HIS Karate-Do

Just found out that we won’t have training on two Saturdays in May. As happens from time to time, Momilani Rec Center has events that conflict with our schedule: on Sat, May 6 there’ll be a garage sale fundraiser, and on Sat, May 13, the center will have a craft fair. If your schedule allows, you are always welcome to train on a Monday evening. Another option would be to do some reading related to karate. Secondly, for those who forgot – or never knew, our group does have a website at www.hiskarate.com. Over a decade ago, one of our members, Kohai Donna (an excellent purple belt) happened to be a seasoned webmaster and graciously offered to build and maintain a website for us. Over the last 11-12 years, she has faithfully done so, mostly gathering up my occasional rambling emails and formatting these into a single resource that members new and old, can access to read up on mostly karate-related thoughts. In fact, some years ago, Sempai Kevin was looking for a Shotokan dojo to visit and possibly train in and he happened upon the site and ultimately joined us – today, he is one of our sempais! As [...]

Now, I’ve often said that karate training is not just the physical exercise that we get to do together, there’s cultivation of the mind, body and spirit, knowledge of bunkai and body movement, gaining patience and learning perseverance, and…gaining an appreciation of the cultural value of this art along with some knowledge of the history of the karate that we’re privileged to practice.  Below is a local video of a talk on  Karate in the Ryukyu Kingdom that was given by sensei’s Goodin and Nakata several years ago at UH.  If you have a few minutes, you might take a look – it’s chock full of little-known information about the history of the kingdom that was to become Okinawa Prefecture in 1879.  Although I already knew most of this, I must admit that I learned a few things from watching…and just for you all, I actually did watch the entire video – all one hour and forty-three minutes! …just so I would be familiar with what I was sharing with you, haha. It’s a small world – one of the two speakers, the late Sensei Pat Nakata was a very close friend of Sensei Fujiwara – they practiced together in [...]

Well, what’s with my stupid title, “I like karate cause it’s so darned hard to learn”?  Well, for those of you who never heard about my initial foray into the art (I joined with Sensei Peter in 1970), I had a very narrow objective when I first started – to learn how to do a good kick and a good punch.  Previously, I had trained in Aikido for several years and thought that I only needed to pick up kicking and punching skills.  This was my main objective.  Fortunately, from the outset, both Sensei Peter and I were extremely good at copying the basic techniques that we were shown.  I swear that we could have passed ourselves off as color belts after just a few lessons – and that fact proved to be a negative in my training…I felt that I had achieved my rather limited training goals and promptly quit after just over a month (can you imagine my arrogance as a young teenager, haha). Luckily, Sensei Peter continued to train and it was only by watching his skills and knowledge continue to grow and grow over the next year that I gradually realized how little I had actually [...]