Liu Zongwu

Liú Zōngwǔ
Name in Kanji	劉宗武
Name in Romaji	Ryū Sōbu
Fighting Style	Hokuto Ryuka Ken
Allegiance(s)	Error creating thumbnail: /bin/bash: line 1: convert: command not found →Error creating thumbnail: /bin/bash: line 1: convert: command not found
Family	Liu Zongjian (father)
Appearances	Souten no Ken
Voice actor(s)	Tessho Genda

Liú Zōngwǔ (Chinese and Japanese: 劉宗武; Wade-Giles: Liu Tsung-wu; rōmaji: Ryū Sōbu)

The 1930's successor to the Hokuto Ryūka Ken style. His first encounter with the previous master, Liu Xuanxin, was at the Tàishèng Yuàn Temple in Ningbo. He met Xia Wenli there, too.

Driven to revenge by the death of his family at the hands of Du Tianfeng, Zōngwǔ turned evil and began to train in the Hokuto Ryūka Ken arts. Pro-war, he believes that it is a good opportunity to cleanse evil from the world. Later he joined the Nazis as a Lieutenant in the Waffen-SS even though he was Chinese. He had the chance to kill Adolf Hitler but didn't because he felt Hitler was too pitiful. Edmund Heckler brings him to Shanghai during the Battle of Shanghai. Zōngwǔ survives an attempt on his life after Dù Tiānfēng asks for Edmund Heckler to organize the hit.

Zōngwǔ desired to kill Kenshiro Kasumi in order to prove that Hokuto Ryūka Ken was superior than Hokuto Shinken. After killing Dù Tiãnfēng and finally avenging his parents' deaths he renounced his evil ways and became a monk. It can be assumed that he passed his fighting style to Jukei.

Trivia[edit | edit source]

Semi-historically, one of the unlikely, but possible reasons that Liú Zōngwǔ could have become a German Nazi officer despite being Chinese was that during the early 20th Century, China was in a pre-war semi-alliance with Germany which ended prior to the war, where both countries relied heavily on each other for exchanging raw materials from China while Germany provided advisors and technology. The use of C96 guns and the Potato Masher hand grenades can be seen throughout Souten no Ken. In reality, the war put an end to all Sino-German cooperartion, and the possibility of a Chinese ranking Nazi officer would be a near impossibility, as Germany allied with Japan, and Japan attacked America and joined the war on Germany's side. Chiang Kai-Shek's son, Chiang Wei-Kuo, was also officially a graduate of the German Wermacht.

Zōngwǔ is also the strongest enemy that the main character of Kenshiro Kasumi has to overcome akin to Raoh in the first half of Hokuto no Ken.