The moral of this story is...

In the mid-60s, I opened a branch dojo in Santa Cruz, a beachside town about 30 miles from San Jose. I had opened one not long before in San Jose. But signups were slow. I attributed it to the fact that there were two other schools in the valley, which must have had a population of around 300,000 at the town. I thought there were too many schools in San Jose – 3, counting mine. Now, there’s one on every corner and we do fine.

Santa Cruz, at the time, was a small town, with a very conservative attitude – almost like you would find in small towns in the Midwest. We once tried to rent their civic auditorium so we could hold a tournament on a Sunday and they refused. They told us that decent people were in church on Sundays. (They had no problems, however, hosting the Miss California pageant there each year on a Sunday. I guess decent folks were either in church on Sundays or watching beautiful women in bathing suits.) After the University of California, Santa Cruz, opened its sprawling, very liberal campus there a few years later, the area made a drastic change of directions politically.

Before opening the branch dojo, I wanted to test the area. So I rented a junior high gym for the night and ran an ad in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, their top newspaper, offering a free karate class. When I got to the gym, I found 85 people waiting to be taught. Only around 20 stayed with it and became regular students. I had some great fighters come out of that small group.

Santa Cruz, counter to its very conservative population core in the early days, was long one of the surfing capitals of the world. So there were always a bunch of non-conservative surfers who trained on occasion. One offered to swap me marijuana for instruction. I passed and his own liking of the substance made him an occasional student at best. But he was one of the top surfers at the time.

Me (right) and Bill Burja, with his trophy for winning
Brown Belt Division at GM Ed Parker's Internationals.

One of my best students from the Santa Cruz group was Bill Burja. His family owned a mushroom farm in the area and Bill had lived there all his life. Bill was a handsome, muscular, nice guy, who the ladies absolutely LOVED. While he was training, women would leave photos of themselves under the windshield wipers of his car with their telephone numbers. Problem was he was married to a woman called Tony. (I don’t know if I am spelling it right or what her full name may have been.) But she was very watchful of him. When all the photos started appearing, she began driving him to the dojo and picking him up after class. (There’s a great story about the night she didn’t show up and I drove him home that I may tell one of these days.)

After we relocated the dojo from the junior high, which was on one of the main streets of town, she let him drive in again. I received a call at the dojo one night from Tony. She asked to speak with Bill. I hadn’t seen him. So I looked around to make sure he hadn’t just come in without me seeing him. But I came up empty. I struggled a bit over what to tell her. I had a personal policy of always telling the truth. That was how I was raised. But the truth could end in a divorce. I couldn’t lie, however, so I told her I hadn’t seen him. “He’s not there!” she screamed, angrily. “Ah, no,” I said. Then, she laughed. “I just called to tell you he wouldn’t be coming in tonight. I wanted to see if you would lie for him or not.”

I was glad I had been raised as I had and honesty was held in high esteem. So the moral is this story is always tell the truth.

Thanks for your patience and continued support.

Hanshi Anderson's Patch

The above photo is of a patch given to me by Hanshi George Anderson many years ago, when he was 1^st Vice President of WKF (previously WUKO) and member of the powerful WKF Executive Committee. It was one of his.

He handed it to me one day and I thanked him, then asked him what I was supposed to do with it. He said “Put it on your blazer.” I said that I couldn’t as I wasn't a member of the committee. He said “Put it on. If anybody questions you about it, tell them to come talk to me.”

I, of course, never put it on my blazer. And, as was his nature, he questioned me about it every time he saw me in my blue blazer from that point onward. I never figured out why he wanted me to wear it. I suspected it was to thumb his nose at someone but never discovered who that was. Life was never dull around him.

Me and Hanshi Anderson (right)

I apologize for my slowness over the last few months in putting up new posts. I’ve been swamped with a bunch of additional stuff, not to mention work on my novel – The Arrow Catcher. I recently acquired a great, new book editor who has made some astute recommendations which require a bunch of rewriting. I’m working my way through that as well right now. Thanks for your patience.

More on who writes our history

While a graduate student at Stanford, we were taught how to evaluate all sorts of written material – books, dissertations, newspapers, research results, etc. The university expected us to one day publish our own books and articles and to perform and publish our own research. So we had to know how to do these properly and present valid conclusions. Many, if not most, research projects are flawed to some degree. Sometimes the experiment was structured or setup improperly. Sometimes there were flaws in their math. And sometimes their conclusions weren’t valid.

For example, someone found that children who could walk balance beams were better readers than those who were poor at it. From that, they concluded that you could improve reading scores by teaching students to walk a beam. So schools all across the country ran out and bought balance beams and required their students to walk them on a daily basis. Reading scores didn’t change. They had erroneously assumed that since those who could walk balance beams were better readers that not just a relationship but a causal relationship existed between the two, that walking beams made people better readers. No such relationship existed. When someone asked me about it, I told them I had a theory about how to defeat cancer. Everyone who came down with cancer wore underwear. So if you didn’t want to contract cancer, you should stop wearing underwear. There was a relationship (everyone who had cancer wore underwear) but not a causal one (wearing them didn’t cause cancer).

Non-research material – magazine and newspaper articles, non-academic books, etc. – are always suspect as literally anyone could write one of these. When checking such publications, we knew to be very careful about using their data, quotes, or results in any serious study.

I once read a book entitled Mind Over Matter. In it, the author gave accounts of several instances in which people‘s minds had been verified to have overcome matter. One such proof was a martial artist who supposedly beat a world champion arm wrestler using only his thumb or one finger (I forget which). It had, according to the author, been verified by Black Belt Magazine. Since I had every issue of Black Belt from the first, I tracked down the article because I knew the martial artist involved and doubted the claim. In the article, the martial artist himself claimed he had beaten the world champion arm wrestler, not some independent and objective observer. It may have been true but was, like “hearsay” evidence in court, not useful in any serious study.

Magazine and newspaper articles are full of errors, misquotes, and outright lies. Some of these are intentional but most are not. The writer is honestly trying to do a good job but lacks the skill or sufficient knowledge of the subject to do it justice.

I tell people that if you don’t want to be misquoted, don’t let anyone do an article on you. If you do, it’s pretty much a given. I’ve had many articles done on me and never had one that didn’t have something – a quote or explanation – that didn’t make me cringe a bit. The writer will hear what they want to hear, mishear what you said, etc.

A local journalist did an article on me several years ago. She quoted me as saying that the nunchaku was developed to beat the husk off of corn. I don’t remember seeing a lot of corn when I was in Okinawa as it was a new world product. But then, I had never said anything about corn. I had said it was used to beat the husk off of rice. But I took some kidding about it for a while nonetheless.

The following was written in a 1987 Karate-Kung Fu Illustrated Magazine article. It was about me and my thoughts on the subject of ikken hissatsu, the so-called one strike kill.

“The Japanese call it the one-punch kill,” wrote the writer of the article, based on information I supplied her. “It’s a blow that brings all fighting elements together with perfect timing to immobilize your opponent with one sudden burst of power.”

Close enough.

“The one-punch kill is tough to teach, since many students believe they can do it naturally without any thought put into the correct power-producing dynamics.”

Have no idea where she got that.

“Some instructors won’t even bother to teach the one-punch kill to women, because they think women don’t have enough power to punch. Then when a female student learns it incorrectly, she proves them right. However, women can actually learn the technique faster than many men because they have no pre-conceived notions about how it’s done.”

This was a mixture of things I had told her, but about a different topic. (Female students often learn how to punch correctly faster than their new male counterparts as they have no bad-habits to unlearn so they improve from day one.) It had nothing to do with ikken hissatsu.

“If the one-punch kill is more difficult than meets the eye, who can teach it correctly? In Japan instructors of the one-punch kill are commonplace. However, in North America, they’re rare. But Jim Mather, who owns and runs the California Karate Academy in San Jose, California, is an American who has put a lot of thought into the dynamics of punching.”

What??? It was true I had given it a lot of thought but so had many others in this hemisphere.

Anyway, just a bit more food for thought to bear in mind when you read a history or article on the martial arts – or someone proposes to write an article on you.