A Karate Story

by Seamus O'Dowd

  When I got a chance I went over to the Scot, bowed, and told him that I liked his style. When he heard my accent he exclaimed ‘You’re Irish!’ I grinned and nodded, as he followed up with ‘Sure the Irish and Scots are all related. We’re practically family!’ He introduced himself as Jim Palmer, and we became firm friends that night, and have remained so ever since. I promised to come to Scotland to train with them when Kanazawa Sensei next visited, and I attended every visit by Kanazawa Sensei to Scotland after that.

  At training the following day, because it was an open seminar with people from different Shotokan organisations, Kanazawa Sensei wanted to demonstrate how different kata are performed by SKIF; and the differences in how he teaches the kata and how other groups perform them. He asked Murakami Sensei and me to perform kata alternately, starting with the basic Heian kata, and working up from there. At one point, Murakami Sensei turned to me and told me that he was lucky that I was there, or he would have had to do all the kata himself! It all went ok until we got to Gojushiho-Dai and Gojushiho-Sho. Murakami Sensei did Gojushiho-Dai first, so then I was to do Gojushiho-Sho. It is not a kata that I liked at the best of times, but for some reason I lost concentration in the middle of the kata and went into Gojoshiho-Dai. Then I became very nervous and struggled to remember the kata at all. I felt I made a right mess of it, and thought to myself that they would have been better off if Murakami Sensei had done all the kata by himself. I was annoyed with myself, but Kanazawa Sensei brushed my apologies aside with a smile and thanked me for helping demonstrate all the kata.

  For me the most important thing was that it was a great seminar and I made a lot of new friends, and that’s half the fun.

  23. KANAZAWA NO BO

  In 1998 a friend of one of my students came home from Australia to get married. He was a fellow karate-ka, so I invited him to come to our dojo to do some training.

  When he saw the Bo staffs at the dojo, he asked me if we did much with them. I told him that I had learned a Bo kata in Canada a few years earlier, and that we worked on it sometimes. He told me that he had also learned a Bo kata on a seminar some time previously, so we agreed to show each other the katas. After I performed Shushi-No-Kon, he showed me the kata he knew.

  It was a kata I had never seen before, but yet it seemed instantly familiar. I realised quickly that this was because it was much more like Shotokan than the Bo katas that I had seen previously. When I asked him where he learned it, he said he learned it from someone who learned it from someone, who learned it from … well, you get the idea. He didn’t know the full history, but he had heard that it had come at some point from a Japanese instructor who had lived in the UK around the late 1960s. But he didn’t even know the name of the kata. I got him to show me the kata a few more times, and by the time we finished I was able to perform it on my own.

  I was intrigued. I kept working on the kata, practising it and trying to get a feel for it. In the meantime, I also tried to research its background. I was convinced just from the movements and the feel of the kata that it was created by a Shotokan Sensei.

  I tried to find out who the UK instructor was, and when he might have learned the kata. I knew already that Kanazawa Sensei had lived in the UK for a while, and also that he had studied different weapons. I started to read old interviews with him, and found one where he mentioned working with the Bo quite extensively – and came to the conclusion that the kata I had learned may have originated with my own sensei!

  I continued to work on the kata, and taught it to my students, but it was some time before I got to ask Kanazawa Sensei about it. The opportunity arose a few years later when I was in Scotland at a seminar with him, hosted by Sensei Jim Palmer. We were having lunch at the home of one of the instructors after training one morning, and a discussion arose about training with weapons. Someone asked Kanazawa Sensei if he had ever trained with weapons and, of course, he said he had done a lot many years ago, but didn’t really have the time to do it anymore. At this point I plucked up my courage and asked him if he had ever created a Bo kata. He said that he had, but it was a long time ago. I asked him if I could show him something, and he agreed.

  We didn’t have a Bo staff, but there was a long hard cardboard tube that I could use. We all went outside – a few Scottish instructors, Kanazawa Sensei, and me with a cardboard tube. I demonstrated the kata, and Kanazawa Sensei’s jaw dropped. I had never seen him look stunned before. ‘This … this is my kata!’ he exclaimed. ‘I have not seen this for twenty-five years! Where did you learn this?’ I told him how I had learned it, and that I had deduced that it must have been his kata. He requested I do it a few more times, and made some corrections as we did so. Apparently, I had either remembered it wrong, or someone had made some changes along the way before it got to me.

  As we went back to the dojo for the afternoon training session, I asked him what the name of the kata was. He told me that he couldn’t remember, so I suggested that we should name it after him. So it was decided, and became ‘Kanazawa No Bo’. For the next couple of years, each time I saw Kanazawa Sensei, he would ask me to perform the kata for him again. He would give me one or two corrections and I would work on it again until the next time I saw him.

  Then Kanazawa Sensei surprised me. He told me that he wanted me to teach the kata to Nobuaki Sensei. He explained that they were both always travelling and did not get to spend time together, so maybe I would get to spend some time teaching his son. This was an honour for me, but it was not such a simple task to complete. I did not get to see Nobuaki Sensei for some time, and when I did there was no time for us to train together with the Bo.

  The next time I saw Kanazawa Sensei, he asked me if I had taught the kata to his son. I explained that I hadn’t had the chance to do it yet. A few months later it was the same story, so I decided to do something about it. I got a camcorder and recorded the kata slowly and at normal speed from a couple of different angles, and put this onto a DVD, which I gave to Nobuaki Sensei.

  A few months later I was in Scotland again with Kanazawa Sensei, hosted once again by Sensei Jim Palmer. We were enjoying a lovely day out on a boat cruise around Loch Lomond, and he asked me again about teaching the Bo kata to Nobuaki Sensei, so I told him what I had done. He was very pleased with this solution. As we talked, he seemed to like the idea of the DVD very much. Then he suggested that maybe I could make a proper DVD of his Bo teachings. I couldn’t believe what he was suggesting, but I promised to do whatever I could to help him.

  By this time, I was not only doing the first kata that I had initially learned, but I was also now studying the second version of the kata, which had been developed after the first. Because the first kata (now more correctly called ‘Kanazawa No Bo Dai’) is very dynamic and athletic, the second kata (‘Kanazawa No Bo Sho’) was developed to suit older or less athletic karate-ka. Kanazawa Sensei strongly believes that karate is for everyone, so it made sense that his Bo kata should have a version for both young and old, or for the athletic and not so athletic.

  SKIF Headquarters requested that I put a contract in place for the production of the DVD, and provide a draft outline of what would be on the DVD. It took time, but eventually, nearly ten years after I initially learned the kata, I had a formal business contract to do the DVD jointly with Kanazawa Sensei.

  24. GEORGE

  Shortly after I opened my dojo, a man named George (not his real name) brought his young son to the beginners’ class. George used to sit at the back of the class and watch while his son trained. After a few weeks of this, George came to me after class one evening. He told me that he used to do karate himself, but became disillusioned and quit. He said that he had had no interest in returning to training when his son started, but after watching the classes with me, he felt that he would like to start again.

  It emerged that George had trained in Shotokan, but with a different organisation. He had attempted for Shodan twice, but one time the grading was cancelled, and the second time he failed. He ha
d quit after this. I told him that he could come and train with us, and there would be no pressure to grade if he didn’t want to.

  When he started training, I could see straight away why he had not passed his black belt test. His karate was all raw strength, with his shoulders up, and with no real technical ability to speak of. He was strong, but also tense, awkward and rough, with no understanding of correct technique and how to generate power other than with his strength. I set about teaching him our syllabus, and working on refining his karate. Old habits are difficult to change, so even though he tried hard, it took a long time to get him to learn to relax and focus on technique a little more.

  Persistence from both of us paid off though, and little over a year after he started with me, George tested for, and passed, his black belt. I was very happy for him, and everyone could see that this was something that he had felt he had to do. He had considered it unfinished business. He felt he had let himself down by quitting so close to his original goal, and there was always a nagging thought of what might have been. It was like a persistent wound, which finally healed when he passed his grade.

  George was generally an affable person, and was quite popular in the dojo. His karate was still mostly about raw power and drills up and down the dojo at full speed, but he was learning the syllabus bit by bit. The only problem was that I used to get feedback from students if he ever taught a class in my absence that he would say things like ‘Don’t worry about getting it right, just go faster and do it lots of times.’ I used to smile and accepted that this was part of who he was, and that it was ok: but it was not the philosophy that I wanted people to follow in my dojo, so I tended to limit the number of classes that he taught during that time. His younger son also took up karate when he turned seven, so now father and two sons were regulars in the dojo. This was a nice aspect of our dojo – quite a few parents and children trained together.

  After another couple of years of hard training George was good enough to test for 2nd Dan. When he passed that grading, he gave me a gift of a book, and he wrote in it about how much he appreciated everything that I had done for him. His karate was improving steadily, and he certainly was a good 2nd Dan standard.

  The only real issue was that every year in the summer George and his sons would stop training for about six weeks. When they came back in September George would be fine, but the boys were young and didn’t have the same retention as their father, so they would have forgotten a lot of stuff. This was frustrating for me as an instructor, and it made it very difficult to get them ready for grading examinations that were often scheduled for mid October.

  At the beginning of October one year after George and the boys were only back at training for about four weeks, I was assessing students for the grading examination to be held two weeks later. Quite a few students had not been training as regularly as they should have, and were not ready to grade. I explained this to each of them, and pointed out what aspects of the syllabus they needed to work on for next time. Most of the students accepted what I was saying, but I could see immediately that George was furious that I was not allowing his sons to grade. He stormed out of the dojo with the boys as soon as I finished the class.

  I didn’t see or hear from him again for a few weeks, and one or two of the other students who were not allowed to grade also stopped coming to the dojo. Then, about six weeks later, he arrived at the dojo in the middle of the class I was teaching and said he wanted to talk to me. When we sat down, his first words were ‘I’m going into business for myself.’ An interesting way to put it, I thought, as I had never considered the karate dojo to be a ‘business’.

  ‘Good for you,’ I replied cheerfully. ‘I think that will make a big difference to your karate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He sounded taken aback.

  ‘Well,’ I reasoned calmly, ‘when you are responsible for other students, and you have to be able to teach the syllabus, it will make you have to learn it in detail. I certainly found that my understanding of the syllabus, and of karate in general, improved a lot when I started teaching.’ I shook his hand, and he left. I knew our friendship was over from the day he stormed out of the dojo, but I was sad about how sour it had become over a simple grading.

  He opened his dojo a couple of miles away from mine. Some of my students told me that he contacted them directly and invited them to leave me and go to train with him. He apparently promised that students would grade more quickly if they trained with him. One or two students did leave, but most declined his offer.

  About a year and a half later, I saw three of my former brown belt students on a training seminar with Nobuaki Sensei. One of them had been refused permission to grade for second brown belt the same time as George’s sons were not allowed to grade. When I looked at her kata during training, I could see that it had not improved at all from the day she stopped training with me – yet here she was, testing for black belt. Two other former students were also testing for black belt, and again I could tell they were not ready. I was surprised that they were all being put forward to test.

  Unfortunately, all three of them failed. This had a devastating effect on the woman; it shattered her self-confidence and she quit karate completely. I felt very sorry for her, but the responsibility had to lie with her instructor. Too many instructors, in my opinion, want the glory of being a sensei but don’t want the responsibility that goes with it. Sensei means teacher, but it has deeper connotations than that. The literal meaning of the word refers to someone more experienced who ‘has gone before’, i.e. farther down the path, or a guide. A guide doesn’t have students; a guide has followers. So although we refer to students of karate, they are followers of their sensei. Therefore, as sensei, we have responsibility for all aspects of our students’ development, and we must strive to make sure that their time in karate has a positive impact on their lives rather than a negative one.

  To be fair to the other two students who failed that day, they both came back the following year much better prepared and passed their grading then. I was glad for them.

  George and his family are no longer involved in karate, and I still think that it is a pity that he didn’t recognise that I was acting in the best interests of his children when I wouldn’t let them test for a grade for which they were not ready. Had he acted differently, I can’t help but think that we would all have been better off in the long run.

  25. BUCKET LIST

  We often talk about the things that we would love to do but haven’t got around to doing yet. There is usually a list of things we would like to achieve before we die, often referred to as a bucket list; that is, things we want to do before we kick the bucket. I decided a long time ago that I was going to try to go and do the things I wanted to do, and achieve what I wanted to achieve, rather than sitting back and just talking about doing them, and later regretting not getting around to them. Specifically, there were certain instructors that I wanted to train with, so when opportunities arose to meet them, I grasped the chances without hesitation.

  In 1999 my work took me to San Francisco. I specifically took a detour to Los Angeles for a couple of days on the way home because I wanted to train with Nishiyama Sensei, who was a legend of Shotokan Karate. He had been a senior at the JKA when Kanazawa Sensei was a student there in his early years. Unfortunately for me, Nishiyama Sensei was touring at the time I was there, so I didn’t get to see him. I did train at his dojo though, and enjoyed it very much. The people there told me I should come back another time to meet the man himself.

  The following year I decided that rather than waiting for another opportunity I would create the opportunity for myself. I had left my job as an IT and project management consultant for a multinational company, and had established a small consultancy business with my wife. My skills were in demand, so I was able to work on client sites and earn enough money to get the business off the ground. Being my own boss, and earning more money, I had a little more freedom than before, so I decided to visit Nishi
yama Sensei’s dojo again.

  I got a special offer on the flights, so I arranged to go to Los Angeles for a few days. I contacted Nishiyama Sensei’s dojo in advance and they confirmed to me that he would be there on the dates that I proposed to travel, so I booked the flights and hotel and made the trip.

  When I arrived at the dojo for a morning class, some of the students remembered me from the previous year and welcomed me. I was introduced to Nishiyama Sensei. He was shorter than I expected, but he held himself with the proud and determined air of a samurai. At seventy-two, the inevitable effects of age and a lifetime of smoking were starting to show. Although he may have moved slightly slower than the younger students, he had a sparkle in his eyes and a sharp mind that left everyone in no doubt that he was a great karate master.

  The class itself was very technical, focusing on detailed concepts of hip vibration to generate power. He discussed different types of kiai and had us practise those, and then we worked on kata also. Nishiyama Sensei had an easy-going manner throughout the class, frequently making jokes as he explained what he wanted from the students. After the class Nishiyama Sensei introduced me to Sensei Avi Rokah, one of his most senior students, and suggested that I should also go and train at his dojo in Beverly Hills that evening. He also introduced me to Sensei James Yabe, who had been training in the class with us.