This year marks my 35 year training in Karate. Now I have to be up front and tell you that it has not been a solid 35 years in a Dojo training. I took time off, a few months here and there, and also left Karate to train in other arts, or to focus for short periods on the other arts while being “Away” from Karate. But at the same time I have to say that while I was “Away” I still did my Kata. At one point I left for a few months (9 to be exact) to focus on my grappling in Judo…but the back yard on Consol ave was worn out that year from doing Kata every day in the summer! I may not have physically been down to the club but I was still training in Dingman Sensei’s Karate!
Now, I also did not start training at the JKA of Manitoba, I actually started training with one of Dingman Sensei’s Sempais in the same city, but I found I did not like his teaching…and I was a little kid. So while I started at the age of six, I trained for a year and a half and then left Karate for almost a full year before finding Dingman Sensei’s Dojo (It may have been a tad more than a year…give me a break its over three decades ago).
I hate stories that start off with “IN the olden days” or “Way back when…” so please forgive me in recounting the evolution of the JKA of Manitoba by starting off with “In the old days” and “Way Back When” kind of ramblings and recounts of the past, but I think it is very important to start off at the beginning of my journey in the JKA. Anyways, when I started Karate with Dingman Sensei, or to be more accurate , in the kids class at the JKA of Manitoba Down on Albert street the club had just moved from Transcona and was in its new digs on Albert street. They had been their about a year or two when I joined from what I understand and the club already smelled like a club and looked like a broke in Dojo.
I remember coming into the club and right away I knew it was different than the previous Karate program I had taken. The kids were huffing and puffing and to be frank…no games were being played…just hard training. I actually watched and Adult class first with my big brother having dropped me off to go find comic books at a local store, I made the climb to the fourth floor and opened the big wood door. The door just said JKA and had the JKA logo under the golden letters. The first thing that hits you when you enter a club is the smell. I cannot describe it really, its actually a mix of everyone’s hard work and perspiration, the smell of moist hard woods and the cleaning supply that was used to clean the floors of everyone’s sweat.
The class itself was crazy and I had gotten upstairs about half way through class on a Saturday and the adults were doing Kumite…I think it was one step but the movement and rotation of bodies made it hard to tell what I was looking at. They flowed and the whole class kind of undulated in front of your eyes, it was not uniform and robotic at all but the class was moving at different times and lunging at each other, sliding back and blocking and the noise was amazing, Kiais and shuffling of Gis made it hard to focus on one person or one group. The spirit in the room, even the waiting area was almost tangible and you could just feel the exertion and spirit being used in that class.
At the front of this chaos was a shorter man, about five three ish with a wooden sword in his hand, A Shinai, and he was barking out orders. The volume he could produce without any effort was kind of scary. Now, his orders did not come out violently or in a negative way, he was urging on the mayhem and trying to get people to move. Most of what he was yelling was in English, but the odd word of Japanese (I assumed) would come out. You could not sit in the waiting room and watch this without eventually becoming transfixed by the instructor. He seemed to just exude spirit and an aura I had never seen….and I don’t believe in Auras.
Class ended and the whole group bowed to each other, looking happy, but worn right out and lined up behind the instructor. When the line was straight as an arrow and all the students were standing straight at attention the instructor lowered himself to one knee, then to a full sitting position and the most senior student yelped some order that I had never heard before and the whole line in unison lowered the same way as the instructor and sat on their knees, in what I thought at the time seemed like a silly thing to do on hard wood floors…..little did I know I would adopt this sitting position for the rest of my life.
After a short, and very quiet moment or three, the whole class repeated some kind of boy scout oath that seemed to remind me of my cub scout oath I had to learn…of which I do not recall at all at this point in my life. And the group bowed after the instructor turned around and then waited for the instructor to get up and leave. Then they stood up, bowed and a young Green belt flew off the floor, bowing as he left, ran into the mens change room and returned to the floor with two buckets of hot water. The whole class cleaned the floor and the instructor walked towards me, turned to bow off the floor and then walked right past me. I will never forget, he did not say a word to me as he passed by me, but he ruffled my hair with his hand closest to me so fast I could not even see his hand move from his side! That was my first introduction to the JKA of Manitoba….well actually…
When I came into the JKA for the first time I actually had two very different things happen to me that I would say NO first time student will ever have happen to them. I opened the door to the club, a large wood door and immediately got hit in the head with a big Tonka Toy truck! Now as it turned out it was the instructors daughter that threw it at me, or in my direction…I never did get the answer to that. If that was not enough of a welcome I was immediately accosted by the secretary. She pointed at me and said “you come here” in a growly voice….now keep in mind I am a young kid and never been here before and did not know who this adult was who was seemingly upset with me. Turned out that after a brief conversation I had been mistaken for another student and was let off the hook. But As a confirmed introvert and shy kid…well my heart was POUNDING in my chest.
After signing up for the club I started training in the kids class, which was three times a week before the adults trained. I have to stop and say that the kids class back then was VERY different than the kids classes we hold now. First off it was from five to twelve years of age and no one under thirteen trained in the main classes. Also, we did not do games! The class was basically a mini version of the adult class with some variations, very little Kumite and lots, I mean LOTS of calisthenics and weird exercises designed to torture you and also train your body. We did duck walks, Seal pulls (picture using your arms to pull yourself across the ground from one end of the club to the other), we did pushups…lots and lots of pushups, sit ups, leg lifts and a variety of other exercises that I really hated as a kid…I wanted to hit something not do pushups…did I mention that we did LOTS of pushups?
We were not allowed to hit the old beat up punching bag or the Makiwara, which was fine by me actually, both were covered in dried blood and the Makiwara often had bits of skin stuck to the harsh looking rope that was used to cover it. It would be a few more years before Sensei and a Sempai of mine had me hit that thing 100 times before each class with both hands and I would start to like it…..a bit too much if you ask my mother.
I stuck to the kids classes for a few years, and Sensei never taught more than once in that time frame. He would sit in his office and work or read and have a coffee while one of the sempai, normally a brown or black belt youth (around 16-20 years old) would take the kids through the class and run us till we were exhausted. The whole time he would sit in his Gi or street clothing and often behind a big newspaper so he could hear the class, but not see it. His office was down a hall just past the public bath room that seemed to always be occupied for the 40 minutes before class you may need to pee, which meant a quick hike to the top floor, up four more flights of stairs, in your Gi to quickly relieve yourself, then back down the cold stairs to the class…or worse…to the basement if the top floor was being used.
Normally 13 was the magic number to transition into the adult class, but I was bound and determined to get in the class at 11. Keep in mind, I was no giant kid, actually I was most often the shortest kid in class and 9 year olds were often a tad bigger than me. I was also not physically gifted to be the fastest or strongest…so it may have shocked Sensei when I interrupted his pre class coffee to ask him if I could stay and try the adult class. The first time I asked he looked out over his news paper and simply said, “No, you are to young”. But I had read or been told this story about a kid that wanted to learn Kung fu and went to the master every day to ask to join the temple and become a fighting monk and I was not going to give up….well I almost did when the third time I asked he looked over his paper and told me I was to small and to short and would get trampled! (now, never mind that he was right…I still wanted to be in the adult class).
I was ready to give up and throw in the towel. Now to be honest, it was all on me. If I were in Sensei’s position I would do the same thing! But!!!!! I guess my attitude towards training changed and I missed a few of the kids classes, and Mavis, the gruff secretary noticed my attitude was changing and she took it upon herself to call my mom and ask why I was so glum. My mom told her how I was board with the kids class and I was actually paying for my own classes with a paper route my brother and I did. When I tested I got extra money by selling my comic book collection and saving up my money I got for doing chores (back then doing the dishes for a full week got you two dollars) and I paid for my own training.
I did not know this but Mavis went to Sensei and pleaded my case to him. Apparently it did not take much for him to agree to let me move up to the big class, with the understanding that this was my choice to do this. I was told at a Saturday Class to try the adult class after my kids class and see if I could manage it. I was ecstatic!
This was the summer and the kids class was early on and cool in the Dojo still, but as we trained you could feel the heat raising. The old Dojo did not have air conditioning, hell most places did not back then, but we had six big windows that we would open up to try and get a breeze in class. The adult class started and was VERY different than the callisthenic and Kihon centric kids class. While I was an orange belt I lined up in the back at the end of the adults. We had two lines and because I was a kid I was seen as a junior to everyone and I was actually kind of happy….except for one thing. I will never forget that the guy in front of me had the worst smelling feet and when we lined up this brown belts feet were rank as heck and I had to then bow and get closer to them! Yah, that was almost a deal breaker right their!
The training was also very different, we did not do much calisthenics, just in the warm up. And after the warm up we did basics…and more basics..then a bit more basics and finally….you got it…more basics. And it was nothing fancy! We did Zenkutsu dachi, age uke to Gyaku zuki hundreds of times on each side. I thought that this was going to be a whole class on this one move! We did 30-45 minutes of basic movements and really it consisted of about four or five different blocks done with a reverse punch at the end and then we finished off the basics with what I would come to know as the perfect kick…Mae Geri. I knew all these basics from the kids class…but I don’t think I had ever done 1,000 front kids…each leg…in a kids class before.
Then we did Kata. 30 minutes of Heian shodan and nidan. The whole time Sensei making minor corrections and pushing students slightly to test balance and once and a while poking them in the gut to check tension. He would kick legs lightly to test the base and then push on the hands or pull the hikite hand and turn heads to face the right way. Very little talking and lots of physical training and corrections. In the kids class we danced through Kata and we knew the “moves” but the expression of the Kata was so different and violently perfect it was like it was a completely different exercise.
After going through the Heian Kata we were split up to work on our testing katas and a senior would walk around and teach us or work with us. They taught us the same way Sensei did, a demo then getting us to do it and finally poking and prodding as we did the kata, a movement of a hand or physically touching and lightly striking to test or point out details. So far the class was different and tougher in its own way but I thought that class was almost done and I had not experienced the dreaded Kumite component of Karate.
It is very important to explain at this point that the hour long class was a basic idea of when the class would start…when it would end was a mystery that only Sensei knew and apparently the Seniors were all in on this fact, and most of the adults that were training knew that an hour could stretch out and normally did stretch out to some unknown time. The only defining factor was when sensei would finally feel we had enough, or he ran out of things to teach for that day or lost interest in a specific part of class. While the classes were always an hour long…that was a minimum time. You were sure that Wednesday and Friday classes would end on time because the senior/black belt class was right after and he would even end class a tad early on those days…but this was Tuesday and you never knew when it would end. One time we went two hours solid training, and Mavis would call my parents and let them know I was fine and class was running long and I had a ride home and would not be on the bus at 8 at night.
Well, the Kumite started after a very brief explanation from Sensei about control and using proper form. We would line up with the juniors running down to find a senior to train with. Sensei would adjust for size and sometimes rank, moving students from one partner to the next to make sure the assigned partner was appropriate for the junior. My first Kumite experience in a seniors class was with a black belt named Keith. He was an older balding man with glasses and really did not look at all dangerous. He punched funny and to this day I wont forget his dipping elbow when he punched. He also had taught me Heian Nidan when I was in the kids class.
Now, Keith was slower than the other seniors and he had funny form, which Sensei would constantly be trying to correct, but Keith just seemed to be wired different. I have to say that first three step Kumite we did was an eye opener. His arms were HARD as a rock and blocking his punches hurt your arms, when he blocked he would not smash your arm but it was like blocking a baseball bat with your arm, the harder you blocked the more it hurt and the more it hurt the less you wanted to block, which meant you would get hit in the chest or the face (lightly) to remind you to block harder. Kumite back then was a game of tag, we said “no contact” but what that meant was “don’t cause them to bleed….to bad”. I was training with the trees now and actually liked it a lot. My first class ended and I was so tired and sore that I had to go home and ice my forearms. My mom thought that I would give up, but really I was getting hooked!
The Dojo was kind of a temple to most of us, it was a special place that held a magic of its own. Looking back it was probably because of Sensei and his serious attitude towards training. Things were so different back then with training. It was not unique for people to walk around after class with blood on their gi like it was a badge of honor and if you left class and were not five pounds lighter from perspiration then you were not working hard enough. Bruises were badges showing your commitment and attitudes were specific in training. If you had an ego, someone was going to pound you down! If you were seen as lazy you were going to get pushed even harder than most! If you were disrespectful or dangerous when sparring you were in for a world of pain! And while gender was left at the door, if you hit a lady during training…well you were going to have the honor of waking up looking at the dingy ceiling. I only saw this once but while it was scary you had a sense that it was not just sanctioned but warranted!
One other thing that we would all brag about, and by this point I was 13 or so and had been training for a few years as a adult class member….was the ability make the walls sweat! This was a unique phenomenon that happened in the summer and sometimes in the deepest of winters when the class got so active that the humidity in the class topped out and we could get the walls to bleed sweat down them. We managed to do this on several occasions in the summer, which seemed very easy seeing as Winnipeg’s summers are often humid and hot, but on the odd occasion we would have a two hour grinder with Sensei and we would push so hard that all of us were soaked in perspiration and drove up the humidity to the point that the walls would turn to rivers of moisture!
One other badge of honor we all held highly was the state of the hard wood floors on the fourth floor Dojo. See the first part of the floor that you worked out on when you first came onto the dojo floor was pristine! And after a few years of absorbing oils from human sweat and the cleaning solution we used it was a reddish wood that almost glowed it was so polished. But the back part of the club was a mess. Broken floor boards, duct taped sections and cut out sections replaced with solid pieces of Oak to replace parts of the floor we would break from time to time doing Kata or when someone flew at the floor in Kumite after being thrown. Pretty much any time we broke the floor or the Kicking bag or the granddaddy …the makiwara…well it was something to boast about and show off as a badge of honor and proof of our training.
Now I was in the adult class but one very important distinction has to be mentioned here, till I was 16…at least…. we were seen as juniors and basically white belts even if we walked around with Purple or even brown belts. We lined up at the back and at the end of rows and we were to treat adults with respect no matter what the rank. I recall a purple belt getting tossed out of the adult class for two months and banished to the kids class for disrespecting a yellow belt adult. Sensei was VERY clear that respect was the number one thing he demanded in class. He also gave you respect back, but if you were caught being disrespectful or if you developed an attitude seen as disrespectful you were going to be corrected.
It almost became a paranoid habit of everyone to respectfully bow and say OUS whenever a black belt came on the floor and God save you if you did not bow when Sensei came on the floor. Not because of him, but because some senior was going to grab you by the back of the neck and remind you what bowing felt like…and how your neck would feel after they gripped it with their death grip!
Sensei rarely had to correct someone’s behavior, we had the “Dojo police” for that. About five different black belts took it upon themselves to keep us in line and truthfully I may have been more scared of Sensei than them,….but just slightly. Kids were expected to show respect to everyone and to train hard and keep up with the adults. If you slacked you were slapped down really fast and pushed hard by seniors, if you were caught Yawning, the worst offence in Sensei’s big book of offensive behavior on the floor, you were “corrected” quickly. Training was strict but it was actually much more fun than you would think in that kind of environment.
Another aspect of training that you don’t see much now a days is who is to blame if a student gets hit during Kumite. When I first started this was a given that you were responsible for your own safety! Never did we put blame on seniors for not showing control or juniors for not pulling back. It was not ever suggested that the person throwing a technique was responsible for the safety of the person that would be defending themselves. The idea being that in the street the attacker was going full force and was not going to give you the benefit of pulling a punch. Getting hit in the dojo meant one of two things….you were training really really hard…or you were not paying attention. It was all on you!
The neat part about class down town was how sensei organized the classes…or rather how the classes kind of subconsciously were organized. The classes at the start of the week were all about Kumite and repetitions of basics. If you went to a adult class on Monday or Tuesday you would get your Kumite in and your basics would be sharpened, as we approached the week end it became a Kata clinic and we would do reps and then Kata. The week end was a mixed bag however and often became all about pushing yourself hard in Kata and Kumite equally. It was funny, even with all three K’s in class you would inevitably find that your training was heavy in one of the three elements.
We would almost always start with a very brief warm up, if any, and then transition into Kihon training. Lots and lots of reps and drills or exercises to build our basics up, then we would do Kata and finish off with Kumite. On Mondays we would spend 10 minutes on Kata and 30 on Kumite and by Fridays class we would zip through basics and sit on Kata for 45 minutes and finish off with a little light Kumite. I asked sensei at one time if this was planned and he looked at me like I was crazy. He simply felt his way through teaching and put emphasis on different aspects of training naturally based on his mood.
Now before I go on I have to say that testing has never been “My thing” its always been something I avoided as much as possible coming up through Karate. I started and graded with a different Dojo up to orange belt and when I joined the JKA I came in with a white belt and started retesting right from white. Sensei never pushed us to test, his wife did, but he did not. I got good at timing my quarterly retreat from Karate to avoid seminars and testing, partially because I did not do Karate for rank and partially because I was paying for all this on my own and as a kid I had limited funds. I tested maybe once a year…and only if I could not avoid it! Around “that time” I would cut back to two classes a week, and normally the Saturday when Mrs. D would not be their and the Wednesday when she was busy with other things. Then the week of the seminars I would get a cold or something and miss seminars, coming back in Monday to be berated by Mrs. D for my missing testing.
I held the rank of yellow belt for a year and Orange for a year and a half. Between Orange and purple however Sensei pulled a fast one on me. He told Yaguchi Sensei how long I had been training and that I knew all the Heian Katas and Yaguchi Sensei gave me a double rank advancement that time….so I justified this as a great chance to take two years off from testing and held my green belt for almost two and a half years before I was forced to test again.
I also did not originally like competing. I was not one to want to be in the spot light, and that was why I loved Karate. You could go to class and just do the work outs. You could escape into your own head and not feel like you were being singled out or you were in the spot light as it were. I hated competition until one time I got hit in the face…really hard. It threw me for a loop but right away I was hooked. I cant explain the realization that you were really getting hit, it was an adrenaline rush to think that could happen every time you stepped into the ring.
Now I know we got beat up a lot in class, but it was significantly different when done on the floor in the club opposed to in the ring at a tournament. It was kind of fun! I knew I was “wired different” as someone once said right about that time. You never wanted to get hit, but you knew you could and the adrenaline was addictive.
One side effect of missing seminars and testing was that I missed out on training with some really cool masters. One that breaks my heart was missing out on training with Nakayama sensei. See at the time the normal cost for seminars was about $30, but the office was charging $50 to train with Nakayama and I just could not justify the cost….now I would have paid $2K for the honor of training with him, but I was a kid!
Nakayama was one I missed, but Senseis dedication to bringing in the best and brightest instructors the JKA could offer up, or rather the ISKF was obvious. We got very close with Sensei’s Sensei, Yaguchi Sensei and he was out every other month and normally he was the Key guy we would see. However, we also had Tanaka, Koyama, Takashina, Okizaki and others come out and train with us. At some point I realized that I had missed Nakayama Sensei and who he was and I just started going to seminars, begging and borrowing money along the way to make sure I could afford it. If it was Yaguchi Sensei I would go every other time and avoid testing as much as possible, but the rest I would see who was teaching and try to make it out no matter what.
When I was in High school we moved out of town to a small new community north of Winnipeg in Birdhill and the bus trip from down town to home was no longer an option. I was heartbroken when I had to give up Karate. I trained on my own for about three months in my make shift Dojo in my basement and one day my mom came home with the local newspaper and rushed up to my room to show me an add she had seen. A local Karate instructor was opening up a club in East. St. Paul rec center in the spring. Well it was six months away but it was something.
With out knowing who it was or what style of Karate I called the number on the phone and Jennifer, the instructors wife, answered all my questions and said that she knew her husband was teaching a small group twice a week in their basement and asked if I wanted to join them right away. I was excited and said yes. As it turned out the instructor was one of my Senseis’ senior students that had only trained during the noon class at the club and I had never really met Terry before.
The classes were surprisingly familiar, he taught basically what Sensei was teaching at the club at noon in his evening class. It was fun but the majority of the students were kids so it was kind of like I was back in the kids class but with the adult class format. The one thing that was different was sparring with Terry. He had this real smooth feel to sparring with him, and he would never hurt you, even if he was going full force. Sparring with him was relaxing and you could have fun. If you ever sparred with Sensei you were nerve racked and paranoid through the whole experience. Terry had a gruff exterior but he was smooth in his Karate and his control amazing, his teaching was basic and clean.
I stayed out at the ESP club for a few years till I moved back to the city, and in the summer Terry would grab me and another student and we would go to the noon classes to train down town. I kept a connection to the main club even when I was living out of town.
One story kind of stands out in my mind however. One Halloween my father “borrowed” My Karate Gi and he sewed on a tone of patches I had collected over the years to make it look cool….well in his mind it did…I was very upset! We had a seminar with Dingman Sensei the next night and I got my Gi back totally covered in patches. Patches from “CANADA” on the arm to a big Shotokan Tiger on the back. Our Gis are pretty much one patch…that’s it.
I tried to take off a patch but it left a horrible set of tiny holes in the Gi and the outline of the patches was visible on the Gi so I had to leave it, I only had one gi at the time and that was what I was going to wear! I packed it up knowing it was not going to go over well with others at the club and marched off to catch my ride.
It took all of about a minute for Dingman Sensei to see the walking billboard I had on and to bee line it to me. He reamed me out for about three minutes before I could explain what happened and left me with a stern warning and told me to have it fixed before I showed up at noon for a class or went to the dojo to training. I apologized to him and Terry and agreed to have them taken off before I would come back to train. I was utterly embarrassed and gutted and my dad got an earful when I came home. I told him that I would borrow all his work ties and sew little patches on them and then give them back before he went back to work….somehow that sounds as dumb today as it did back then!
Near the end of my living out in East. St. Paul the Dojo moved to the main floor from four flights up and I remember going to the club with Terry and helping Sensei scrape and paint the roof and paint walls. The new Club had a big glass shield to keep the noise of the Galley away from the training floor, it had a small office that never really did get finished for Sensei and it also had a small office for the secretary, his wife, just as you came in. The move was huge, it was a nice new facility with two working showers in each change room and a toilet in the DOJO…in both rooms! And it had a nice mirror, the Makiwara and beautiful hardwood floors. And despite all this I still think it was a big mistake!
As much as that club would become my home away from home for the next ten years or so it was the beginning of the down fall of the JKA main dojo. We gained a lot of students from the buildings that housed offices all around us, and the foot traffic was fantastic, but we also ended up with more issues with students and political issues took over our daily lives.
At some point I went to university after basically taking three years to “find myself” which meant three Karate classes a day EVERY DAY and I even trained Sundays as I had keys to the club. But once in University I had to do the right thing and book my courses….around the Noon class and evening classes. I also tweaked my courses after talking to Sensei so I could learn things that would help me teaching and training and running a club or helping with his. Not a great way to get a degree as it was kind of spotty and had a little of this and a little of that.
It was around this time that the politics and lack of assistance from the masters got to Sensei and he held a vote with the students after telling them the whole story, of which I knew because I was the one writing and sending the letters to the masters for assistance. We voted and sent a letter of resignation to Both masters resigning from the ISKF, which was a sad day for all of us. I felt really sad for Sensei because it meant he was leaving his Sensei and I think that was the first day I saw him cry in my life, not a lot but enough to show how much it hurt him, All that because some students of his wanted all the power and forced his hand. It truly was a comedy of issues that cause it but we were free and clear of politics and we had four clubs that followed us so its not like we were completely alone.
After we left Sensei ramped up training, or at least it seemed like it to me. We got harder, classes were pushed hard to show we were keeping or exceeding some kind of mythical standard that he old group had set, and our classes were so much harder now and testing….yah, we went from 5 minute black belt testing to 25 minutes of torture at camps that made the old testing look easy. My first few black belt tests (of which I failed three times) were five minutes each and the actual test seemed to blow by so fast it was not funny, the summer I tested under Dingman sensei for my Shodan I almost died. In place of two Kata and some drills and capped off with a short Kumite component we had four Kata, standard Kihon, then drills from four different instructors, one step, semi free and some god forsaken 20 step full speed Kumite drill, a pencil focus test and then back for one last kata…it was crazy, but I passed and it only took a week to get rid of the stiffness that caused.
Times were changing for us however. Sensei made a shift from the hard nosed Karate that lead to feelings of pure terror and a feeling of possible bodily harm every time you went to the club to a more family friendly Karate program. This was done to in response to a dip in membership due to the style of teaching and training we had once enjoyed. And the whole atmosphere changed. The club strived to maintain membership and it became an obsession with some of us to keep the whole thing going, we never had to worry about that in the late 80’s and the early 90’s, we just showed up and did our best to survive a class at a time.
The club also lost out when we left the organization in that we now did not have the tournaments we once had, we also did not have the masters coming out to grade us and Sensei was so much more picky than they were and the testing was really harder. We started to see a shift in martial arts training in general in our city, more TKD clubs opening because of the Olympic participation of that art in the games meant most people sent their kids to that art not Karate. We also saw a drop in participation in general by kids and adults in Karate. The economy was going in the toilet and it really affected all of us and Karate a lot. People were far more picky with what they spent money on and they were scared!
Sensei moved us first to the basement of the building and the JKA move down stairs made the foot traffic marketing die, also new members did not like the idea of training in the basement. It was dark and looked dirty and scary, when we were on the main floor we used to joke about the old building once being a funeral home and the bodies were kept in the basement, now we were in the basement! The one good thing that happened is just before the move we found our way back to the JKA and had started to form a relationship with Saeki Sensei in Ottawa. We were solid in our core, but issues with one instructor, my old ESP Karate instructor separated us from that club and a second instructor retired and moved to BC. We had three clubs now and my little club was building in students as well, so really four.
During the early ears and right till we left the ISKF and then rejoined the JKA I had the pleasure and honor of training with some great seniors and all of them affected my training. Some I still talk to but because of politics and my inability to get past what some of the seniors did to Sensei I have left many of them alone and not communicated with them in years, but I still feel that when the JKA was at its height it was built by Sensei and those seniors to be something Great.
I enjoy seeing that most of them still train and that the issues of personality have not affected their passion for Karate. I also enjoy seeing people from the old days flourish in Karate, people like Scott Middleton who is now a very high ranking person in his new organization. Scott worked so hard and it is only because politics and distance that I don’t train with him now.
We really were blessed by great circumstances and a dedicated instructor who gave more than just his time to build the organization and give us all a great club to train at as well as more than just a little information to build our own Karate training around.
Since then we left down town and moved the club to a tennis facility, that was eventually ripped down, we moved to a church in the down towns less than nice area and lost even more students. But we eventually found our way to a community club in the western part of the down town-ish area and began to rebuild the organization. We saw instructors retire and leave and some new ones pop up. Our style of Karate still holds the traditional components but we now focus much less on sport and more on health and enjoying Karate.
One of the senior students opened his own stand alone and we are looking at other options for clubs. The whole organization and clubs have changed and are now starting to form into solid clubs and the future is bright again for the JKA. My training has changed as well. I once was very young and my training was all about just doing as much as I could, now with a family and being much older I train smarter and focus more on getting inside of the techniques and understanding what I am doing more than just performing like a purebred horse!
Karate will always change, but the one thing that has to stay the same is the passion and commitment one has to their own Karate!
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