Recently, at my son’s home, our evening repast (yes, I could have written evening meal, but repast goes better with reflections 🙂 consisted of some delicious old-style fare (beef stew and laulau) from the venerable Highway Inn in nearby Waipahu.  you all know the place, been there for nearly 70 years, serving up local food.
As it often does, my thoughts drifted to….karate.  What!?!  Eating great local style food should start one reminiscing about the good old food from the good old days or something like that, right?  Well, in my usual roundabout way, I’ll explain how I ended up thinking about karate-do.
I believe that I’ve mentioned that Sensei Wayne, Sensei Peter and myself were all members of the KAH Special Training group.  In addition, we were also members of the University of Hawaii Karate Kai.  The training was rather severe there, and the large group of young college students that would join at the beginning of each semester would rapidly dwindle to a few, willing to endure the rigorous classes.  Fast forward 45 years, and the club and the little building where we met and trained together, are both long gone. Sensei Wayne, Sensei Peter and myself are all still involved in the art, trying to pass on a bit of what we’ve learned to other interested students such as yourselves.  So much of our karate basics were honed through time (and blood and sweat) spent in that old wooden dance cottage in the UH Quarry, where the multi-deck parking structure stands today. The UH Karate Kai consisted entirely of UH students, mostly men; young, strong and connected by a desire to be the very best karateka possible.  It followed in the tradition of the the JKA in Japan, wherein the very best JKA technicians were initially developed in the severe training found in the university clubs.
The UH Karate Kai had been created in the 1960’s through the efforts of three UH students: Ed Fujiwara, Ron Awa and Bobby Toguchi.  Ed was a business major, Ron (like Sensei Peter and myself) was in the College of Architecture, while Bobby was studying history.  In the end, they were successful in attaining their black belts, graduating with their degrees, and in leaving behind the club which, years later, we all became members of.  When yours truly trained there in the early 1970’s, none of us had ever met, nor even knew about these men whose efforts had benefited us (and you) so greatly.
In later years, I was fortunate enough to meet all three – two are still involved in sharing the art.  Ed, as you know, later became my mentor, as Chief Instructor of the JKA in Hawaii.  We would all run into Ron at various seminars and tournaments.  He owns his own architectural firm and also established a dojo that caters to fellow architectural and engineering professionals.  I only met Bobby once, back in the early 1980’s, when he came to the Mililani Dojo to visit with his old friend, Sensei Ed.  He no longer had time to train, as he had given up his job at JAL to take over the family business and help out his ailing father.  He felt a strong call to preserve both the business and the tradition that his father had created, and the long work hours and effort required to maintain the business consumed most of his time and effort.  In 2003, he suffered a stroke, and in their turn, his daughters answered the call to help an ailing father to continue the family tradition.
It is the life-long dedication of these three men towards preserving and sharing something they believe to be of value that impresses me the most.  They are all different in their individual personalities and giftings, yet similar in their humble perseverance to share something special with others.  We are all beneficiaries of their ongoing efforts.  As I mentioned at the outset, these rambling memories were sparked by a bite of some delicious laulau from the Highway Inn in Waipahu…the very family business that Bobby spent most of his adult life preserving.  You can read a little more at: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2007/12/23/business/story01.html