.

Importantly, Powell does not attempt to write a complete or definitive history of Kajukenbo. Instead, he focuses on a narrower—and more critical—question: How did Kajukenbo become a martial art in the first place, and what roles did its founders actually play in that process? In doing so, he confronts long-standing claims head-on, including the popular assertion that Kajukenbo was created by five fully realized martial arts masters, each representing a single discipline.

Powell’s skepticism is not casual; it is analytical. Considering the historical context of Hawai‘i in the 1940s—when black belts were rare and advanced training opportunities limited—he found it highly improbable that five men in their early twenties could all have been fully credentialed masters in separate systems. Rather than accepting tradition at face value, Powell asked the kinds of questions investigators are trained to ask: Who taught them? For how long? Under what circumstances? Where is the documentation?

This line of inquiry was inspired, in part, by earlier landmark works. In 2006, John Bishop published KAJUKENBO, The Original Mixed Martial Art, widely regarded as the foundational modern text on Kajukenbo history. Bishop challenged earlier narratives by documenting the founders’ actual training backgrounds and demonstrating that several had experience across multiple disciplines rather than mastery in only one. Later, in 2017, David Tavares added a crucial missing piece with Black Robe, The Kempo/Kajukenbo Connection, which publicly clarified the authentic training lineage of Kajukenbo founder George Chang for the first time.

Powell’s work builds on these contributions but goes further, drawing extensively from interviews with the Kajukenbo founders themselves. Where accounts conflict—as memories inevitably do—he presents multiple perspectives alongside supporting documentation, allowing readers to weigh the evidence and form their own conclusions. He is transparent about the limitations of historical reconstruction and makes no claim of absolute certainty. What he does claim, and deliver, is honesty of process.

Although the book is accessible to newcomers, Powell is explicit about his primary audience: Kajukenbo practitioners themselves—the students, instructors, and senior practitioners who carry the art forward. This is not mythology intended to inspire from a distance; it is history meant to be understood, shared, and responsibly passed on.

Powell did not initially set out to write a book. After years of publishing articles, maintaining educational websites, and appearing on podcasts to address persistent inaccuracies, he came to a difficult conclusion: false narratives, repeated often enough, calcify into perceived truth. This book is his most comprehensive effort to interrupt that cycle.

How Kajukenbo Became an American Martial Art, The Unknown Story is not an attack on tradition, nor is it an attempt to diminish the founders of Kajukenbo. On the contrary, it treats them with respect by presenting them as real people operating within real historical constraints—innovators whose achievements stand on firmer ground when understood accurately.

For anyone familiar with Kajukenbo’s origin stories—especially the oft-repeated tale of five masters—this book offers a necessary and compelling re-examination. It is an invitation to trade romanticized certainty for documented understanding, and to honor the art by telling its story as truthfully as the evidence allows.

The book is currently available for purchase on Amazon. https://a.co/d/3I0BCpe

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