My first opportunity to witness Soke Takayuki Kubota in action came at Ed Parker’s 1965 International Karate Championships, the biggest karate tournament in the world at the time. Grandmaster Parker was a great guy, who was always a pleasure to be around and who tried to make each year’s Internationals as challenging and fair as possible for competitors, fun for spectators, and educational for instructors and martial artists in general.

He invited Soke Kubota to demonstrate for the instructors who met each morning in the basement of the tournament hotel to go over the rules, make announcements, introduce people, and present demonstrations by martial artists we hadn’t seen before. There had been an article in Black Belt Magazine, which everyone read back then, about this Japanese policeman who had done some amazing things, including breaking up a prison riot unarmed and single-handed. (I later asked him how he had managed to stop the riot. He basically said that if you hit the first guy so hard that it did massive damage, no one wanted to be number two.) The article included a great photo of Soke Kubota standing next to his police car. So everyone was eager to see this Japanese policeman in action. Soke Kubota and John Gehlsen, who was only a green belt at the time but would later become one of our greatest fighters, put on an impressive exhibition.

Just a few months earlier, I had returned from Korea and been discharged from the Army. I was already a black belt, having trained both before and during my military years, and I was looking for someone, preferably someone great, with whom to continue my training.

Whenever I spotted one of the early media stars, the celebrated, big-name martial artists at any tournament, I always watched to see how good their students were. If they were strong, I assumed they had a good instructor, who taught an effective martial arts system. I found, however, that few had produced any highly skilled students. What appeared to have made these instructors so successful was not the fighting system they taught but, rather, their genetic gifts – their natural reflexes, flexibility, hand-to-eye coordination, fast-twitch muscle composition, and so on. Many were such great natural athletes that they could have made any martial arts system look good, no matter how flawed. I wanted to find someone who taught a system that could make the average person effective.

I was very impressed with both Soke Kubota and his students. The kihon or fundamentals of his Gosoku Ryu system were practical and effective in a fighting environment, as they were the result of him merging his extensive street experience as a former Japanese police instructor and bodyguard to the American Ambassador with the traditional kihon and techniques he had learned from men like the legendary Kanken Toyama, one of his early instructors. When used to implement his own brilliant tactical and strategic skills, the results were impressive. His early students – men like Ben Otake, Tonny Tulleners, Harvey Eubanks, George Damon and later John Gehlsen, George Byrd, Val Mijailovic, Boban Petkovic, Rod Kuratomi, and others – were tough fighters, their techniques quick and powerful as the name of his style, Gosoku Ryu, Hard and Fast, implied.

In addition to demonstrating at the instructors’ meeting, Soke Kubota also demonstrated at that night’s black belt finals. Part of his demo included sparring with one of his black belts, Tonny Tulleners, who was the tournament’s middleweight black belt champion. (Tonny would later win the bronze medal at the first WUKO World Karate Championships in Tokyo in 1970.) Next, Soke Kubota sparred with the lightweight and heavyweight black belt champions individually, then all three at once. Of course some of their techniques would likely have “scored” during the long, three-against-one match had a win been determined by tournament rules, rather than by the rules of budo. But in attempting to score on him, they had to move close enough to reach him, which enabled him to grab and control them. From there, he could have easily delivered one of his brick-breaking, bone-crushing punches, had he chosen to do so. But even had any of them tried to do more than merely score a controlled tournament point, he had already established his ability to take a tremendous amount of physical abuse without diminishing his ability to continue fighting.

He had started his demo that evening by “warming up” his hands and legs – beating his knuckles and shins with a sledge hammer. So everyone was well aware of his own incredible toughness. As Okinawan and Japanese masters had long taught, his personal training in the martial arts had not only focused on learning attack and defensive skills but also on body toughening, making himself better able to withstand whatever his opponents might attempt to do to him during an actual attack.

This was true old school training, which Soke had undergone beginning when he was a small boy growing up in Kyushu. It was wartime and everyone in Japan, including four-year-old Takayuki Kubota, was being mobilized to defend their homeland, fighting on the beaches hand-to-hand if necessary. He said that he and the others would punch a heavy, makeshift punching bag 500 times each morning to toughen their hands and strengthen their striking techniques; then they would do the same with their feet, kicking the heavy bag 500 times to toughen their feet and strengthen their kicks.

In addition, he religiously practiced “bottle training,” beating his shins each day with a beer bottle to deaden the nerves. As an adult, this enabled him to deliver a ferocious shin-to-shin sweep that struck fear into the hearts of anyone who knew about it and were asked to spar him. “Sweep me,” he would tell visiting black belts who had come to train with him. (And the bigger they were, the better.) When they came around to sweep him, he would snap his lead leg back, pop his hips around, and smash his shin against the black belt’s shin, taking them to the floor.

What had impressed me greatly at Soke Kubota’s demonstration at the Internationals was his warrior’s attitude. He had such confidence in his ability that he never worried about testing himself against people he had never met, let alone fought before. And he did it in front of a standing-room-only assembly of top martial artists from at least this hemisphere.

His demos were always unplanned, spontaneous events. After I joined the IKA and began training under Soke, I was occasionally selected to demonstrate with him. He always told me simply to attack. When I asked, what type of attack he wanted, he would say “Any okay.” Do anything. Even when demonstrating in front of many of the top martial artists in North America at the Internationals, he wasn’t the slightest bit worried about being up to the task or looking bad, which was in stark contrast to what others who demonstrated that night had done. All gave choreographed, well-rehearsed presentations, and looked it. In one multiple-man attack scenario, an “attacker” fell down at the wrong time. When he realized it, he got back up, to the amusement of the audience. Soke’s demo was nothing like that. When he put someone on the mat, they knew it and usually stayed down at least long enough to run a physical inventory to make sure everything was still working as designed.

In 1966, I hosted the U.S Karate Winter- National Championships and invited Soke Kubota and Bruce Lee, who was living with a friend in Oakland at the time, to demonstrate. Chuck Norris drove up from Redondo Beach with some of his students and won his first Grand Championship. The event gave me the opportunity to speak in-depth with Soke Kubota and a few of his students. I found him very down-to-earth, a humble man with a wonderful sense of humor. He always made everyone feel at ease and was as comfortable with white belts as with the most senior black belts. What I heard and what I had already seen convinced me to join the IKA.

I have truly been blessed throughout my 64 years in the martial arts and owe so much to so many who helped me along the way, men and women who were not only wonderful people but also tremendous martial artists. Soke Takayuki Kubota was one of the most important of these and I’ll always be indebted to him.