them) attitude. When I was training with Miyagi Sensei in Hawaii, the training was very tough, yet he was kind to me. He was the father I never had or knew. I could see the kindness in his eyes even through the strict and specific requirements given me to achieve. One day my teacher made me stand in a horse stance for seven hours on the beach in Wahiawa, looking at the ocean under the shade of a tree. He would come and kick the back of my legs every so often to see if I’d fall. In that moment I hated him, yet now I love what he allowed me to achieve. My teacher would hit the back of your hand if you did not rotate your fist with the seikan punch. This was what he was remembered for most. He was very fast or at least seemed very fast and it may have been due to a complete lack of wasted movement. Years later I was teaching a seminar at Sensei Rocky Ryan’s dojo in Shingle Springs California with Sensei Sid Campbell and Rocky’s first teacher was there. He came up to me and said “I trained with your teacher in Hawaii.” So I asked “how was that?” He said “I couldn’t train for long because he kept hitting the back of my hands and it was painstaking.” I knew, of course, he really did train with my teacher. In 1991 I went back to Okinawa to compete in Grandmaster Morio Higahonna’s Goju-ryu tournament and to train with some of the old grandmasters. I took my students to see Grandmaster Eizo Shimabukuru in Kin. It took a while to find his dojo and we paid a taxi to drive us there from Naha. As the taxi driver pulled up to the front of his home/dojo he honked the horn two or three times. I jumped out of the taxi and ran to the bottom of his stairs, bowed my head and said, “O Sensei,”as he was running down the
stairs to deal with this rude action by the taxi driver. He welcomed us to his home and then confirmed that my kata was very similar to his kata. We exchanged cards and on his card one side is about karate and the other is about his chicken farm/contractor’s business. When we first went to the tournament building for the morning training with Grandmaster Katsuya Miahira and Grandmaster Shinpo Matayoshi, we found ourselves early and had to wait outside for the doors to open. As we were sitting on the small wall outside the building a somewhat overweight Okinawan gentleman walked up and many of the other showed respect by bowing. I told my students that he must be an important ranking instructor and they agreed. Finally Miahira Sensei walked up and went inside and the doors were soon opened for everyone else. We went into the bathroom to change and when we emerged with our black gis on, we found that we were the only ones with black gis. I was, in fact, the only one there with
I jumped out of the taxi and ran to the bottom of his stairs, bowed my head and said, “O Sensei.”
continued on next page Martial Arts Grandmasters International ®
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