What is Tomari-te (Tumai-di)

One of my teachers, Moritoshi Nakaema is a descending of the Tomari-te grandmaster Seikichi Nakaema, from Nago, Okinawa. He tolds me sometimes that “Tomari” was a passage between Naha and Shuri. Something similar to those small village where diligences used to stop for lunch and resume their travels, as we see in old western movies. He explained me that Tomari means “a place where the men stop a punch”, to say that man of Tomari were very strong. Tomari was a place where the King frequently recruited soldiers for his militias. I know that many of readers of this blog will be surprised by this, very different from what they are accustomed to hearing. Tomari is today regarded as the “dream land” of Ryukyu's martial arts, a small piece of land that does not exist anymore since the Meiji restoration.