Gouken

Gouken (Japanese: 剛拳, Hepburn: Gōken) is a fictional character in the Street Fighter video game series. He is the martial arts master who trained Ryu and Ken, as well as the elder brother and former training partner of Akuma. Gouken is usually depicted as a bearded man who wears Mala prayer beads on his neck and a karate gi with the kanji mu (無), or "void" sewn to the back. Although Gouken has been a supporting character in the Street Fighter series since Super Street Fighter II Turbo, he did not make his first full-fledged appearance in the video game until his appearance as a hidden character in Street Fighter IV.

Character development

While the backstory for the early installments of the Street Fighter series established that Ryu and Ken trained under the same martial arts master and that the master was killed by his brother, the identity of this character was originally unnamed. The character Gouken was conceived to serve this role in the Masaomi Kanzaki manga Street Fighter II: Ryu, an adaptation of the original Street Fighter II show cased in Japan's Family Computer Magazine (and later adapted into English under the simplified title Street Fighter II). In the storyline of the book, Gouken trained Ryu and Ken in his temple somewhere in the Japanese wilderness. One day, Akuma stormed Gouken's dojo and killed him, leaving Ryu and Ken with the duty to avenge their master's death. While the novel took liberties with the established canon of the games, Gouken's character would be adapted in the storyline of the later games in the series following Akuma's introduction in Super Street Fighter II Turbo.