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 [...]

I received some sad news about the passing of a former co-worker at IBM Corp, Mr. Harold Uehara.  Harold was 82, and the last time I saw him was some twenty years ago when he retired from Big Blue.  Everything about Harold was colorful and unique.  Even though we considered him an “old man” at 60+, he was extremely youthful looking, well-muscled and always looked very dark…hence his nickname of Koge.  He was a field manager at the company, rumored as the uncredited creator of the “barefoot” design that was a trademark of notes from him.  I always admired his handwriting – beautiful (a fast-disappearing skill in our modern world of keyboarding)!  As I recall, like Sensei Peter and myself, he was a former member of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the US Air Force.  I think he once told me that he was flew in one of the three B52 bombers that circled the globe non-stop way back in 1957.  He was always extremely proud of his two children – in fact, his son worked for me at IBM for a summer, following his high school graduation.  At an IBM picnic way back in the late 1970’s, a couple of [...]