Article

The Road to Karate – A Budoka’s Way To Live
By Hiroshi Shoji. Shihan of the Japan Karate Association.

Part 13 - Notes on Food Shortages

..we learned a lot in general from sempais of other clubs and also, as many aspects of other sports such as a balance in power, speed and explosive power...

As we lived as community members under the same roof, we visited and had meetings with members from other athletic clubs frequently. As we learned a lot in general from sempais of other clubs and also, as many aspects of other sports such as a balance in power, speed and explosive power, were useful to us, we quite often visited sempais from other clubs. Some times we talked about serious subjects and other times we just spent time on trivial matters.

One of the sempais whom I used to visit always sat with dignity in the middle of his room in front of a rectangular Japanese charcoal heater which he had brought into the dormitory. Water was always boiling in a copper kettle, making a clinking noise. He was a handsome and young looking person, smoking tobacco with a Japanese style long thin pipe. He could have been easily a model for a portrait. He was a very refined looking person, a type of person that you would not expect to find at the men-only dormitory housed by unkempt athletes.

I was rather impressed that there were strange people in the world!

Although he was such a refined looking person, whether due to his hunger or strange nature, I was surprised at his peculiar eating habits. When I was visiting him in his room, he grabbed a dragonfly that flew into his room and dipped it into the boiling water on the Japanese charcoal heater and ate it as a boiled dragon. No matter how hungry I was, I would not be able to do such a thing. I was rather impressed that there were strange people in the world!

As it is said that everybody is different to other people, the life at the dormitory had aspects of fun, with the people who had strange habits living together, such as eating snakes as a medicine or behaving strangely. Like an incident recently reported in the newspaper, a member of the dormitory was forced by sempai to drink sake which his body could not accept and as a result he became violent and gave hard times to the sempai who had trouble restraining him. He could not remember a thing afterwards. Since then, his sempais never forced him to drink sake. The greetings of Oss*33 were also forced on the members of the dormitory.

These were some scenes of the life of youth at the dormitory where appetite and romance co-existed.

Training - Night Walk
To practice techniques at the dojo is not the only training. There are many different ways of training in Karate. As per Funakoshi Sensei’s teaching “Karate is not only in the dojo”, we should always train our legs and hips even outside the dojo.

When we were 4th year students, we planned a night walk as a part of our training.

When we were 4th year students, we planned a night walk as a part of our training. We had heard from the sempais that they had also trained themselves with night walks before the last war. Our plan was to revive the tradition which had been suspended after the war. We looked for a suitable destination which would be about 50 kilometres away. As the vicinity of Mt. Takao was thought to be suitable, we implemented our night walk to Mt. Takao without a prior investigation of the location.

We gathered at university in the evening and set off for a night walk. As the purpose of the night walk was to increase our physical strengths, the pace of our walk was fast, probably at a slow jogging pace for normal people. The scene of us walking at a fast pace must have been strange to the people around us. We were dressed in the traditional Japanese haori and hakama. Many of us wore iron clogs or high-teeth wooden clogs. We found out later how wise those who wore shoes or two-toe socks or straw thongs were. I regretted that I wore wooden clogs. My feet got swollen as if another layer of skin had developed on the soles. We train barefoot, therefore the soles of our feet must be thicker than those of other people. But, it is not possible to walk for many hours with clogs on. We found out that walking on bare feet was much easier. Some of those who wore two-toe socks and clogs threw the clogs away.

Her anger immediately subsided and she said “What hard work!” and gave us sweets which she said would help us recover from fatigue.

We had to take a short break just before Tachikawa. We laid our fatigued bodies on the ground. We did not care about getting dirty. As we could not lie down in the middle of the road, we lay under the eaves of one of the houses along the road. The owner of the house must have been surprised and got angry. She put her face out of the door and scolded at us. We explained to her about our night walk. Her anger immediately subsided and she said “What hard work!” and gave us sweets which she said would help us recover from fatigue. We felt the thoughtfulness of this unknown person and accepted her hospitality gladly.

We continued the night walk to Mt. Takao, asking directions to the destination, as we were not familiar with the geography. At one point we asked someone about the remaining distance to the destination and later on when we asked another person the same question, the distance was, for some reason, increased, which surprised us. We thought the people living in such a remote area would be honest, but we wondered if the people in this area had an inclination to tease non-locals or maybe we were fooled by a fox or a badger. (Translator’s remarks: Foxes and badgers are said in Japan to be able to transform themselves into the shape of a human being and fool people.)

The relief that we had made it and the extreme fatigue took over and we fell down on the ground.

Experiencing these events on the way, we finally arrived at the foot of Mt. Takao. Although we underwent various training in Karate to strengthen our bodies, our movements became slow once we started climbing the mountain, barely crawling. We reached the summit of the mountain just in time for the sunrise. What a fantastic and refreshing feeling it was to reach the destination and see the sunrise after trying ourselves to the limit! But what happened afterwards was not so great. The relief that we had made it and the extreme fatigue took over and we fell down on the ground. The morning sunshine coming through the green leaves stung our eyes that had not slept all night. Whilst drifting into unconsciousness, we asked ourselves.

“Is it necessary to do this and why are we doing this?” We became sleepy and could not be bothered to think further.

“It does not matter why we are doing this. We just do it. All we need is action without words.” When we woke up, the sun was shining on us. We reflected that we needed to train ourselves more.

Nothing can replace a sense of achievement and satisfaction. This can be applied to the training of techniques. After having established a goal, a sense of achievement of the goal through devotion is great. The harder the process to reach the goal is, the greater the sense of achievement. To be continued...

Notes
*33 Oss is the greeting used mostly by people practising Martial Arts.

Read our Tribute to Shoji Sensei from November 2003

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