My Undo-ing

When I started in the Violeta Dojo I was in my early thirties, had two very young boys, and was at the onset of a marital crisis. Going to the dojo three times a week wasn’t going to help much. Yet I needed the grind and sweat, the extremeness of it to break the placidness of the everyday. I worked in a small, dark office translating legal opinions of the court to English. This is a painstaking, lonely, and tiring job. It was a far cry from my previous work at an ad agency where producing TV and radio spots for retail accounts at least got me out of the office for most of the day and sometimes part of the evening. Karate was one of the very few things in my life where I saw results and that had any sort of meaningful structure. At the time it seemed a reasonable alternative to going mad or ending up sprawled drunk in a blind alley. That was the consensus of all concerned: go back to the dojo and work it out through the kata, and the 10-step pushup (some things never change).
So much for spiritual enlightenment. I was a mess so I thought I’d throw Goju into the mix and see what happened. I’d get to dojo running from work, change into my fucked up old gi and rinse my feet (courtesy requirement), then enter to warm up, do my hojo-undo. That was a change. Kimo had the whole array lined in the back of the dojo and after teaching you the basics, would prescribe a routine suited to your needs and ability. The chi-ishi was what he’d start you out with. Kimo stressed this sort of training but only after he was certain you had the physical preparedness for it. At the beginning you did it under the supervision of a senior student or Kimo himself.
I slowly realized that I was more a white belt than green belt. Even though I knew the steps in my kata I was still a greenhorn. I knew nothing. Kimo tore apart my Gekisai, undid my Saifa, retooled my Sanchin.
Kimo told the story of how a black belt through sweat, use, and time started to fade, become white; and how a white belt through the same process darkened in time. The color of a belt just says at what stage of undoing you’re at.
I began my undoing.

The .45 Kata

A recent essay by Dan Djurdjevic on his insightful blog, The Way of Least Resistance, brought to mind one of my favorite anecdotes of the Ochoa Years (circa 1970’s), about the “practicality” of martial arts, and specifically in the anecdote, of Kata and dojo training in general.

Well into my first year of karate, the black belts usually assigned a green belt to oversee the kata and bunkai training of the “senior” white belts, I among them. There was one particular green belt, a teenager who had been practicing in the dojo since he was a kid, who although proficient in technique was extremely inarticulate. The guys in the group I was in were mostly in their late 20’s and had regular jobs, and one in particular was a union organizer, a union muscle man. Since the kid had to give class and explain technique as part of his grading, he was uptight about it and rambled on more than he needed to, and like I said, the kid had a choice vocabulary of about 100 words of which 50% were “you knows” and interjections that sounded like the grunts of a crazy screeching monkey. We learned to ask little or nothing at all. The union organizer hated his guts because aside from the useless gibberish the kid would pick him out more than usual to make a point, peppering the 200 lb., 6’ 1” union guy with punches, kicking in his knees, and dropping him to the floor with arm locks and foot sweeps. After a particular trying day for the union guy, he stomped out of the training area, yanking his belt off and cussing under his breath. The sensei looked on with a bemused air and with a nod of his head sent the kid scampering after him to the dressing room. When the rest of the class got there the kid was berating the union guy about dojo etiquette and the importance of kata. The union guy had his back to us when suddenly he whipped around, grabbed the kid by the gi and put a .45 pistol to his nose and screamed “this is the only kata I need, the .45 kata.” As you can well expect, this became the white belt mantra for a time around the dojo dressing room, of course, well beyond the earshot of the sensei, mind you.