My first karate club was an excellent example of both what makes karate great and the poison that ruins the experience. In the three short years I trained with that small club I fell in love with Shotokan karate for life and I received a detailed education in the underlying cancer that is destroying karate from the inside. Its about a community and the individuals within that community.
In the early nineties, Whitehorse of the Yukon Territories had one of the most vibrant martial arts communities anywhere. The generous recreation budget of the government meant that just about any club could operate debt free even if their membership was a meagre five people. We had three karate clubs, all practising Shotokan karate, a huge Tae Kwon Do club, a Aikijutsu club (all members were prison guards from the local penitentiary), a Ninjutsu club (mostly ex-Viet Nam veterans who were not a lot of fun to train with because they were seriously dangerous men), a fencing club and a very active firearms club (with a world class gun range). If a guy kept on good terms with all the clubs, you could feasibly attend a different seminar with globally famous instructors at least once monthly. All the facilities were free of charge and most of the clubs received substantial discretionary cash grants from the territorial government. Club fees were a joke and mostly were used to pay for Christmas parties or summer barbecues. Everything was good.
My first year in karate was fantastic. We actually had over thirty practising members and everybody genuinely cared about each others progress. It was common for members to arrive early to class and train basics or Kata on their own and all kyu belts were encouraged to exchange helpful pointers for progress. Of course, the sensei was always the final word on everything, but often he would just stand back and only correct instructions when they were egregiously incorrect. Everyone cooperated and everyone seemed to progress rapidly. Even today, after over two decades of continuous training and countless hours on the dojo floor, I still look back on that training as being good quality. Certainly, most of the students that came out of that program still shine as some of the best karateka I ever met. I have to credit the sensei and his sempai for that high quality of training.
The sensei of that little club in the Yukon was, to say the least, a unique character. His karate had long since passed "top quality" and was working on "downright crap" by the time I knew him. The old guy was a professional framer and carpenter and the years of hard labour had punished his body. There was no lightening fast reflexes left, nor any athletic jumps, kicks or footwork. There were many days that simply getting out of a kneeling position after the traditional bow-in was a complicated process. The physical destruction of his body was not helped at all by the fact that he was a barely functioning alcoholic.
Sensei would often miss class altogether or turn up three sheets to the wind. Standing down-wind of him was a challenge many nights as the breeze was filled with the smell of whiskey shots and beer chasers. I remember one particular night where all the old sensei could mumble was an incoherent exhortation that "you gotta be there" when you are fighting. He was absolutely dependent on his sempai, who was a very capable young man who loved old sensei and was determined to keep his club alive, even if it meant becoming a continual apologist for the old drunk. Most of the best teaching came from sempai, but the overall spirit of the club remained that of the old sensei as he once was, not as he became.
My first club was extremely traditional in nearly every way. Everything, and I mean everything, was done in Japanese. I never even knew the English translations of most of the techniques until I left the Yukon. There was no such thing as "informal bow-ins" and karate was about self-defence, not about tournaments or sports. Both sensei and sempai had done the tournament game and both had completely rejected it as the wrong path. Sensei was pretty blunt in his opinion of tournament players while sempai freely admitted that while he was pretty darn good at "tournament tag", he really thought of it as nothing but childish games. Our Christmas parties typically involved a few very solid drinks followed by Sensei doing a detailed play-by-play of old school knock-down full contact karate bouts captured on Beta-tapes. He loved watching Jean Yves Theriault, known as "The Iceman" at his fighting pinnacle, and he would often point out that Jean-Yves only really had three basic techniques in his repertoire: jab, reverse-punch and front-snap-kick. Sensei's karate was all about basics and that is what we did: lots of basics.
The thing about Sensei is that he was an old street brawler, a refugee of biker-gangs from the sixties and seventies. His karate was never pretty, even in his youth, but it was always effective. Sensei never had any use for jumps, spinning kicks or high kicks. If the technique could not be used in the heat of battle, dancing in the gravel of a road-side honky-tonk, then it was relegated to the back burner and rarely taught. My spinning back kick to this day is a poor-man's version best saved for hitting the heavy bag rather than used in sparring. The lack of lustre on Sensei's karate was, truly, the underlying issue when his karate club started to fail in the mid-nineties: old students who had passed the old man in technical skill lost their respect for the man who had brought them from bunny-eared white belt to black belt instructor.
I have already told you that there was three Shotokan karate clubs in Whitehorse. There was the venerable old JKA club run by yet another crippled carpenter. That club was large and very JKA in it's training: lots of low stances and lots of line drills up and down the floor. The head instructor was frequently side-lined by work-related injuries, but that did not matter since the club had a clear hierarchy and if Sensei was missing, it was understood who was to take over the leadership. The group was a great bunch of guys and I trained with them frequently, attending every club seminar for the entire three years I trained in the Yukon. My club, the Northern Tsuruoka Club, was a branch of Master Tsuruoka's organisation out of Toronto. Tsuruoka style is basically Shotokan with slightly higher stances and .....Ok, it's just Shotokan. Northern Tsuruoka was actually the oldest club in the territories, but probably due to Sensei's unpredictable nature, the club never really caught on. At one point Northern Tsuruoka looked like it might match the much larger JKA club, but then there was a split.
The "split" of Northern Tsuruoka is worthy of examination. The guy that took off on his own, leaving old Sensei, was a Shodan under Tsuruoka style and was actually pretty capable at tournament style karate. His movements were sharp, athletic and crisp and he carried himself as a true "sensei": he bowed exactly so, he knelt and stood without effort and he even had the fake Japanese accent when he was teaching. New Sensei had left Old Sensei and formed his own club out of moral disgust at the continued alcohol infused deterioration of Old Sensei. We all noted that the period when New Sensei had left the original Northern Tsuruoka club was also about the time Old Sensei had quit attending tournaments altogether. We also noticed that New Sensei had affiliated his club with a tournament based sport club and had miraculously attained Nidan ranking very soon after joining the new organisation. (Now don't get me wrong: the guy actually was worthy of Nidan ranking at least, but I never have seen anyone suddenly bump-up a kyu ranking when they changed clubs; in fact it is more common to be demoted or at least discouraged from rapidly grading when you change clubs. Sudden promotions only seem to happen with Dan rankings when people jump ship and join new associations)
The disturbing thing about the whole split with the Northern Tsuruoka club was the back-biting and trash talk that occurred after the split. Old Sensei pretty much kept his mouth shut about the entire affair, but would have nothing to do with his old protege and discouraged us from attending "that clubs" seminars. New Sensei was quite vocal about what a hopeless drunk Old Sensei was and how Old Sensei's Dan ranking was fake; New Sensei was adamant that Old Sensei had never graded past Nidan and that his current Sandan ranking was a figment of Old Sensei's whiskey sodden mind. Much ado was made about the fake ranking and the ongoing physical deterioration of Old Sensei and it was done very publicly.
At the time I was a very lowly kyu grade and I did not understand much of what was going on. I actually thought that the ranking debate was a serious issue and led me to doubt everything I knew about Old Sensei. The public back-biting did devalue Old Sensei's coin with me and many other students; students that actually had trained with Old Sensei and had left him to join New Sensei's club repeated the tales of rank inflation and physical incompetence as often as anyone would listen to them. The entire process undermined Old Sensei's entire standing within the closed karate community and eventually he was marginalised and forced to retire. The last time I spoke with him he was so far gone that he was barely able to form coherent sentences and could not remember the names of any of his former students. New Sensei can take a lot of credit for finally destroying the man that led him to his Shodan ranking...and he might just be proud of that.
So here is the crux of the story. Some of my readers might suggest that the alcoholism and physical deterioration of Old Sensei was justifiable cause for forced retirement. And they might be right. On the other hand, you need to look at the much bigger picture and, more importantly, the final results.
Old Sensei, regardless of his physical limitations and his oft drunken behaviour, had produced many very capable students. He was obviously a capable instructor; his results spoke for themselves. Furthermore, Old Sensei was teaching karate as a self-defence system, which is what it's original form truly was. Old Sensei had proved his karate effective many times in real fights, the last one against three muggers intent on stealing his car. That incident occurred late in Old Sensei's declining years when he could barely rise from a kneeling position and walked with an obvious limp, so I would hate to know what the old man was capable of in his prime. Meanwhile New Sensei had really nice hair and prided himself on never using his karate outside the dojo or tournament venue.
The ranking issue, so important to me at the time, I consider nothing but a sad joke now. Dan rankings are more about being accepted as part of the "in crowd" versus the loser brigade. Certainly there are ranking examination up to Godan level and beyond, but what nobody ever tells you is that as you progress in the Dan ranking system the likelihood of you passing (or even getting the opportunity to test sometimes) is directly proportional to how much of a "company man" you are. Nidan ranks are a dime a dozen, but then Nidan is not really an instructional rank, it's just a slightly advanced Shodan who might someday reach full instructional ranking. Sandan ranking is the first true instructional rank and while the Sandan rank usually does signify some real physical skill, it is also all about that candidate being elevated to one of the "in crowd". I have seen capable men fail at their Sandan examination simply because the examiner purposefully reset the bar so high that the candidate had no hope of passing. I have also seen the magical bar reset to a much lower standard if it served the political machine of the official examiner. When faced with an Dan ranked karateka, I always watch the man and rank him according to my experience rather than what his little sheet of paper states.
Consider the situation of the Northern Tsuruoka club: Old Sensei had taught many capable karateka over his many years at the helm, his rival New Sensei being one of them. By all accounts Old Sensei, while a crippled drunk, could still capably defend himself in a real fight while New Sensei always maintained really nice hair and a tidy dogi. Old Sensei knew what it took to survive a fight ("you have to be there", his drunken exhortation to me that night, was all about maintaining focus and living in the moment. I knew that then and I really know that now) while New Sensei knew what it took to win a political coup. I know who I respected in that situation and I know who I thought was just a paper tiger. You can make your own decisions.
I lost track of Old Sensei years ago, soon after I finally earned my Shodan ranking. I called him one night to tell him the news and he did not have a clue who the hell I was, despite the fact I had trained with him and spent many winter nights watching tapes of old bare-knuckle fights with him over a three year period. His speech was slurred and his sentences disjointed. Old Sensei had not been on a dojo floor since shortly after I left the Yukon. He barely remembered his own name anymore. He is probably dead now. I ran into one of New Sensei's students about a decade after I left the Yukon. He came and trained with my club in Saskatchewan. The student had been a white belt when I knew him, but he now sported a new, bunny-eared black belt. His karate was passable at best, but he knew all sorts of Kata and tricky but useless moves. There was nothing functional or utilitarian about his karate, but he freely told us all sorts of tricks for looking good at a tournament. I guess it really is all about a person's value system and the student never falls too far from the tree of the teacher.
Truthfully, there really is no right and wrong in the above story. My sympathy lays with my Old Sensei, obviously, but the complaints about his drunken behaviour were justified. The problem I have is that the justified complaints about drunkenness were extended to incompetence and rank inflation. The measure of an instructor's competence is the quality of his students, not the quality of his own karate and, well, rank is just another piece of paper signed by an authority who has a vested interest in the success or failure of the candidate. Papers can be bought and sold and association loyalty is as much a form of currency as cold, hard cash. Make your own judgements.
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