Topic: Can anybody read this? (Japanese calligraphy)

[cb750dude]

I was going threw some of my dads old military and motorcycle patches and found this one. Does anybody out there know what is says?

Sean

[sangyo soichiro]

"Bare hands."

[Frankenkit]

ok, so we know what the kanji are.... (thanks, soichiro!) Dude, can you give us some more context so we know what this might pertain to?  I wnt to say there was a budo that was something like 'the way of empty hands' but I can't think of whether that applied to judo, aikido, or something different entirely.

[BobbyR]

I have showed this to my Mamager who has just come over from Japan. This is a patch that is associated with Karate. The top character is "SKY" the second is "Hand". The sky character is used to mean "empty" in this context. So it would say "Empty Hand".

[mystic_1]

Wikipedia says:

Karate (空手) (Japanese pronunciation: [kaɽate] , English: /kəˈrɑːtiː/) is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) from indigenous fighting methods te (手, literally: "hand"?) and Chinese kenpō.

Also,

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%A9%BA%E6%89%8B

mystic_1

[Sam Green Racing]

Empty and sky are the first figure and the second figure is hand.  空手。 空手。

Bare hands comes like this. 素手。

Sam.

[Aaron Richard]

looks like you came up empty handed
ahhh.....that was awful

[j squared]

looks like you came up empty handed
ahhh.....that was awful

That just made my day

[seaweb11]

This place kills me

way to go guys and gals

It's like frikin "Ask Me" 

[SD750F]

cb750dude,

I bet the patch you found was worn by our solders as they took or escorted prisoners of war... That would make sense to me with the translation provided by soichiro.

[j squared]

Im pretty sure it means "BYAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"