by John Donohue
So, beyond the sighs of anticipation, once the lesson started, none of us spent much time worrying about how tough things were. In the dojo of Yamashita Sensei, the only way to be is fully present and engaged in the activity at hand. The unfocused are quickly weeded out and rarely return. The rest of us endure, in the suspicion that all this will lead to something approximating the fierce skill of our master.
We were working that day on some tricky techniques that involve pressure on selected nerve centers in the forearm. At about the time when most of us were slowing down—shaking our arms out in an effort to get the nerves to stop jangling—Yamashita called that part of the lesson quits and picked up a bokken. We scurried to the lower end of the floor and sat down as he began his instructions.
The bokken is a hardwood replica of the katana— the two-handed long sword used by the samurai. It has the curve and heft of a real sword and so is used to train students of the various sword arts that have evolved over the centuries in Japan. In the right hands, hardwood swords can be very dangerous. They have been known to shatter the shafts of katana, and people like the famous Miyamoto Musashi, armed with a bokken, used to regularly go up against swordsmen armed with real swords. The results were never pretty, but Musashi used to walk away intact, bokken in hand.
Bokken are also used in set series of training techniques called kata, which is typically how Yamashita had us train with bokken.
Kata means “form”: they are prearranged exercises. Don’t be fooled, though. Kata practice in Yamashita’s dojo is enough to make your hair stand on end. When we perform kata, we do them in pairs of attacker and defender, and the movements flow and the blade of the bokken moans through the air as it blurs its way to the target. There’s nothing like the sight of an oak sword slashing at your head to focus your mind.
I was backpedaling furiously to dodge a slashing kesa-giri—the cut that with a real sword would cleave you diagonally from your shoulder to the opposite hip—when movement on the edge of the practice floor caught my eye.
The visitors filed swiftly in, bobbing their heads briefly in that really poor American version of bowing. There were three of them in street clothes and the fourth was dressed in a hakama and top. The outfit caught my eye: the top was crimson red and looked like it was made out of some silky sort of material; the hakama was a crisp jet black. Quite the costume, really, especially when its wearer had a shaved brown head the shape of a large bullet. He had come to make a statement, I guess. They sat quietly with their backs against the wall, watching the class with that hard-eyed, clenched-jaw look that is supposed to intimidate you.
I suppose I should have been impressed, but my training partner would not let up. She was about as fierce and wiry as they come. And her sword work had a certain whip and quick snap to it, a slightly offbeat rapid rhythm that was hard to defend against, even though in kata you theoretically know what’s happening. She wasn’t at all impressed with the visitors. She was a relatively new student who was mostly intent on making one of Yamashita’s senior pupils—me—look less than accomplished.
So even though I was pretty curious about these guys—Yamashita did not, as a rule, tolerate visitors and one of them was dressed like he came to play—I quickly got more interested in not making a fool out of myself during bokken practice.
It’s a pride thing. There’s a lot of talk in the martial arts about letting go of your ego and all that, and we try, we really do, but the fact is that, at this level, you have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into developing your skills and attaining a certain ranking in the dojo, and you really get just a bit ticked off when something happens to threaten that. All the bowing and titles, the uniforms and colored belts, are about status, your sense of worth. It’s a closed little world with its own system for ranking you, but it’s still a status system, and human beings respond to that.
This woman was good with her weapon. I could sense that and so could she. She was pressing me a bit—altering the tempo of the moves, delivering her cuts with something close to full force, shortening the time between parry and counter—delivering a type of challenge to see whether I could meet it.
I could, of course, but that wasn’t the real point. For me, the challenge was how to respond to her force with something more refined. It meant that instead of parrying her cuts with a force that would make our bokken bark out with the shock of impact, I needed to finesse it a bit.
I changed the angles slightly, moving my body just out of the line of attack, which served to place me out of the radius of her strikes. I tried to keep my hands supple as I parried, accepting the force of her blows and redirecting them slightly, but things were getting a bit sweaty and I didn’t want the sword flying out of my hands and shooting across the room. It happens occasionally, and if nobody gets hit we all laugh and the one who let go gets ribbed unmercifully, but this was not a situation where I was willing to get laughed at.
I knew this woman was a relative beginner at the dojo, and I counted on her weapon fixation. It was an unfair advantage in a way, but it’s also an example of what Yamashita calls heiho—strategy.
Between shifting slightly and redirecting a bit more through the next series of movements in the kata, I built up enough frustration in my partner for her to over commit in her next strike—a little too much shoulder in the technique, her head leading into it—and it was all over. I simply let go of my bokken with my left hand, entered into her blind side, led her around in a tight little circle and took the sword away. It wasn’t a move that was in the kata, but Yamashita tells us any time you can do tachi-dori (sword taking), you should, just to keep your partner on his or her toes.
The pivot took her around on her toes, all right. She knew what was happening about a split second after the spin began, but it was too late to get out of it. I handed her back the bokken. She smiled a bit ruefully and we bowed just as Yamashita called the class to order in preparation to bow out.
He glided to the head of the room and waited for us to line up. He was studiously avoiding looking at the gang of four in the back of the room, but you could tell from his body language that he was annoyed.
You don’t come dressed to play unless you’ve been invited. Only the sensei can give permission for a student to train in the dojo. If you show up uninvited and suited up, it means that either you don’t know anything about Japanese martial arts teachers and are in real risk of being beaten up, or you are purposefully being insulting and wish to challenge the sensei to a match. In which case, it is anyone’s guess who gets beaten up.
I’ve seen this happen before. Not often, but you don’t tend to forget it once you’ve seen it. Especially if you’re a student of the teacher being challenged. You get used as a type of cannon fodder for your teacher. He sends you or one of your pals out to fight the challenger, he watches the action, analyzes the skill level of the opponent. If the first student gets beaten, a more advanced pupil goes next, and so on up the line. By the time the challenger reaches the sensei (if he lasts that long), he has either revealed his strengths and weaknesses and so can be defeated, or become so tired that he’s no longer much of a challenge to the sensei. It’s not fair, of course. It’s heiho.
We all knelt, a solid dark blue line stretching down the length of the dojo. Yamashita sat quietly for a minute, then turned to one of his senior pupils, a mild-mannered Japanese-American guy named Ken, who sat next to me at the end of the line reserved for higher ranks. He looked like he was dreading what was about to happen. Yamashita said to him, “I see we have visitors. Perhaps you would invite the colorful one to speak with me.”
Ken bowed, got up, and scurried to the back of the room to deliver the invitation. The guy in the red top nodded, exchanged a series of ritual handshakes with his companions, and stepped onto the training floor. He struck a ready pose and let out a loud “UUUS.”A few of us rolled our eyes. Some of the karate schools out there think that kind of thing makes you seem like a real hard charger.
&
nbsp; Yamashita nodded slightly and Red Top moved forward.
“I regret that I was unable to welcome you properly to my dojo. I am equally distressed to say that I do not know who you are or what you want, since we have not been properly introduced.” The words came out quickly but were carefully pronounced. Sensei doesn’t really have much of an accent, but when he is annoyed his words are very precisely formed. I don’t know if Red Top was picking it up or not, but there wasn’t one of us who doubted that Yamashita Sensei was really ticked off.
“Mitchell Reilly, Sensei.” He bowed, properly this time. Ken caught my eye. Mitch Reilly ran a notorious jujutsu school, pretty much specializing in combat arts of the one-hundred-ways-to-pluck-their-eyeballs-out variety. He was a mainstay of the non-traditional African-American martial arts community. He was built like a refrigerator and I could see his knuckles were enlarged from the damage too much board breaking creates. Mitch Reilly had the reputation of being a really savage competitor, a fair technician, and a guy staggering under the weight of a giant ego.
“So, Mr. Reilly, I must assume that there is a reason for your presence here. The school is hard to find and only a man in need of something would make a journey through such a dangerous neighborhood.”
Reilly looked contemptuous. “No problem. I can take care of myself.”
“And,” Yamashita continued, “the obvious care with which you have selected your . . . charming costume tells me that you are, perhaps, interested in . . . ?” He let the question hang in the air.
I sat and watched the steam start to come out of Reilly’s ears. I have to admit, he got it under control fairly well, which was a sign that he was probably a dangerous man. When the faint trembling stopped, Reilly finished Yamashita’s sentence.
“A match,” he said. “I’m challenging you.”
You had to admire him. The guy pulled no punches. He was probably five years older than I was—in his early forties—and had been banging around the martial arts for at least two decades, and now felt he was ready to take on the closest thing the New York area had to a bona fide master. Most people don’t even know Yamashita exists. He came to New York years ago from Japan for reasons none of us can fathom and hones our technique with a type of quiet brutality. The senior Japanese sensei send their most promising pupils to him, but he’s never appeared in Black Belt, hasn’t written a book divulging the ancient, secret techniques of the samurai elite, and doesn’t have a listing in the Yellow Pages. Which was why Reilly’s presence—and his challenge—was so odd.
You could see Yamashita’s quandary. Reilly was fairly dangerous in a savage, commonplace kind of way. Yamashita was a harsh teacher, but he never needlessly put any of us in danger of serious injury. It was beneath Sensei’s dignity to accept the challenge, but you could almost hear the clicks in his brain as he weighed various other options. Would this match serve any type of purpose in terms of teaching his students? Who would be the most appropriate opponent? Ken was a senior student and could be a logical choice. We all knew—and Sensei did too—that his wife had just had a baby and that a great deal of Ken’s mental energy was not totally focused on training at this time. He was good (even on his bad days) but a match like this was bound to be one where both parties limped away. Ken didn’t need that right now and Yamashita knew it.
Yamashita’s head swiveled along the line of students, weighing each one for potential, for flaws, like a diamond cutter rooting carefully around a draw of unfinished stones. The more experienced among us sat, trying to be totally numb about the situation, not really focusing on Reilly, listening to the hum of the fluorescents and the faint rumble of trucks. The newer students sat in various states: the smart ones were secretly appalled at the prospect; the really dense were excited.
When he called me, I tried to feel nothing. “Professor,” Yamashita said. Ever since they found out I teach in college, the nickname has stuck. It could have been worse. Early on I had worked out at a kendo school where the Japanese kids simply called me “Big Head.”
I bowed and scooted up to the front. In this situation, you sit formally, facing the sensei, which put me right next to Reilly.
“This is Dr. Burke,” he told Reilly. “I am sure you will find him instructive.”
Reilly jerked his head around to size me up. I looked back: flat eyes, sitting there like a blue lump with relaxed muscles, no energy given to the opponent.
“You think you want a piece of me, asshole?” Out of the side of his mouth, like he’d picked it up from old Bogart movies. I swung around—you could see a slight jerk before he realized what I was up to—and bowed, saying nothing. Silent. Passive. A shade. Heiho was keeping yourself in shadow.
Reilly looked back at Sensei. “You must be joking. I’m not fucking around with this piece of shit.”
Yamashita is funny about foul language. He spends his days teaching people how to do serious harm to others, but he has this real thing about keeping conversation civil. Part of it’s just that Japanese politeness, but I think the other part is that he is a man dedicated to an art that celebrates control of one sort or another, and foul language strikes him either as the result of a bad vocabulary and poor imagination or as a lack of mastery over one’s temper. In either case, this kind of language is forbidden in his dojo. Reilly may not have known it, but he had just committed a gross breach of etiquette.
“I am sorry, Mr. Reilly. I regret that we cannot accommodate you in your request for a lesson. You are clearly not ready for any serious training.” With that, Yamashita looked right through him and stood up like he was preparing to leave the floor.
“Wait a minute . . .” Reilly shot up and looked like he was going to reach for the old man. Which was how I got to wondering about whether I could poleax him. I was targeting him for a knuckle strike right below the ear (I figured with any luck I could dislocate his jaw), but there was really no need. Yamashita had about reached the limits of his patience.
As Reilly came at him, Yamashita shot in, a smooth blur. There was an elbow strike in there somewhere before he whipped Reilly around to break his balance. Then Yamashita was behind him, clinging like a limpet and bringing Reilly slowly down to the floor. The choke was (as always) precisely executed: the flow of blood to the brain was disrupted as he brought pressure to bear on the arteries and Reilly was out cold.
Yamashita stood up and beckoned to Reilly’s pals. “Remove him. Do not come back.” Not even breathing hard. They dragged Reilly off the practice floor and trundled him away.
“What a foolish man. An arrogant and violent man.” He looked around at us all, then turned to me. “I am surprised at you, Burke. I would have tried for the jaw dislocation. Work on your reaction time, please.”
He glided away and the lesson ended.
3. The Smell of Money
I live in Brooklyn because the rents are cheaper and Yamashita’s dojo is there, but I work in Bloomington, a planned suburb on Long Island that, among its other unremarkable features, harbors the pedestrian university that employs me.
Of course, it’s not that I really work there. Dorian, like many other colleges, pays a horde of part-time teachers to do the dirty work of modern education. As an adjunct instructor I labor in obscurity so that the full-time professors can think deeply in a measured, quiet, unpressured life that, in my more bitter moments, I think must be like the early onset of Alzheimer’s.
A part-time college instructor typically makes about an eighth of the pay of a real professor, with no benefits, medical coverage, or job security. Everyone loves us because we’re cheap, docile, and actually teach for a living. For our part, we labor on in the blind hope that we will somehow be plucked from anonymity and elevated to full-time status, where you work about nine months out of the year.
So I wandered in that day, my bag crammed with unmarked student tests and a collection of battered paperbacks, with the resignation of a gladiator who knew that his sword was made of lead. The letters for appointments for next semester
were due out today, and I was not particularly optimistic.
The battered common room where I had staked out a claim to an ugly industrial gray metal desk and lopsided typing chair was fairly quiet as well. My mailbox, one in a series of slots labeled with neatly typed paper slips (easily replaced), was filled with the usual junk. There was an announcement about an upcoming faculty meeting—they insist on sending these things to adjuncts, even though we’re not eligible to attend—a perky newsletter for resume-writing workshops and other forlorn hopes; a flyer on blue paper advocating attendance at a continuing education seminar, “Selling Real Estate with Feng Shui,” and a message that I was wanted in the dean’s office.
Dorian is a small, obscure place, but even small ponds have big fish. I headed down the hallway toward the administrative offices. The university’s brick buildings are old and heavy with the accumulated aroma of particulate matter: dust and plaster for certain, asbestos probably, and old paper. The halls smell old and used except when you approach the dean’s suite. Here, the paint is brighter and everything smells like furniture polish and new carpets.
I once heard a full professor say that a dean had the education of a philosopher, the heart of an accountant, and the soul of a weasel. Joseph Ceppaglia was a slim, gray, academic weasel of the first order. He had a mop of salt-and-pepper hair, which he patted absently in moments of thought; a Douglas Fairbanks mustache; and every other month he tried to stop smoking through a variety of useless stratagems. He was slim and articulate, wily, and immensely pleased with himself.
He didn’t get up from behind the desk, just swiveled around to see me better. “Hey, Burke. What have you been up to?” I didn’t know it then, but it would be a question I’d hear asked more than once. The dean was chewing nicotine gum furiously and bending a paperclip back and forth.
And he had a plan. Which was how, the next day, I ended up in “officer country” waiting to meet the president.