Belt Order by Style
Kyokushin — the full-contact “knockdown” style founded by Mas Oyama — uses a belt order all its own, and it catches out anyone expecting the Shotokan rainbow. Here is the complete ranking, why the colours sit where they do, what each one means, and how Kyokushin’s famously hard grading works.
Each colour spans two kyū grades. The junior grade is a plain belt; the senior grade of the same colour adds a single black stripe. Dan (black-belt) grades are marked with gold stripes — one per degree.
Grades vary slightly between Kyokushin organisations (IKO, Shinkyokushin and others). Always follow your own dōjō’s syllabus.
Mas Oyama trained in Shotokan under Gichin Funakoshi before founding Kyokushin, so the systems are cousins — but Oyama built his own belt order in the 1960s, and it doesn’t match. The clearest difference: blue sits high, before yellow, where Shotokan (and most styles) run yellow → orange → green → blue. Same colours, different meaning.
Oyama tied the colours to a progression of growth — often read as an elemental journey from earth to sky to the void. It’s a traditional interpretation rather than a fixed rule, but it captures how Kyokushin sees the path.
Kyokushin is knockdown karate — full-power strikes to the body and legs, no punches to the head. Its gradings are correspondingly demanding: alongside basics (kihon) and forms (kata), you are tested on real full-contact sparring (kumite), hard physical conditioning, and — at higher grades — tameshiwari, breaking boards or tiles to prove focus and power.
The higher you climb, the more kumite a grading demands. Advanced dan tests can require dozens of consecutive full-contact fights, culminating in Kyokushin’s legendary trial: the 100-man kumite (hyakunin kumite) — one hundred back-to-back rounds against fresh opponents, completed by only a handful of fighters in the style’s history.