In the early 1970s I was quite committed to the practice and teaching of Yoga. At some point I realized that Yoga was not the path for me. I had always been drawn to Japanese culture and I began to investigate Zen. My first encounter with Japanese culture came when I was 11 years old and I started working for my father. My father was a wholesale florist whose business was located in the middle of two square blocks known as the L.A. Flower market. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday he would get up at about 2 in the morning, eat breakfast and go to work. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday he would not get up until 5. I would go with him and work at the shop doing menial tasks on Saturdays. Later, during holidays and summer vacation I would work full time at the shop. The main thoroughfare was Wall St so I can say I grew up working on Wall St.!
There were many other wholesale florists on the street as well as two large open markets where wholesalers and growers would bring their flowers to sell to retailers and route runners who would call on retailers who did not come in to the markets. About half of the wholesalers and a lot of growers were Japanese Americans. My dad was very highly respected by them. During the war, when the Japanese were moved off the coast into internment camps, his company took over the running of the Japanese - American flower market. Many Japanese Americans were robbed of their businesses and possessions during the war by unscrupulous individuals and companies but when the Japanese Americans returned, my father’s company returned all property and material to them. My father spent much of this time in Europe fighting the Germans but his partners worked tirelessly to keep the Japanese – American assets solvent and even wrote letters trying, in vain, to get some of the growers and wholesalers released.
After the war there were two Markets, one almost completely peopled by Japanese Americans and one almost completely peopled by European Americans. When they amalgamated, the Japanese would only accept one person as the director, my father. So I had a lot of contact with people of Japanese ancestry and came to love the culture and the food. However, when I went away to University, I lost touch with that culture.
In the early 70s while still involved in Yoga, I realized that I really wanted to learn a martial art. I had been a pretty wimpy kid and relied mostly on my wits to avoid fights with other kids. I also made sure that every year I had a really big, tough kid as a friend. Heaven help the kid that picked on me. So I figured it was time to get a handle on male violence and to be able to fight my own battles. At one point in this search I had a dream that seemed really strange to me. I was in a basement fighting the guys who had picked on me in high school. For some reason I was wearing a black skirt, which seemed very strange.
I visited many martial arts schools and dojos but it seemed to me there was a lot of ego involved and that a lot of the people teaching were pretty nasty guys obsessed with competition and bravado. In 1975 I attended the Transpersonal Psychology conference in Asilomar and saw that there was a morning workshop in Aikido, a martial art I had never heard of. The instructor was Bob Frager, a psychologist and head of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. I later learned he had studied Aikido in Japan with the founder himself. He has written humorously and informatively about this experience. And, he was wearing a black skirt.
After two mornings of practice, I was hooked. I returned to Victoria and at my first day back at the University of Victoria, I opened the campus newspaper and was surprised to see an article about a young man from Hawaii who was going to begin teaching Aikido on the following Monday. This could be seen as an occurrence of what Carl Jung refers to as “Synchronicity,” two or more seemingly unrelated events that occur simultaneously and are perceived by the observer as carrying a message that would only have meaning in the psyche of that person.
I began studying with Gary Mols Sensei and he did a great job of teaching us physical Aikido as well as presenting Aikido philosophy in an understandable and useful manner. I had been practicing Aikido for about a year when Gary Sensei announced that we were going to Vancouver to participate in a demonstration that the new Japanese Sensei there was giving. We arrived at the gym and all went into the change room together. After changing into our dogis we proceeded upstairs and the demonstration began. We all demonstrated but Kawahara Sensei’s demonstration was the most amazing and terrifying. I had never seen such power and precision. After the demonstration we went back to the change room, changed into our street clothes and were preparing to leave for lunch together. As Kawahara Sensei was getting dressed I noticed he was looking around and saying something in Japanese to one of his students. I realized that he was looking for his socks and I looked down to my feet I realized I had put on his black socks and not my own. Terrified, I left the gym and even after many years together as student and teacher, never told him about this.
Kawahara Sensei made many visits to Victoria and I consider him one of my best teachers ever. I wanted so much to learn from him that I even studied Japanese so I would better understand him. On one occasion, he, my friend Gary Anderson and I sat in the wheelhouse of Gary’s fishing boat drinking scotch and carrying on a conversation about life itself. At one point I asked, “Sensei, you drink, you smoke and you like to consort with women. Is this good for you?”
He replied, “Not good for body, but good for spirit!” Gary and I both erupted in raucous laughter.
After a few years, Mols Sensei stopped teaching, and through Kawahara Sensei I was able to convince Ishiyama Sensei to come from Montreal to Victoria. Starting with a few dedicated students he built the dojo into a large, highly functional group of individuals dedicated to the practice and study of Aikido. I have never met a finer group of people and I am sure Ishiyama’s own integrity and positive approach to life and its challenges drew students with the same intentions he had.
After our first summer camp Kawahara Sensei gave a little speech. As we were sitting in seiza completely exhausted but filled with the joy seven days of intense practice had brought us, Kawahara Sensei began to speak in Japanese. Ishiyama Sensei translated.
“You Canadians are the worst Aikido students I’ve ever seen in the world. I thought Americans were bad but you are worse.” Imagine the shock we all felt as we were being ruthlessly criticized after a long week of intense practice. What we didn’t realize was that this is a traditional Asian practice used when training students. It keeps one from becoming inflated and in fact is a compliment. If he did not have hope for us as students he would not criticize us. So every year after practice Kawahara Sensei would rip us up one side and down the other and we got used to it. In fact, we sort of looked forward to it. So imagine our surprise when after four or five years we sat down at the end of the practice and waited for Kawahara Sensei to tell us how terrible we were. On this occasion all he said was, “Your Aikido is getting better.” It was like the heavens had opened up and God himself had blessed our Aikido.
One of the most difficult aspects of aging is the limitations that my body is experiencing. I gave up physical Aikido several years ago when my arthritic joints just refused to cooperate. I notice that I sometimes lose balance or bump into doors, something I never would have done in the past. I hope I am still doing mental and spiritual Aikido in spite of my body limitations. What good is a martial practice if it does not transfer to daily life? Really, as Ishiyama Sensei would remind us, how many times in a day is someone with a wooden sword going to attack you? And yet I can be sure that every day will bring interpersonal and psychological challenges.
When I was first studying Aikido, I began to look into the martial philosophy of Budo. I realized that for the Samurai, an honorable life meant serving one’s lord faithfully and without question. Dying in the service of the lord in battle was the most honorable act one could perform. As a young professional with a wife and two children in modern Canadian culture, this didn’t seem very practical so I set about trying to translate this philosophy of ancient Japan into a way of life that was applicable to me, now. I realized that if I considered integrity and truth as my “lord” then my ego, not me, would have serve those concepts and, in fact, may have to die in their service. This approach to life turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined but I hope it still guides my behavior today.
One of the greatest gifts I was given in Aikido was the opportunity to confront my own fear and to finish something to which I had committed myself regardless of my fear. On one occasion a Japanese Zen monk stopped by our dojo in Victoria and gave a talk after practice. He asked the question, “What are the three things you must do to become proficient in Aikido?” Some of us answered, “Practice.” He said, “Yes, that is one.” Students then offered numerous other suggestions to which he answered “No” repeatedly. When no more answers were forthcoming he said, “The answers are practice, practice, practice.”
I did not always want to go to practice and sometimes I would have to drag myself to the dojo. Sometimes fear and anxiety would stalk me as I stepped onto the mats and I would want to make an excuse and leave. But I almost always went and I always stayed. Five minutes into practice my spirit would be soaring and often at the end of class, soaking wet with sweat and joints aching I would think, “My God, it is good to be alive!”
I used to be a very anxious person. I think I come by it naturally since my mother, Virginia, was extremely anxious. I think her philosophy was that if you worry about it enough it won’t happen or if does you will be ready. Since most of what she worried about didn’t happen she was reinforced for her worry. See, it works. I worry and it doesn’t happen.
I once asked my supervisor why I was seeing so many clients with anxiety. He answered, "The world is a scary place.” I said, “For this I am paying $170.00/hr?” I remember hearing Chuck Yeager being interviewed about a scene in the movie “The Right Stuff.” He was asked if he was afraid when the plane he was testing went into a death spiral. He answered, “No, fear just gets in the way of the job to be done.”
Once, when I was feeling anxious about a high-school math test I asked my dad the same question about the battles he fought in Germany and Korea. He had a similar response. He said that no anxiety means you are not paying attention, too much anxiety is crippling but some anxiety is good because it forces you to focus on the job to be done. Although, he did say that the one thing that really scared him was seeing the Germans advancing across snow covered fields in their white camouflage outfits. He said on one occasion he thought he was watching ghosts advance against his position.
I knew I finally had a pretty good handle on anxiety and fear after an experience I had a few years ago at the local hospital. I started feeling a pain in my chest one evening and after it became quite intense I drove to the hospital and was admitted to the ER immediately. I was given an EKG, administered nitroglycerine and put through the tests given to heart attack victims. I was informed I had suffered a heart attack and my life was going to change.
Everyone left the room eventually except one male nurse. We began to talk and he said he and his wife, also a nurse, wanted to move to Vancouver, Canada. I proceeded to tell him the best way to do that and we had a long discussion about the Canadian medical system. At some point he asked, “Do you have a spiritual practice?” Surprised, I said, “Sort of. I have studied Aikido for many years and it is the basis of how I live my life. Why do you ask?”
He replied, “this is not how people who have suffered a heart attack usually behave. You are not depressed, not upset, not angry and you don’t even seem worried.” I answered, “What good would that do?”
Eventually, after three days of tests it was discovered that my heart was perfectly healthy but had somewhat of an unusual but not dangerous rhythm. My favorite experience was the treadmill. As we reached the final stages and I was gasping for breath wondering if I would be able to finish it, the tech said, “Keep going Larry. Keep going.” The she exclaimed, “Don’t follow the light, don’t follow the light Larry.” After, she said, “You have the most boring normal heart I have ever seen.”
Pondering what the nurse had said, I tried to understand why anxiety no longer seemed to be a real issue for me. I decided it was Aikido that had helped me lose that burden. A side effect of this experience was that it brought my mortality to the forefront and I had to decide what I needed to complete before I leave the planet. This book is one of those things.
I believe the discipline required for conscientious practice taught me to face my fears, overcome my own laziness and anxiety and complete tasks because I had committed to completing them. Striving to live with integrity was the greatest gift Aikido gave to me. It has become the foundation of how I try to respond to every challenge I face in life. I do not always succeed and fear, laziness and negativity are always lurking.
A funny example of the difficulty of translating ideas across cultures was told to my wife by Dr. Hugh Keenleyside who was a member of the Canadian delegation to Japan before WW2 began. Apparently the Japanese had just begun to celebrate Christmas and as Dr. K. entered a Japanese department store he beheld a large, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. At the top was a large replica of Santa - nailed to a cross.
I studied Japanese for two years at the University of Victoria. The two people I practiced with most often were my Sensei and friend, Ishu Ishiyama and my colleague, Michiko. Japanese is very different from English and I remember some humorous experiences.
Michiko told me she was once discussing American politics with a class when she first began teaching in Canada. At some point the class broke into raucous laughter and she asked them why. They told her she had just said she wanted to discuss the difference between Canadian parliamentary elections and the American plesidential erection. I will forever be grateful to her for teaching me a response to, “O genki deska?” a greeting roughly translated as, “How are you?” She told me a good response would be, “O kage sama de.” “Fine, because of you.” How much richer than, “OK”.
On another occasion I climbed the stairs to Ishu’s house and asked politely, “May I come up into your house?” He laughed and said, “You just asked if you could throw up in my house.” He once told me that I could study for years and I would never completely understand Japanese. One reason is that they leave a lot out that you have to fill in with cultural content, much of which is unknown to westerners. Sometimes the subject or object is left out of a sentence. Verbs are sometimes omitted and can be negated at the end of a sentence if the speaker senses discomfort in the listener regarding the content of the sentence. So a sentence might be, “As for Johnny, a good boy he is….not.” The other reason Ishu said it would be difficult to ever understand Japanese completely is that the language, by its very structure, serves the purpose of hiding meaning from foreigners. There is also the problem that there are really two Japanese languages, one for men and one for women.
The importance of syllabic stress and context in the language was demonstrated by one of my teachers who gave this example. Mr. Yamada visits Mr. Tanaka. Ms. Tanaka answers the door and says, “Mr. Tanaka is not home. Would you like to come in and wait for him?” He said this in three ways, all of which sounded exactly the same to me. Apparently the first phrasing meant indeed he would be home soon. The second meant he was away and you shouldn’t really come in but politeness requires me to ask you to come in. The third meant either he was dead or was never coming back. Japanese people interpret these differences with ease. We, of the literal English language, do not.
This teacher also told a story about arriving in San Diego from Japan. He said that in Japan when you are first asked if you want something to eat or drink you refuse it and say something to the effect of, “No I couldn’t possibly eat a bite.” You refuse a second time then grudgingly accept and eat every morsel or you insult your host. So, arriving at his host residence looking haggard and thirsty in the California heat, he was asked, “Would you like a drink?” “No thank you,” he said. His host said “Ok” and began to orient him to his new home. He thought, “What is wrong with this person? Why does he not ask me again? Who are these impolite barbarians?”
This penchant for politeness and indirectness often confuses us westerners and our missing the hidden meaning in the communication makes us seem stupid or rude. Soon after Ishiyama Sensei began teaching Aikido he realized we did not have the same standard of cleanliness that he did. One night after class he asked us, “Would you like to wash the mats now?” We had already opened the fridge in the dojo and started to drink beer so we decided we wanted to do it at another time. He later told me he was astounded at this response as it was not a request but a command. A Japanese person would know that. We did not. When I arrived for the next practice, the fridge was gone and buckets and rags were set out so we could clean the mats before practice. He never had to ask again.
All in all, the influence of Aikido, Japanese culture and Japanese people in my life cannot be overestimated and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to experience the insights and kindness those experiences afforded me. Domo Arigato.
