My wife and daughter are hooked again this season, on the tv show…”So You Think You Can Dance.” Out of all the thousands of dancer-wannabees who entered the tryouts in the various cities, it’s now whittled down to just a handful of extremely talented, hard-working young dancers. I marvel at their work ethic, at how they hold up under intense stress that seems to bring out their best. I can’t believe that, whatever their individual dance background, they successfully learn different styles and routines every week…sometimes two routines with partners…and still come through dancing like pros. Then I wonder…if I had these dancers as karate students, would I be able to teach them karate, especially kata so that they could perform like experts and how long would it take for them to pick it up? What is it that separates kata in karate-do from skillful dance? Well, here are my thoughts: 1) All of the movements in kihon, and therefore, the sequences and combinations in the kata of karate-do are meant to generate purposeful focused power. Not for the sake of generating power, but to generate and impart force into selected targets on an opponent’s body. In addition to the [...]

The topic of this note is “Fellowship”, but let me begin by saying that among all people, some are more blessed with individual self-motivation than others. This may be at work, at home projects, in academics, in daily exercise, in eating a balanced diet, in avoiding excess of any kind, and so forth. For folks such as this (Sempai James comes to mind), coming to training whenever possible is a no-brainer. James is a retired supervisor of social workers, but at 70 years old his retired life is anything but relaxed. He is up and doing his daily five mile walk long before the sun comes up. Each day, he meditates, stretches, lifts weights, punches the heavy bag and does work around the house. Later in the day, he does a second walk (this time with his wife) of three miles. And until recently, he spent much of his day helping care for his father-in-law (nearly 100 years old), who passed on earlier this year. And he still finds time to come faithfully to karate training and pitching in where ever he can help and training as hard as anyone. We’ll miss his presence for three weeks in August, when [...]

We’ve all been blessed with a blog for our karate ministry since January 2006. The site is all the work of kohai Donna, who in real-life, is a very talented webmaster. Donna and her husband, sempai Wes, have training with us for several years and it was she who approached me with her idea of creating a blog as a unique way of helping the ministry. Since she created it over a year ago, she has used it to collect and archive the various email notes I send out (both the good and bad, haha), capture moments in the ministry via photos and videos, not to mention being a great place for our members and friends to visit and keep in touch when they can’t come to training. Most recently, she (with much help from her better half, sempai Wes) expanded the site to include a Resources Section, something our members have always wished for; easy to access videos of Shotokan Karate katas, along with recommended books for reading. When you access the Resources Section, simply click on the desired kata and Presto!, the video appears, ready to play. Recently, Sempai James generously donated to the ministry, part of his [...]