A Karate Story Read online

  After the first minute the referee told us we had to fight or he would give us a warning. Our sparring became a bit more tactical, but we were not fully committed. We remained scoreless. Then, with thirty seconds to go, and with pressure mounting, we both exchanged a series of clumsy, tit-for-tat techniques. As we separated, the referee gave the thirty-second warning. We both thought he said ‘Yame’, the command to stop, and we stopped fighting. The referee realised this and impatiently shouted at us to keep fighting. I reacted while my opponent was still processing this information, stepped in and launched my favourite technique – jodan mawashi-geri (roundhouse kick to the head). He was still off guard and I caught him perfectly. The referee knew that it should have been a full point, but, even though my score was perfectly legitimate, he may have felt partly responsible because we had thought he had told us to stop fighting, so he only awarded me a half point.

  On the restart, I tried keeping out of the way of my opponent, who threw an array of wild techniques as he tried to score. As I danced out of his way, I heard Sensei Ray roar at me. ‘FIGHT!’ he commanded. ‘Win or lose, keep fighting!’ I stopped the evasive tactics and held my ground. I tried to time him coming in, but we were back to the stalemate from before. Neither of us got a clean score: time ran out, I had won the fight, and our team were declared the winners. We were the senior men’s team kumite national champions.

  My first success in a kata competition as a black belt was at a relatively small inter-club competition. I was still Shodan, but Sensei Ray was not competing, and neither were the other most experienced competitors. Even Adrian didn’t compete. Before we even started Sensei Ray found me and gave his usual preparation speech. He told me that I should win the event outright. I was surprised, but he gave me confidence, and confidence is crucial in competitions. Before I knew it I was in the final, and my kata, Nijushiho, was enough to win the event.

  Later that year I was told that I had not made the national team for the European Championships. I was more than a little disappointed but, to be fair, I had not been a black belt for very long, and had not attended very many squad training sessions. But the reason I was disappointed was because Adrian, my friend and rival, was selected for the men’s kata team. Sensei Ray, Martin O’Keeffe and Adrian made up the team that went on to become European champions. Sensei Ray said that Adrian was selected over me because he was the same build as the other two (I was taller and thinner), but in my heart I knew that he was training more than me and he deserved his place on the team.

  I had been in University since 1988, so there were times when my training had to take a back seat to focus on studies and exams. It was still more frequent than my parents would have liked, and became a cause of some friction at home. I used to think it was ironic that my mother strongly encouraged me to start karate, and now wanted me to stop, or at least to do it less than I was.

  Before I finished college I had been offered my dream job with a major Japanese multinational. I was to go to Japan for two years as a software engineer. I couldn’t believe my luck. In the interview process I remember being asked by one of my Japanese interviewers, ‘Do you want to live in Japan?’ My reply was so emphatic and positive that he just smiled and had no more questions for me, although other candidates that day told me that he had given them a grilling. Unfortunately the job fell through at the last minute so I never got to go and work for that company, and I never got to live in Japan.

  After graduation, jobs were few and far between. I took some temporary work where I could get it and eventually, more than six months after graduating, I got a permanent job as a computer programmer for an airline at Dublin Airport. This meant I had to move nearly 200 miles from home. Once I settled into my new life in the capital, and my new job, I started to look for a new dojo to join. I travelled to Bandon every couple of weeks and visited the dojo as often as I could, but I needed somewhere more convenient to train midweek. Such a simple notion became a much bigger problem than I thought it would.

  The first issue I encountered was the fact there were no longer any clubs in Dublin affiliated to our organisation. There had been a split a few years previously, and the former chief instructor (who had given me my first double grading) and the guys that I had fought with on the team when I was a brown belt were now all part of a different organisation, and I didn’t have contact details for them anyway.

  The other problem was that I was used to a particular type and standard of training, and I found it very difficult to find one that was comparable. They say that you don’t know what you have until it is gone; I realised quite quickly just how special the dojo in Bandon was. In the first year of my time in Dublin, I must have tried at least six different karate clubs. None of them felt right, and I invariably ended up moving on after a short time.

  Surprisingly, the club that I ended up staying at for the longest was not even a Shotokan club. It was a Wado Ryu club that trained in the sports facility beside the airport. When I started with them, I offered to wear a white belt, because I was not a black belt in their style. The instructor thought about it for a minute, then suggested that I should wear a brown belt until I was comfortable with their system, when he would arrange for me to test for black belt. I trained with them as a brown belt for a couple of months, and then one day I forgot my brown belt. The black belt was the only belt in my bag, so I put it on. The instructor looked at me and nodded without saying anything, so I just wore my black belt from then on.

  The training was not bad, but it was different from what I was used to in Shotokan. I found the high stances and short back stance particularly difficult to get used to. I still made my pilgrimage to Bandon every few weeks, but it became confusing to train in two different styles at the same time. I came to the conclusion that it was counterproductive, and eventually I stopped going to the Wado Ryu club. For a few years, my training became nomadic. I would train every two or three weeks at a dojo, and practise at home in between. I never stopped, but I became uninspired by the lack of company and the drive you experience from people who push you and encourage you. I felt I had lost my way a little, but didn’t know what to do about it.

  I was sharing a house in Dublin and I kept a bookcase with my collection of karate books in the sitting room. One of my housemates started looking at the karate books, and expressed an interest in learning karate. When she asked me to recommend a karate club, I found that I could not really endorse any of the clubs that I had trained in, so I didn’t know what to do. In the end I asked Sensei Ray for advice. We chatted about my infrequent training patterns, and how I felt a sense of wilderness. I was lost, I couldn’t help my friend, and I couldn’t help myself. ‘Open a dojo,’ was his immediate response.

  ‘I can’t!’ I protested. ‘I’m only a Shodan!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told me. ‘You have been Shodan for five years now. It will be good for you to have a focus for your training again, and to start teaching others. Open a dojo, and I will help you prepare to test for Nidan next year.’

  I had a lot to think about. It was both exciting and daunting. Could I really open a dojo and teach others? Would anyone want to learn from me? Would I have anything to teach them? Could I be called ‘Sensei’? Surely I was too young to be taken seriously as an instructor? With plenty of doubts in my mind, but with assurances from Sensei Ray that he would support me, I decided to go for it.

  9. SHIN-DO-KAN

  I started out small, just teaching two girls at my house. We pushed the furniture in the sitting room out of the way as our warm-up, and then trained as best we could within the limited space. It worked ok, but I knew it was not ideal, so I started looking for a hall that we could rent a couple of evenings per week.

  I didn’t have a car so it had to be somewhere reasonably close, and it had to be affordable too. After a couple of weeks of searching I found a room in St Kevin’s Football Club, in Whitehall on the northside of Dublin. Their main sports hall was not available (or affordable), but the
y had a smaller room upstairs that was reasonably priced and available. The floor had PVC tiles, which was not ideal, but I decided to take it. The next step was to get some leaflets printed and deliver them around the neighbourhood. I hand-delivered over a thousand leaflets, and hoped for the best.

  The first class was scheduled for 10 October 1994. The two girls I had been teaching were both going to be at the dojo on the opening night, but I was worried about whether anyone else would show up. I convinced a friend at work to come along as well, and I asked my younger brother Enda if he would make a trip from Cork for the evening. He had earned his Shodan but had been out of training due to his college commitments. He agreed to take a train to Dublin and come to the class for the first night, as a show of support.

  Three new students also showed up that night, so I had a total of seven students on the opening night. It was far from earth-shattering, though it did give me a boost. A new chapter in my karate training had begun. I was now the club instructor of the only SKIF dojo in Dublin, which I had named Whitehall Karate Club. Enda returned to Cork after that first night but student numbers grew over the next few weeks, and soon I had about fifteen students training regularly. In a stroke of luck, my old friend Shane was now also working in Dublin. He came along to help me with the dojo, and we picked up our friendship where we had left off a few years previously in Bandon.

  A few weeks after I opened the dojo I received a phone call that was to prove significant to the people at each end of the line. ‘Hello Seamus, my name is Garry Cashman. You probably don’t remember me, but I used to train in the karate club in Midleton.’ Of course I remembered him. Garry was tall and stood out in a crowd. He was funny, popular, and was good friends with Adrian. He would often be heard telling a joke or making a quip in the changing rooms at seminars or competitions: he was always that one person who everyone liked to be around. Garry had also uprooted and moved to Dublin. He experienced a similar struggle around the city as he tried to find a dojo. Like me, he had tried to train independently of a club but missed the camaraderie of a dojo. He had heard that I was opening one, and was keen to have somewhere to train regularly.

  I was delighted to invite him to come and join our little dojo, and that was the start of a strong friendship based on a shared passion for karate, which has lasted ever since. It was a good thing for me that Garry came to train with us because shortly afterwards, Shane broke his ankle (playing golf, of all things!) and had to stop karate. I still miss training with him. He was a great karate-ka.

  Garry and I used to meet up regularly for extra training together, and we worked hard to get our karate standard to where we felt it should be. We took the responsibility of teaching others seriously. I consider the five years Garry and I ran the dojo together to be my second ‘golden age’ of training. At the time I was encouraged by Sensei Ray, and by the organisation, to take the Nidan (2nd Dan) examination as soon as possible after opening the dojo. Ever the diligent student, I began working on my syllabus with the aim of testing in April 1995. I confess that I took the easy option in selecting a kata for the examination, because I chose to do Nijushiho. In our syllabus, Nijushiho is actually a Sandan (3rd Dan) kata, but I knew it better than any of the ones prescribed for Nidan because I had been doing it in competitions for several years.

  I took the Nidan examination under Kanazawa Sensei in April as planned. Some of the senior members of the organisation had formally introduced me to Kanazawa Sensei during the seminar, and explained to him that I had opened an SKIF dojo in Dublin – the first since the split by the previous chief instructor. I partook in my first T’ai Chi classes with him, which gave him an opportunity to get to know me better. With only five of us, the classes were intimate, which afforded us a lot of individual attention.

  Kanazawa Sensei seemed to be genuinely pleased that SKIF had a presence in Dublin again, and so he took a personal interest in me. I asked him if he would give me a Japanese name for my dojo and, after thinking about it for a minute, he named it ‘Shin-Do-Kan’. He explained that the name meant ‘The Club of the Way of Nature’, because our karate must be natural.

  I was very nervous for the grading, and caught up in the rush of the past few months. Between concentrating on my students at the new dojo and the hurried preparations to grade, I felt quite ill-prepared. I don’t think it was the best grading I have ever done. When the results were announced and Kanazawa Sensei told me I had passed, I couldn’t help wondering if I had passed because I had opened a dojo in Dublin or because I deserved to pass. There was certainly a nagging doubt, so I committed myself to train even harder, to try to deserve the grade. Garry passed his Nidan examination six months later, and the extra time he had to prepare meant that he did an excellent grading, and deserved his grade without a doubt.

  After all the pressure subsided it was time to turn our attention to our students. We held our first gradings for the students shortly after. Sensei Ray came to teach and conduct the examinations. He said he was impressed with all the students, and Garry and I were relieved that we seemed to be on the right track.

  More and more people were joining the dojo, and there was a great atmosphere every night at training. Kanazawa Sensei talks frequently about the importance of harmony at many levels. This was something that Garry and I strived for in the dojo, so we outlined some house rules, which we asked students to abide by. We asked for harmony between the students and instructors; everyone should work together to improve each other’s standards; no aggression towards anyone in the dojo; and no-one was to look down on anyone else. Everyone was welcome to come and train. Our number one request was to always train with diligence.

  10. AIKIDO & BACK TO COLLEGE

  I poured all of my efforts into teaching the ever-expanding classes, which soon began to take a toll on my own training. I missed being a student and not having responsibilities! In college I had done a couple of Aikido classes, just for fun, so I found an Aikido club with a good reputation in Dublin and joined it to refocus my training.

  The instructor there was an interesting guy. He had been a black belt for twenty years but had never tested beyond Shodan, as he felt it was not necessary. He explained to me that as a black belt he could train in the advanced classes on any seminar, and he could teach, so he didn’t see any point in getting higher Dan grades. He had very little ego and an attitude towards the grading system unlike anything I had encountered previously. He didn’t facilitate gradings with his students. Everyone wore white belts until he decided that they should be black belts, and that was it. Having come from a culture of different coloured belts with the advantage of measurable and visible progress, but also with the disadvantage of the risk of developing egos, I found this simpler system fascinating.

  At first it felt a little strange putting on a white belt, but it was also liberating. Once a week I would take off my black belt, and in doing so, removed the responsibility of teaching and setting an example for my students. I replaced the black belt with a simple white belt for Aikido class. There was no pressure, and no expectation or responsibility when I walked into that class. I was able to just be a beginner and train and learn, and no-one expected me to know things instantly. Most of them didn’t even know that I did karate!

  I really enjoyed the training, as the emphasis was very different to that in karate. I learned a lot of locks and holds, and throws and rolls. But because of my background in karate, I also learned a lot of more advanced principles, which other beginners would have missed, or not learned as quickly. It was in these classes that I learned about balance, and how to break balance; I learned about the concept of switching (kaishi); I learned about absorbing the energy of an attack; and I learned about using an attack against the attacker. These concepts are fundamental in Aikido and are taught to everyone as they begin to learn the art. These skills are often considered ‘advanced’ in karate classes. Because the emphasis and progression of techniques is different in Aikido, I was afforded the opportunity to learn and
practise these concepts more often than I would in any karate class, where they were used as a secondary tool to assist our core training. It was all very interesting, and I brought a lot of it back to our karate classes, especially for the higher grades.

  I ended up only staying in Aikido for a few months, which is a pity. Even now, I have promised myself to return at some point. However, an opportunity came up that I couldn’t afford to miss. I was offered a position on a certificate course in University College Dublin for Injury Management & Fitness in Sport, from the faculty of Sports Medicine. There were classes on one night per week, plus Saturday mornings, and the evening classes clashed with the Aikido. It was a one-year course and covered a wide variety of modules. From warming up and stretching, to strength training, fitness training, biomechanics and physiology there was a lot of stuff that was directly relevant to our training. These classes were supplemented by modules for first aid, sports massage and the impact of drugs in sport, which were also very interesting.

  One of the fascinating aspects of the course was the variety of different experiences that people had, depending on their sporting background. For example, in the module on warming up and stretching, many of the people from ball sports were seriously lacking in this area, whereas the couple of us from a martial arts background were remarkably comfortable with what was being taught because we already followed all the principles involved in our standard warm-ups. Only the person from a gymnastics background had better knowledge on stretching than we did! This diversity lead to some interesting debates both during and after lectures; our banter eventually leading to lasting friendships.