When Gichin Funakoshi was a young man, he enjoyed walking in solitude among the pine trees which surrounded his home town of Shuri. After a hard day of teaching in the local school and several more hours of strenuous karate practice, he would often walk up Mt. Torao and meditate among the pine trees under the stars and bright moon. Mt. Torao is a very narrow, heavily wooded mountain which, when viewed from a distance, resembles a tiger's tail. The name "torao", in fact, literally means "tiger's tail".
Hoan Kosugi, a famous artist and president of the Tabata Poplar Club, an artist' guild, was a very important figure in the development of Shotokan karate-do in Japan.
To entice Funakoshi, to write a book about karate, Hoan Kosugi told Funakoshi that if he would write the book, Kosugi would design it and provide a painting for the cover. When Gichin Funakoshi produced the book, Hoan Kosugi produced the now famous Shotokan tiger.
His idea for the tiger came from the expression "Tora no maki." Tora no maki, in Japanese tradition, is the official written document of an art or system, which is used as the definitive reference source for that particular art. Since no books had ever been written aboutkarate, Hoan Kosugi told Funakoshi that his book was the tora no maki of karate, and since "tora" also means "tiger", he designed the tiger as a representation of Funakoshi's art.
The irregularity of the circle indicates that it was probably painted with one brush stroke. The characters by the tiger's tail denote the name of the artist.
The Shotokan tiger is a traditional Chinese design which implies that the tiger never sleeps. The tiger, therefore, symbolizes the keen alertness of the wakeful tiger and the serenity of the peaceful mind which Master Funakoshi experienced while listening to the pine waves on Tiger's Tail Mountain.