A Karate Story Read online

  I found myself enjoying my subjects and utilising my newfound skills in the dojo. The coursework never felt laboured and was thoroughly enjoyable. Even exam time was stress free! I was at least as proud to graduate after a year as I had been to graduate from my degree course a few years earlier. And this course benefitted my health, broadened my understanding of the human body, and my students could benefit from the knowledge. It was a win-win.

  11. T’AI CHI

  I began to study T’ai Chi in earnest after my initial classes with Kanazawa Sensei in 1995. Intimate classes with three or four students took place in a meeting room at his hotel. It was a challenge from the start, but I was willing to learn and study anything that could benefit my karate, so I lapped it up. Kanazawa Sensei explained that he started to study T’ai Chi to help improve his karate, and that this was why he still practised it more than fifty years later. He confided in me that he didn’t really like T’ai Chi at first, and that it took him about two years before he started to get a feel for it and actually enjoy it.

  As usual, I was different. Although I am sure it took me a lot longer than two years to get a feel for it, I enjoyed it from the first class. Of course I was trying to relate the movements to what I knew; and what I knew was to try to put strength and focus, or kime, into every technique. I found it ironic that after listening to Sensei Ray shouting ‘Stronger, Seamus!’ at me for years, I now had Kanazawa Sensei saying ‘Softer!’. Even now my karate is too soft and my T’ai Chi is still too strong! The breathing exercises were simple enough to understand, but learning the movements of the form took about two years. Of course it was difficult because we would only have maybe two classes twice a year at that time, but it still seemed like slow progress.

  I was quite surprised when Kanazawa Sensei told me that I was ready to take the first examination in T’ai Chi in 1999, four years after I started studying the art. He explained that there are only six levels in the T’ai Chi ranking system, with the first being equivalent to Shodan (first black belt) in karate. By this stage, Garry and a few of my students had joined me, so now there were maybe seven or eight people in the classes.

  The test was as nerve-racking as any karate grading. Although I was only required to perform the Yang-style short form, it felt like it went on forever. In T’ai Chi, the movement must be slow, smooth, balanced and continuous. This is difficult enough at the best of times, but under the pressure of an examination, it seemed impossible. My movement felt jerky and wobbly, and I was quite unhappy about it. Kanazawa Sensei, however, told me afterwards that he understood about the pressure in the examination, and made allowances for the grading. Then he told me that I had passed. I wasn’t sure whether to be delighted, relieved or just disappointed in my performance.

  I started teaching a little T’ai Chi to my own karate students after that; the regular practice helped me to smooth my movements. After I passed the second examination with Kanazawa Sensei, I certainly felt that I was progressing. I then began teaching formal T’ai Chi classes to both karate and non-karate students.

  There were several incidents during these cosy classes that helped me get to know Kanazawa Sensei as a person, and not just as an awe-inspiring martial artist. I remember realising Kanazawa Sensei actually had a great sense of humour. When he first visited my dojo in Dublin, I gave him a gift of a t-shirt with our club logo on it. A couple of days later we were in Cork for his biannual expedition of karate and T’ai Chi seminars. When Kanazawa Sensei came into the room for T’ai Chi, he had his tracksuit on, and the jacket zipped right up, as though he was cold. As we lined up and he faced us, he dramatically unzipped his tracksuit top and pulled it off to reveal the t-shirt I had given him. ‘I’m from Dublin!’ he declared with a grin. Over the following years I got to do a lot more T’ai Chi classes with Kanazawa Sensei when I started travelling to his seminars in different countries. The USA, Canada and Scotland, in particular, organised for him to teach T’ai Chi regularly, and I was delighted to tag along in those classes.

  I took the third T’ai Chi examination in Ireland, but I did the fourth and fifth ones in the USA as they had stopped holding T’ai Chi classes in Ireland by then. It was a real pity: I know a few of my students had shown an interest in studying it, and some had gone on to take their first examination. Only Garry and I kept it up after they stopped the classes in Ireland. In the USA the students were so keen to learn that they organised classes with Kanazawa Sensei on the Friday evening, and then on both Saturday and Sunday morning a group of us would meet in the car park before breakfast and spend an hour or more practising. Kanazawa Sensei’s eldest son, Nobuaki Sensei, joined us from time to time. He was a world champion several times over and a fantastic instructor with a natural talent for the art, but in these sessions we all just trained along together. Several of the instructors from the USA, Canada and Scotland also graded in T’ai Chi, and now there is a strong group in each of these countries, teaching Kanazawa Sensei’s T’ai Chi to others.

  12. TORONTO

  In 1995 I began working for an American IT company. The money was better, and I was finally able to afford my first car. This made it a lot easier to get to and from the dojo and I was delighted that I no longer had to wait around for the unpredictable Irish public transport.

  At the new company, I had email and access to the internet for the first time. I joined a martial arts chat group called ‘The CyberDojo’, which included a great group of people with varying levels of experience. Everyone was willing to share their knowledge, and it was very useful to an inexperienced karate-ka like me, with only ten years of training. A few months later I was asked to travel to Toronto for a few weeks on a work assignment. I panicked a little at first, worried about how my dojo would run if I was gone for so long, but I spoke to Garry and he assured me that he would be able to look after the classes. It was only then that I started to look forward to the trip. I hadn’t travelled very much before then, but I liked the idea of it.

  I knew that Sandy, one of the ladies in the Toronto office, practised karate, so I contacted her and asked if I would be able to go training with her. She did Goju Ryu, a very different style to Shotokan, but I was just keen to train and learn. She said she would organise something, so I planned to bring my karate-gi with me. Then I had the idea of seeing if anyone on the CyberDojo was based in Toronto, with a view to meeting up and training. To my surprise, a couple of people responded to my query, and we made provisional plans to meet up. I also received contact details of the local SKIF people in Toronto, so between them all I was not going to be short of training while I was there.

  Toronto is a beautiful city, but in February it is cold: bitterly cold. While I was there it was regularly minus thirty degrees with the wind chill, and it was common for 30 cm (12 inches) or more of snow to fall overnight. I was worried about how I would cope with training. I was used to training in cold halls with no heating, but not that sort of cold! I contacted one of the guys from the CyberDojo, Maurice Richard Libby. We arranged to see each other during the week, when he would take me to a friend’s dojo.

  Maurice was a revelation. For the first time, I met up with people from another country through karate, and realised that our shared passion for the art enabled us to make friends all over the world. But Maurice also made me realise how lucky I was. When we met up first we talked about our backgrounds. He knew that I was a member of SKIF, but he hadn’t realised that I had trained and graded directly with Kanazawa Sensei. By this time I had probably trained on over fifteen different seminars with Kanazawa Sensei, with often four or more classes per seminar. I had taken grading examinations with him seven times already, including both my Dan grades. Maurice stated that he would ‘give his right arm’ just to train with Kanazawa Sensei once, not to mention actually testing with him. Until then, I had always taken training and testing with Kanazawa Sensei for granted. Over the following years, the more I travelled the more I realised that there were many, many karate students around the world who wo
uld love to get to train with Kanazawa Sensei as regularly as I did.

  Maurice took me to meet Sensei Michael Walsh at his full-time dojo, which I was relieved to find had heating, as did all the other dojos I visited. In fact, they told me that the temperature was a bigger problem in the summer, when it became too hot and they needed air-conditioning to cool down! I had a wonderful time training with these karate-ka throughout my visit. Sensei Walsh was very kind to me from the beginning, which may have been partly because he was originally Irish, even though he grew up in Newcastle, England, and had lived in Toronto for many years. They taught Shotokan karate, but their head instructor also travelled to Okinawa regularly to study other styles of karate and also kobudo (weapon arts). They practised Bo, Tonfa and Sai that I saw, but may have done more as well.

  Sensei Walsh was good friends with Maurice, and he invited us both along to a banquet dinner one night. It was a Chinese banquet with twelve difference courses, and I had never experienced anything like it before. It was a celebration for Sensei Walsh and a couple of others, because they were being promoted to instructor status in T’ai Chi. I remember sitting at the meal and enjoying the company of my new friends, intrigued at the notion that two weeks earlier I hadn’t even met any of them, and now they were treating me like a lifelong friend. And it was not just Maurice and Michael either – all the others that were there were people that I had trained with in recent days and we had become friends too.

  I also trained with the guys from the SKIF dojo in Toronto, which was run by a Portuguese instructor named Antonio Terra. This was a very different set up from the full-time, professional dojo run by Sensei Walsh. The SKIF dojo was run from a hall that they rented a couple of evenings per week, and they didn’t have very many students, and no fancy training equipment. But their passion for karate was unmistakable. I loved training with them because they taught the same syllabus that we did in SKIF in Ireland. I started to really understand the benefit of being part of an international organisation. I enjoyed training with them every bit as much as at the other dojo. For the five weeks I was in Toronto, I tried to get to each dojo at least twice per week.

  Sandy also organised for me to go to a training session with her Goju Ryu instructor, Sensei Scott Hogarth. When I was going there, I asked Sensei Walsh if I could borrow a white belt, because I felt I should not wear my black belt in a Goju Ryu class. He kindly gave me a gift of a white belt. Sensei Hogarth was an imposing figure but a real gentleman. When I offered to wear the white belt, he wouldn’t hear of it, because he had such respect for Kanazawa Sensei. I still have that same white belt, and I keep it in my bag in case I ever visit a dojo of a different style. I even sometimes wear it in my own classes to remind myself – and my students – that the colour of the belt around our waist is a lot less important than we like to think it is.

  I thoroughly enjoyed the training, and I even learned one of their basic kata – Gekisai Dai Ichi – which I continue to work on regularly. Although I had trained briefly in Wado Ryu, this was my first time training in a style that was very different to Shotokan, and I was surprised to find that there were more similarities than differences, and that the skills were easily transferable.

  Maurice also trained at a Uechi Ryu dojo and he brought me along one night to experience a different karate style. Again, it was a very interesting experience, but I was put with a junior instructor and the low grades because they felt I might not be able to keep up with the class, and therefore my learning was limited that evening. I was still delighted to get to experience even a little from this different style of karate, and all of these small experiences started to add up over time.

  One evening at the SKIF dojo, Sensei Terra told me there would be an SKIF tournament that weekend in Toronto, and that Dozono Sensei would be attending. Dozono Sensei was the chief instructor for SKIF in Canada, and I was eager to meet him. I readily agreed to go along to the tournament as a spectator. When I got there, the tournament was already under way. I stood near the entrance, enjoying watching the events in progress. After a few minutes, Sensei Terra spotted me from his position as a judge. He signalled to someone to take over from him, and came straight over to me, with his usual big grin on his face. After we chatted for a couple of minutes, he went to tell Dozono Sensei that I had arrived. He had apparently told Dozono Sensei about me beforehand. As soon as he heard that I was at the tournament he announced a lunch break and came with Sensei Terra to meet me.

  Dozono Sensei is a very small man – less than 5 ft (1.5 m) tall. But what he lacks in size, he makes up for in energy and passion. He is like a human dynamo on caffeine. He took me to the canteen in the sports hall and we talked over a light lunch. I liked him immediately. It was obvious that he had tremendous knowledge of karate, and he was close to the Kanazawa family. He asked me many questions about my training and experiences, and my opinion on different aspects of karate. We also talked about T’ai Chi, which Dozono Sensei had been doing for many years. He was pleased to hear that I had started studying T’ai Chi also, and encouraged me to continue my studies. Within thirty minutes of talking, I felt like we were old friends already.

  When we went to re-start the tournament after lunch, Dozono Sensei announced that the team kata would be the next event. Then he had a surprise for me as well as for everyone else. He introduced me to the crowd, and announced me as the honorary chief referee for the team kata event! Although I had taken part in many kata events, including team kata events, I had never refereed before. I was shocked, daunted and honoured all at the same time. However, the advantage from the competitors’ point of view was that I was independent and unbiased. I was able to judge each performance on merit alone, without any concern for which team was expected to win or any local ‘politics’.

  In the end, the teams that came first, second and third were the teams that I had scored to place in that order, so overall the other four judges had also agreed with me. I didn’t know until afterwards that Dozono Sensei’s daughter was part of the team that won. This explained why he was glad to be able to step away from the judging of the event and leave it to someone else.

  What pleased me most was that a couple of the competitors from different teams came up to me and told me that they thought I had scored all the teams accurately and fairly. It is always pleasing for the referees and judges to hear that the competitors felt they got it right. Karate competitions, especially kata, can be very subjective to judge, so it is quite common for competitors to feel that the judging was not fair – especially if they didn’t win. Subjectivity is always a contentious issue. For example, some judges favour power, some favour technique, and some favour athleticism. Therefore, what one judge considers a good kata, another judge may consider to be poor. This is why most tournaments use a system with up to seven judges giving scores, but the highest and lowest scores are eliminated, and only the middle five scores used. However, it still often leaves competitors feeling that they did not get the scores they deserved.

  Unfortunately Dozono Sensei was not teaching in Toronto during my visit, so I did not get to train with him on that occasion, but I vowed to do so at some point in the future. I was sorry to leave Canada, but I knew that I was armed with a lot of experiences and ideas to bring back to my students.

  A year later I returned to Toronto for another five weeks. This time I concentrated primarily on the Shotokan dojos of Sensei Walsh and Sensei Terra, because I set myself a specific goal for the trip: I wanted to study something meaningful, particularly in the area of weapons. Although I had done some weapons training with Sensei Walsh the previous year, I didn’t do enough of anything to really be able to make use of it when I returned to Ireland. So this time I spoke with Sensei Walsh when I arrived, and I asked him if he would help me to learn one full weapons kata while I was there. He agreed to teach me a Bo kata called ‘Shushi No Kon’.

  Every evening we did the regular training, and then Sensei Walsh would take me aside and work on the Bo kata with me. Then I
went back the apartment and used the handle of a sweeping brush to work on the moves I had learned, trying to get them into my head before the next class. Each night I learned a few more moves, and by the end of the five weeks I had a reasonable working knowledge of the kata.

  One night while I was training with Sensei Terra, he told me that I was invited to go to the city of Belleville, a couple of hours away, to train with Dozono Sensei.

  It snowed the day I was due to travel to Dozono Sensei, but the Canadians don’t let a little thing like several inches of snow deter them from getting around, so neither did I. My car had excellent winter tyres, and all the roads were being cleared and gritted anyway, so driving was not really a problem. I found the dojo, but I was early, so it was locked up and in darkness. I waited about thirty minutes, and then Dozono Sensei arrived, along with his daughter and son. Soon after that, all the other students started to arrive as well.

  We had a wonderful training session. Dozono Sensei had been very ill as a baby, and was sent to karate training at the age of four in order to make him strong. Although he always remained small, he certainly had strong spirit and I benefitted greatly from his excellent karate. He also demonstrated his T’ai Chi to me, and explained that he had some karate students who practised T’ai Chi with him, but that he had a lot of students who only did T’ai Chi. He agreed with Kanazawa Sensei’s philosophy that studying T’ai Chi was a great benefit to karate. I was very pleased to hear this, and to see his T’ai Chi, because even though I had been studying T’ai Chi with Kanazawa Sensei for about a year and a half, I was still struggling. Talking with Dozono Sensei and watching his graceful T’ai Chi helped make me determined to keep it up.

  After training Dozono Sensei invited me back to their house for dinner. He told me that his wife was looking forward to meeting me, so I was delighted to oblige. At home, Dozono Sensei showed me how he had converted one large room into a small dojo for himself. He grinned as he pointed out that he didn’t need much space for his dojo, so this room suited him just fine. We had a wonderful dinner together. At the end of the evening, they invited me to stay the night. They had the spare room prepared, which they told me was the room that Kanazawa Sensei always stayed in when he visited. As much as I would have liked to stay, I had to be at work early in the morning, so I had to decline the kind invitation and I headed back to Toronto.