Life in Japan - NinZine 3.0

Path to the Heart of the Flower (IV)

Shawn GrayDecember 7, 2012

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Finally, some free time to blog again!

In the last blog article I wrote on my early adventures in Japan, I related how I went to Iga in search of Hatsumi Sensei in October 1990, but didn’t manage to find him.

After not having found him, there was nothing else to do but return to Hiroshima and continue with my English teaching schedule. I also went back to my Karate studies, and continued pounding my fists into bloody hamburger against trees.

Back to Eikaiwa!

Back to Blood!

In December 1990, I had the opportunity to travel to the Chito Ryu Karate Hombu Dojo, located in Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. The Dojo was equipped with two bunkbeds, accompanying four people. When I arrived, there were two guys visiting from British Columbia, Canada, also staying there for training. (I wish I could remember their names after all this time, so that I could track them down. It would be fun to share stories again.) The Soke (Grandmaster) was 40 years old at the time. His father, the founder, had died in 1984. (From what I’d heard, an elder brother had been destined to continue the leadership of the style, but from what I heard, had been disabled in a car accident and therefore unable to continue with training. The younger son, next in line, had been in Tokyo pursuing medical studies, but was recalled to Kumamoto by his father to take over leadership of the lineage.) I stayed at the Dojo for two weeks, and greatly enjoyed the training. I was awed by the skill level of Chitose Sensei and his senior instructors. In the backyard behind the Dojo were two Makiwara punching posts. Wooden covers protected them from the rain, and on the covers were painted a Japanese character which is very familiar to my fellow Bujinkan practitioners. The character is pronounced “Nin“, and is the first character of the word “Ninja.” What was this character doing displayed so prominently at a Karate Dojo? Although sometimes understood in ninjaphile circles to mean “stealth,” the character is more widely used in more mainstream Japanese to mean “restraint,” “patience,” or “perseverance.” It was with these noble ideals in mind that we forged our minds and bodies in the daily training at Hombu Dojo. Kata, Kumite, and Makiwara training were all part of this. By perseverance and austerity in training the body and mind in the way of the Bushido ideal of the Samurai of old, we pushed our mental and physical limits beyond what we thought possible.

Makiwara with “Nin”

Aside from the training itself, there are a couple of memorable experiences from that time in Kumamoto. One was when Chitose Soke took the other visiting Canadians and myself out for a visit to Kumamoto Castle, one of the three premier castles in Japan. Scars from the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 (when Samurai warriors of Satsuma province rebelled against the imperial forces of the Meiji government) pock-marked the stone walls. It was an impressive edifice. Soke took us out for sushi afterwards.

Another memory was from one night when my two new Canadian friends took me out for a night on the town, Kumamoto style. I had never been out drinking in Canada before, let alone in Japan. I had no idea what kind of town I was in or where we were going. Before I knew it, we were sitting at a table ordering drinks, surrounded by very nicely-dressed ladies from the Philippines. I was from a farming town of 3,600 people on the Atlantic Coast of Canada. It took me a while to catch on that these ladies worked here. Anyway, we kept ordering and my two Canadian friends were on my left, engaging the ladies in deep conversation. Almost as if they’d met before. I felt a nudge on my right and turned to see what appeared to be two of the local Japanese bikers. They seemed friendly enough. The one next to me, I discovered through our broken conversation (my Japanese vocabulary was probably about 30 words at this point), did well in the local boxing scene. At least that’s what he told me, as he kept grinning and pointing to the biceps bulging out from under his cut-off denim vest.

I was starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable, but couldn’t really understand why. I started to think I should ask my friends when we were planning to leave. I turned to my left to ask my friend when we were going to get the check, and then felt a fist slam lightly into the right side of my face. My friend turned. “What?” “I think maybe we should go. This guy just hit me.” “Wait a second.” He turned to confer with the other friend. I turned to my right and smiled nervously at the two grinning Japanese guys wearing black leather. They looked like they were having fun. A moment later I turned to the friend on my left again. “What.” Again a punch from the right hit the side of my face. Harder this time. “Look man, our friend on my right here has now hit me in the face twice. We need to go, now.” “Ok.” My two friends stand up. Both of them were about fix-foot two. Sturdy Canadian farming boys. I turned to my right. The two Japanese dudes were gone.

We paid the bill and headed down the elevator. It came to a stop at ground level, and as we stepped out into the parking lot and the doors closed behind us, we found ourselves on the back side of a slowly-shrinking circle, on the perimeter of which were four or five tough-looking locals. The friend on my right made a quick beeline to the right, down an alley. I was close behind him. Closer than I normally am to other guys. We zig-zagged quickly through some alleys and eventually found ourselves with our hands on our knees, panting and out of breath, outside the Hombu Dojo “bunk room.” There were just two of us. The other Canadian friend was nowhere in sight. It was around 2am. We waited. We didn’t want to wake anyone and cause a scene. We waited some more.

After what seemed like at least 20 minutes, our friend loped quietly out of a side street and over to join us in the shadow of the Dojo roof. “Where were you?” “What took you so long?” “What happened!?” He told us that he didn’t see us bolt away right away, and before he knew it, he’d been surrounded. As the four or five tough guys closed in, one of them had pulled a knife. Our friend had a quick eye and saw the guy start to draw. He jumped on him and punched him to the ground, and then made a run for it. It took him a while to give them the slip and sneak back to join us at the Dojo without being found. We quietly slid into the Dojo dorm and into our bunks, glad to be alive. The next morning Soke asked us how our night had been. We played it cool and made like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He smiled.

The next day was the day he took us to Kumamoto Castle. On the way in the car he told us that he’d heard about what happened, saying he was glad we got through it ok, and apologized “for those with bad manners.”

Chitose Soke and 2 Canucks

Before I left Kumamoto to go back to Hiroshima for the New Year, 1991, Chitose Soke gave me some training advice for when I got back. Study also Kendo, for speed and timing, and also Judo, for throws and locks. I was a bit surprised to hear this. Martial arts masters aren’t always known for recommending that their students study other arts. Soke’s openness in this way really impressed me.

When I got back to Hiroshima, I asked around about Kendo training. There was a small Okonomiyaki bar in Hiroshima run by a young Japanese woman and her American (Seattle, I think it was) husband. He was very into Kendo, and was proud of doing it in Japan as a foreigner. He had photos of his shop and would brag about being a 3rd Dan, which I think he said was one of the highest ranks of any foreigner in Western Japan at the time. I have no real way of knowing whether that was true or not, but that’s what he’d say. He agreed to bring me along to his Kendo class and introduce me to his teacher, Fujiwara Sensei.

With Fujiwara Sensei

Lesson with Fujiwara Sensei

Fujiwara Sensei was a wonderful old (to a twenty-year old!) Japanese man who always had a huge smile floating across his face. He had a very soft, gentle manner and a kind way of speaking. For some reason he took a real liking to me and, in addition to selling me $1,300 of training gear for $300 and giving me a set of Hakama with both of our names embroidered in it, also refused to let me pay for lessons. This irritated the American guy who introduced me. Fujiwara Sensei had been his teacher for years, but he always had to pay for his lessons. I was unable to explain why Sensei seemed to like me so much. Maybe it was just because I was always so polite. I’d always greet him with the extra-polite, “O-kawari arimasen ka?” (“Has there been no change [in your health, etc.]?”) He’d always smile widely and say, “Hai, arimasen!” (“Yes, there hasn’t!”) My American friend was less than impressed. He’d pound the hell out of me when we were paired up in the Dojo and I would go home with headaches from getting hit on the head so hard repeatedly. I didn’t know what to do. I could not force Sensei to take the money. Out of desperation I would bring bags of fruit to the Dojo and force them on him. The Japanese students would laugh at this, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was never ranked in Kendo, although in addition to the regular Suburi and Randori training, Fujiwara Sensei also taught me 5 Bokuto Kata forms and 2 Shoto Kata forms. I seem to remember that these were for Shodan level, but my memory could be wrong on that.

Kenjutsu Lesson

As far as Karate ranking went, I went to Japan as a brown-belt. Kanao Sensei in Fukuyama wanted to promote me, but said that Chito Ryu had prohibited ranking of foreigners to Yudan grades (black belt grades) in Japan. Apparently some Japan-promoted foreigners had in the past gone back to their home countries and caused political problems by claiming their rank from Japan was worth more than a locally-given rank of the same degree. So I wasn’t promoted during my stay in Japan, but Kanao Sensei did teach me some very interesting Kata that made things interesting when I got back to Canada.

To be continued…

Path to the Heart of the Flower (III)

Shawn GraySeptember 18, 2012

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

In Part I and II of this adventure, I wrote about how I made my way to Japan in 1990 to teach English, pursue Karate training, and look for ninja grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi. I had arrived in Japan in early August, and now, finally, in October, after getting settled into my apartment, teaching schedule, and Karate training, it was time to set off in search of the ninja master.

Getting information about ninja masters wasn’t as easy in 1990 as it is today. There was no Internet, at least not as we know it now. I remember writing letters home that would take a week to ten days to get from Japan to Canada, and a ten-minute phone conversation to connect with family cost me $100. The only information I had to base my search on was contained in two books on the ninja that I had brought with me to Japan. Both of these books were authored by the same American student of the grandmaster, and both of them pointed to the Iga region as the home of the ninja clans. Eager to meet Hatsumi Sensei for myself, I made plans to visit the area, the city of Iga–Ueno, located in present-day Mie Prefecture.

To plan the trip from Hiroshima to Iga–Ueno, which took around 6 hours at the time (I assume travel times have shortened in the time since), I went to the tourist information centre in Peace Park in central Hiroshima, about 200 metres from where the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. (I had lived across the street from this location the first month I was in Japan, before relocating to the suburbs, and had been able to see ground zero out my kitchen window.) While the lovely ladies at the desk looked up train connection options, I watched televised footage of the carnage that was going on in Kuwait at the time. Saddam had torched the Kuwaiti oilfields, prompting George Bush Sr. to order the invasion that would drive him back to Baghdad.

Train information and tickets in hand, I was finally ready to make the trip. It was only a weekend trip, two days and one night, so I packed light, but made sure to take my two ninja books with me for reference. I got as early a start as possible, and made it to Iga–Ueno station early on the Saturday afternoon, images of the mystical ninja floating in my teenage head. Exiting the station, the reputation of the city as the home of the legendary shadow warriors was immediately apparent.

Iga-Ueno Station – October 1990

I couldn’t bring myself to pose behind the mask. I was looking for the real deal, not a propped up wooden cut-out for tourist photos.

From the station, I made my way to the ryokan inn where I would be spending the night, checked-in, and then excitedly made my way to the ninja museum, where I was sure to find the next clue in my search for Hatsumi Sensei. The ninja exhibit was fascinating, complete with purple-clad kunoichi female ninja agents, a creaking nightingale floor, hidden compartments, and trap doors. But I was really after information about the living master himself.

Proceeding into the museum proper, I slowly made my way past the many exotic artefacts, pausing to inspect them, unable to decipher the Japanese descriptions. Approaching one glass display case, I stopped in my tracks – I had seen something that I recognized. Underneath the glass was a partially unfurled makimono scroll. I had seen this very scroll before – there was a photo of it in one of the books I had brought with me! I excitedly ripped open my pack and quickly leafed through the book until I found the corresponding image. There was no mistake – the photo in the book was of exactly the same object I was looking at, as if I had taken it myself only moments before. This was a valuable clue in my search – it provided a link between what I had read about the ninja warriors and the exact place where I was physically standing in that moment. Surely a meeting with Hatsumi Sensei himself was only moments away!

I flagged down one of the few staff floating about the place, and in my awkward Japanese asked about Hatsumi Sensei. Her response was a blank expression. Hatsumi Sensei? Bujinkan? Another blank look. When I persisted, she wandered off to find a more senior person who might know more, and soon returned with an elderly gentleman. Between my dreadful Japanese and his attempts at English, he made it known in no uncertain terms that he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Hatsumi Sensei or of anything regarding the Bujinkan organization. I couldn’t believe my ears. I had come all this way to find him. And the photo in my book was proof that I was on the right track! How could the staff not know anything? I tried again to get more information from them, but they simply shrugged, and as the afternoon waned, I left the museum, crestfallen.

On the way back to the ryokan, I tried to make sense of what had happened. I was obviously at the right place – the photo in my book was proof of that. There could really be only one explanation. The staff had lied. There must have been some invisible, unspoken test that I had unknowingly failed and, having been deemed unfit for acceptance into ninja training, I had been sent away empty-handed. From what I had read of the elusive ninja in the books by the American student (who, by his own account, had managed to gain acceptance into the clan himself), it was likely that they were watching me right now, monitoring my movements. Maybe the ryokan staff themselves were also in the employ of the clan. Perhaps if I conducted myself well, someone would appear and tell me that I had passed the test after all. These were the thoughts of a 19-yr old from a small Canadian country town, brought up on fantastical ninja books and then transported into the mystical homeland of the ninja warriors, only to be denied in the end.

No ninja appeared at the ryokan that night. Or the next morning. There was little else to do but have a look around Iga–Ueno, including the castle. Photos were not allowed inside, but I did take a picture of an old palanquin from the doorway. This would have been carried on the shoulders of two retainers, the person of importance, such as a regional feudal daimyo lord, seated in the red box-like structure in the middle. I also got a shot out across one of the tiled roofs – tiled roofs are very exotic – and one of the castle moat, which conveys the mystique that I had come to associate with the image of the ninja through the books I had read.

The day was passing and it was time to return to Hiroshima. No ninja having appeared, it was with a heavy sigh that I boarded the train and watched the misty mountains of Iga pass slowly out of sight.

I may have waited just a bit too long for the ninja to appear – I missed my connecting train in Kyoto. It was already late at night by this time. It was dark and the temples were closed. The only thing I found open was a portable ramen noodle stand close to the station. I had a bowl of hot noodles to console myself and, as I had little extra money, curled up to sleep on the concrete sidewalk in front of Kyoto station, using my pack as a pillow. It seemed an appropriate finalè to the ill-fated trip. I caught the first train back to Hiroshima the following morning and just managed to make it to my first English class on time. It would be another four-and-a-half years before I finally caught up with the legendary ninja master…

Path to the Heart of the Flower (II)

Shawn GrayApril 12, 2012

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

In Part I of this article, I wrote about how I became involved in Japanese martial arts and the reasons for my growing interest in all things Japanese. I arrived in Japan in August 1990, the 45th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. My 1st month in Hiroshima was a time of adjustment – and many social faux pas (which continue to this day!). In time, I took over the majority of English classes offered by the small English school where I was working, which was run by an American Christian missionary and his family. In fact, I myself had come to Japan on a “religious activities” visa, sponsored by an American missionary organization and the small country Baptist church in which I spent most of my youth. The church had a history of almost 200 years–and I was its 1^st ordained missionary. :-)

I still hadn’t realized at the time what a monocultural environment I had come from. Most of the people who lived in the rural Canadian province where I was raised are of Anglo-Saxon descent-there were very few people of other ethnic and cultural backgrounds (although that has changed a lot in subsequent years, from my understanding). But for me in the 80′s, I knew almost noone who wasn’t a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. There was one Black girl in my elementary school (who had been adopted by a Caucasian family), and the 1^st Asian person I met was when I was around 15 years old. The 1^st Japanese person I met in my life was when I was 19 years old, a few months before I left to go to Japan. She had married a French Canadian man in the city where I started college, and keen to talk to our anthropology class about Japan. When she found out I was about to go to Japan, they invited me over to their home for dinner. Wow–a real-life Japanese person! How exotic! (And Buddhism, wow – you mean there’s more than one way to look at the world?? :-) )

Now I was on Planet Japan. People still had 2 arms and legs, but so many things were so very different from the small country town where I grew up. But I was open-minded and hungry for knowledge and experience -I began to carry around a dictionary and notepad with me wherever I went. When I heard something I did not understand but sounded useful, I would either look it up on the spot, or make a note of it to look up in the dictionary later. I would try to do this with at least one or 2 words per day, and then use those words in real situations as many times as possible that same day. This is how I learned Japanese. I never studied the language in school.

The summer in Hiroshima is unbearably hot-especially for Canadians. I grew up playing ice hockey on frozen rivers. Here, temperatures were in the high 30s centigrade, but the worst thing was that humidity. By 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, you were already covered in sweat. I got used to walking around with my clothes sticking to me like what felt like “saran wrap.” Not the easiest thing to get used to. The weather very slowly began to improve by September, and since I was now into the swing of things with my work schedule, it was time to get my Japan martial arts training under way.

Through my karate instructor back in Canada, I got the contact details for the closest instructor in my style (Chito Ryu). Kanao Sensei lived 2 hours away by train, in the city of Fukuyama. Since that was too far for me to travel in time for regular weeknight classes, he agreed to meet me on a weekend. His cousin spoke some English, and was the facilitator for our 1^st meeting. Kanao Sensei was a 4^th Dan at the time, which in our style meant that he was a senior instructor. There were no easy black belts in our style. In fact, if you weren’t Japanese, you weren’t even allowed to get a black belt in Japan in Chito Ryu.

Kanao Sensei graciously agreed to teach me on the weekends. I would take the train two hours to Fukuyama and he would teach me at his home, in the garden behind his house and in his car garage if the weather was bad. Sometimes I would stay overnight and we would train both days. We did a lot of Kata training, and a lot of Makiwara training, which involves punching a target over and over, and over and over, and over and over, hundreds of times. For untrained fists like mine, the target, a post or tree, was wrapped with rope made of rice straw (Maki = to wrap; Wara = straw – sometimes thin boards were substituted, as shown in the photo below). After a few dozen strikes, my tender knuckles would split and begin to bleed, and after a few hundred repetitions, the straw rope would be covered with blood. Sometimes this was followed by knuckle push-ups on the concrete floor of the car garage. Kanao Sensei didn’t seem to mind getting my blood on the floor of his garage, and I would often go back to Hiroshima with my knuckles covered in bandages, which made for great conversation in my English classes the following week. Call it masochistic if you will, but it certainly did foster a spirit of determination, focus, mental control, and perseverance.

Kanao Sensei worked at the Fukuyama City post office, and without really realizing what was happening, before I knew it I was postmaster-for-a-day, and was interviewed by the local media, appearing in the local newspaper (photo below – Kanao Sensei is on the far left). There weren’t many foreigners around those parts in those days, and it appeared that they found me to be just as exotic as I was finding everything about this new country to be. It was quite an experience for a 19-year-old with only half of a college education, from a town of 3,600 people on the other side of the world, and as life goes, it was shaping my future much more profoundly than I could have guessed at the time.

Having now become used to my work schedule, and having established a relationship and training regimen with Kanao Sensei, the next thing to do on this great adventure was to track down Masaaki Hatsumi, the legendary ninja master. I say “track down” because it was still before the Internet, and ninja masters were not advertising. I had no address, no phone number, no connection with anyone who was training with Hatsumi Sensei. All I had was a couple of books by Stephen Hayes, and the only location mentioned in the particular books that I had was the historical region of Iga, currently known as Iga-Ueno, in Mie Prefecture, about 6 hours by train from where I was living. And so, once my schedule allowed it, in October of 1990, I set out for Iga in search of Masaaki Hatsumi.

Path to the Heart of the Flower (I)

Shawn GrayMarch 26, 2012

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

February 9^th was the 20th anniversary of my first day of training in the Bujinkan. I mentioned it on Facebook, but was encouraged to write a series of blog articles about a bit of my martial arts history and how I found the Bujinkan and made my way to Japan to train with Hatsumi Sensei – to approach the heart of the flower that is Japanese martial arts, budo. I’ve always found it fascinating to hear stories of the adventures of my Sempai here (Mark Lithgow, Michael Pearce, Mark O’Brien, Andrew Young, and Mike L) and, now in my 17^th year in Japan myself, I thought it would be fun to look back over the years, and in remembering, share some of that with the readers of my blog.

Black Belt Magazine – Feb 1984

Like many of us in Bujinkan, I was originally attracted by the ninja image. It was 1984, the same year that I started karate practice. In the small town of 3,600 where I grew up in Eastern Canada, there was a Chito-Ryu Karate club, which I joined after 9 years of ice hockey. I quickly came infatuated with Japanese martial arts and would frequently go to the magazine rack at the local gas station to check for the latest issues of martial arts magazines. It was on one of these visits that I found Black Belt Magazine, Feb 1984 issue. I was young. I was impressionable. I was hooked.

But how was a young New Brunswick lad supposed to access this ninja training? I was in junior high school. I couldn’t go to Japan. I couldn’t even go to Dayton, Ohio. But I could join the Shadows of Iga Society and Robert Bussey’s Warrior International as a correspondence member, so that’s what I did. I also got hold of some Japanese split-soled tabi boots and shuko hand claws and spent a lot of time running around in the woods climbing trees and sneaking up on unsuspecting neighbours and making blowguns from copper pipe. Luckily, I survived. Sometimes that rather surprises me.

I kept up with my karate practice quite seriously, entering and coming home with trophies from a number of provincial tournaments. I was invited to go to the Canadian national championship tournament, but it was held in Vancouver, 4,000km away, and I was in high school. I entered a local college and took liberal arts courses, and in my second year was presented with the opportunity to take a year off my studies and go to teach English in Japan. It was a dream come true, needless to say, and in August 1990 at age 19, I got on a plane and flew to the other side of the world, from a town of 3,600 to a city of 25 million.

I somehow managed to find the people that were meeting me at Narita airport. They had come by car to pick me up, and I remember that traffic was absolutely gridlocked all the way back to Tokyo. A trip that would take an hour by train took us six hours by car. After having already traveled through a 15-hour time difference in 24 hours, it seemed to take forever. We finally arrived at the organization’s Tokyo headquarters in Shinjuku, where I stayed for the first 3 days for an orientation program. Shinjuku is one of the major Tokyo metropolitan centers and one of the biggest train stations in the world, and having come from such a small town it amazed me that I had to look straight upwards to even see the sky. There were so many skyscrapers and so many people and so much concrete and so many wires and lights and sounds – I was at first afraid to even go exploring outside alone because I thought I’d get lost and never be able to find my way back (most of the streets in Japan don’t have names). The city seemed to go on forever. This wasn’t like visiting another city, or even another country. It was like visiting another planet entirely. Planet Japan.

Atomic Bomb Memorial, Hiroshima

After the 3-day program in Shinjuku finished, I boarded a Shinkansen high-speed bullet train bound for Hiroshima, where I had been placed to work as an English teacher. The ride took around 5 hours from Tokyo back then, I think (it might be a little quicker now). The train sailed along so quickly and smoothly it felt like I was riding in an airplane. I was going to be one of the first occupants in a newly-constructed apartment building that was going up near the place I’d be working, 30 minutes out of central Hiroshima by bus. Since construction wasn’t finished yet, I stayed in an apartment in downtown Hiroshima for the first month – right across the street from Peace Park, ground zero for the atomic bomb that had been dropped there 45 years before. I could see the famous bombed dome monument from my kitchen window, and would often go walk through the park to sketch, practice my haiku, or just people and pigeon watch. When I saw something interesting, I’d sketch it or write about it in a journal. (I didn’t blog it. I didn’t Facebook it. I didn’t Twitter it. It was pre-Internet, and life was good.) Peace Park also had an international cultural center where I could get travel and tourism tips in English, and also watch news on TVs with English subtitles. I remember taking the 30-minute bus ride in to Tokyo to keep up with the first Gulf War (the Bush’s first attempt at Hussein) on their TVs. They also had a library with a lot of English books about Japan – but you couldn’t check them out, you had to read them in the library. It was here that I discovered Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and film director Yukio Mishima, and with my interest in Bushido, the way of the Samurai, I was fascinated to discover that his failed coup d’etat and suicide by ritual disembowelment occurred literally 2 hours before I was born. (The things that fascinate 19-year-old Bushido enthusiasts!) The library also had a copy of Yoshikawa’s Musashi, the life story of the famous samuraiwarrior. It was quite a thick book, and since I couldn’t take it home with me, I went back again and again, gradually working my way through it. I was completely enamored with bushido, the samurai code of honour.

One of my first memories in Japan, while settling into my English teaching schedule and still living across from Peace Park, was of one of my neighbours – an interesting American guy named Richard (no, that’s not him in the photo, that’s me, trying to teach English). After I’d been there some time, Richard announced that he was going on a trip to China and asked me if I’d look after his place while he was away. Turns out while he was in Hong Kong he found out that there was a film production looking for extras and he applied and got a part in the film. The movie was Kickboxer with Jean Claude van Damme. (Richard is the reporter who interviews “the champ” after the match right at the beginning of the film.) I wasn’t much of a movie buff and didn’t realize what a big film it was until later. I later moved out to my apartment in the suburbs and we eventually lost touch, unfortunately. I should look up his name in the movie cast members and see if he’s on Facebook. That would a riot. (I wonder if he signs autographs…) Another interesting memory was the time that he told me that he was going to be away for a couple of days to go talk to someone regarding a misunderstanding that he was having with a gangster who thought he was seeing his girlfriend. I was supposed to call the police if he wasn’t back in 2 days. I hadn’t even been in Japan a month yet and already I was making such interesting friends. :)

I soon got into the swing of things with my weekly schedule of English classes – class size varied, but I think overall I had 90-100 students per week. After the work schedule was sorted, I started getting to know my way around my new neighbourhood bit by bit and began to explore the wonderful, exotic treasures of Japanese culture: go,(the board game), sado (tea ceremony), shodo (calligraphy) and, of course, budo, Japanese martial arts. The first thing on my list for that last activity was to make contact with my karate sensei – and the next was to track down the ninja master Masaaki Hatsumi.

(To be continued in Part II…)