John Gehlsen

John Gehlsen

One of the highest complements I ever received was “This guy could be good.” Now on the surface, it would not appear much of a complement. I was already 3^rd dan and had won a fair amount of sparring trophies by then. But it was the person saying it and his personal standard that made it special to me.

It was the late 60s or early 70s. We were at Soke Takayuki Kubota’s IKA Headquarters on Kenmore in Los Angeles, the same dojo where they filmed the dojo scenes for the movie, The Mechanic, with Soke, Charles Bronson, and Jan-Michael Vincent. I was in an advanced class that met on a Saturday or Sunday afternoons, forget which. Soke was taking us through a drill he called “Attack-Defense.” Each person had to await the spontaneous attack of an opponent, defend against it, and launch a successful counterattack. If the counter failed, you had to wait for your partner to attack again. This went on until your counter was successful. Then, you got another partner and repeated the drill.

I was paired off with John Gehlsen. I don’t remember his attack or what I did in response but it was John who said to Soke, “This guy could be good.” Although not many people outside Soke’s organization were aware of John’s skill, I considered him (both then and now) one of the toughest fighters ever trained in this country.

John was a tall, lanky, thick-boned man, who worked both undercover and regular duties for LAPD. I first met him at Ed Parker’s Internationals. It must have been around 1965. Soke Kubota had recently arrived in the U.S. and Ed invited him to demonstrate at his annual event, the largest and most prestigious tournament in the world at the time. (I think I spoke previously about that event.) John was only a green belt at the time.

When I hosted my first tournament, the U.S. Winter-National Karate Championships in San Jose the following year, I also invited Soke to demonstrate. He brought both John and Tonny Tulleners with him. Chuck Norris drove up with Chris Wells and one of his other students. And Bruce Lee also demonstrated. I had met Bruce through someone. I think it was a great, old Kung Fu friend, James Yimm Lee, but not sure. (Bruce lived with Jimmy when he first came to California.) In the finals, Chuck fought Roy Castro, GM Ralph Castro’s brother, for the grand championship and Chuck prevailed, winning his first grand championship.

John and Soke Kubota shared an apartment back then in Hollywood, on Vine Street, if I remember right. It was on the second floor and they used the large front room for the dojo. I would fly to LAX in the morning on my one day off. I’d rent a car, drive to Hollywood, take a private lesson from Soke, and participate in every class. Then, I’d take the long drive to LAX, catch the last flight to SFO, then drive the 40 miles to my home in San Jose. (I relate this story whenever someone tells me the dojo is too far from their home – usually 5 miles or less – to train with us.)

As I mentioned, John wasn’t known to many beyond Soke’s dojo. But in 1969, or thereabouts, he was asked to accompany an American team that Sensei Nishiyama assembled to compete against several university teams in Japan. A friend, who was a senior student of Sensei Nishiyama’s, went on the trip too. He told me that the Japanese treated John and most of our fighters with a degree of disdain much of the time until his first fight. John had been an alternate to the team and didn’t fight during the first couple of competitions. But when they finally put him in, his opponent refused to stop when John scored on him and kept trying to hurt John. So he drove the guy out of the ring, into the stands, and didn’t stop until the officials grabbed him. My friend said everyone in the large gym jumped to their feet and applauded. After that, he was treated with respect wherever he went.

In 1970, WUKO held its first World Karate Championships in Tokyo. The U.S. sent five teams, comprised of many of our top fighters at the time. John and Tonny Tulleners, also from Soke Kubota’s dojo, were on one of the teams. In the individual competition, Tonny tied for third with the legendary Dominic Valera. John didn’t make it to the finals but received one of the Outstanding Spirit (Tamashii) Awards distributed to the most respected fighters.

In 1972, the United States sent just one team to Paris for the second World Championships. John was selected to this team as well. This event was highly controversial. The U.S., Japanese, and several other teams walked out due to what friends termed the inadequate quality of the officials. (I heard they used judo, kendo, and/or aikido officials in matches – depending on who told me. But I wasn’t there so I’m not sure if any of this was true. I just know teams walked out.)

Well, enough for now. I’ll be writing more posts on John Gehlsen and what I learned from him. Thanks again for your patience and continued support.

Postscript: Here is a link for footage of Senseis Gehlsen, Smith, Tulleners, etc. at the team selection tournament for the 1972 WUKO World Karate Championships in Paris. There is a clip at the bottom of the DVD ad. http://www.empiremediallc.com/DVDs/1972%20World%20Karate%20Do%20Champ.html

Tsuken Akachu no Eku Kata and Learning to Better Appreciate Every Day

I apologize for my long absence in posting. It’s been an eventful six months, and not much of it in a good way. Since it is behind me now, I am returning to normal and don’t mind talking briefly about what happened and what I learned from it.

First, the good part, at least for me – although probably less interesting for you. I was able to finish an extensive rewrite of my novel, The Arrow Catcher. It is with my editor, awaiting her read-through and suggestions. I’m fortunate to have a great editor, Lynn Stegner. Lynn is not only an award-winning novelist but also a writing teacher at Stanford University (considered one of the two best writing programs in the country). And she is also the daughter-in-law of the late Wallace Stegner, who was one of America’s greatest writers.

The reason I had so much time to focus on my writing over these last few months was my two stays at the hospital.

I wasn’t sure if I would ever go home after my first stay. I developed an infection that spread throughout my body, a condition they call “sepsis”. It came out of nowhere. I was fine, then developed a fever. I drove to the dojo to teach and got sicker and sicker as I went. (I live 90 miles from the dojo.) By the time I arrived, I figured I’d teach the first class and then go home early, getting one of my senior students to cover my classes. I felt so bad I lay down on the office floor, thinking I might feel better if I rested a bit. But I kept getting sicker, my fever climbing and my kidneys aching. I realized that if I didn’t leave then, I might get so sick I wouldn’t be able to drive home later. So I left a note for my office manager and set out. By the time I got home, I was burning up and felt like someone had hit me in the kidneys with a baseball bat. I had been kicked so hard in the stomach many years ago that it bruised one of my kidneys. This was a hundred times worse. I called my doctor and he told me to go straight to the emergency room, which I did.

The emergency room staff ran some tests and told me I had an extremely bad infection, which they later identified as sepsis. They admitted me and put me on a strong antibiotics drip. I was there for 5 days before being released. Another infection hit me a few days later and another after that was treated.

I mention all this in more detail than I feel comfortable with, or you probably wanted to hear, for a reason. I teach Tsuken Akachu no Eku kata to my students. Within this kata is an unusual jump, reportedly unique to weapons kata. In it, you drop the eku handle, kick your feet backwards unevenly as you jump, and (while still in midair) reach out as far as you can with the blade of the eku.

I learned this kata many years ago and told it was called Tsuken Akachu no Eku Bo. It was explained as a battle between two fisherman, one with an eku (oar) and another with a fishing spear. The spearhead was made of metal, I was told, which would become rusty and encrusted with rotten fish guts over time. A cut from its tip would introduce bacteria into ones bloodstream. As this kata was reportedly created 150 years earlier, there were no antibiotics at the time. The person cut was believed to have approximately ten days before he went into septic shock and died.

So the odd jump had three purposes: 1) block the spear thrust at ones feet with the handle, 2) kicking the feet back to make sure they were not stabbed or even scratched, and 3) reaching out and smashing the attacker in the side of the neck with the blade of the eku.

I was never sure if their sepsis explanation was realistic until I found it could occur even today. Had I come down with what I did back then, I would have died.

They found that my infection was caused by an internal tear. (I won’t bore you with the details.) Surgically fixing it was what necessitated my second hospital stay. But that was completed in early June and I’m back to normal, or as normal as one can be at nearing 70. I now have nothing wrong that rolling back my age by ten years or so wouldn’t clear up completely. But I feel fortunate to be this healthy and fit at this age. I contribute it to my lifetime in the martial arts and my long quest to always keep myself in shape both physically and morally in order to serve as a positive role model for my students.

Anyway, thanks for your patience and continued support. It means a lot to me.

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.

Do the victors write much of the history of our arts or the losers?

They say history is written by the victors. And in the old days, that was generally true. Whoever controlled things, decided what the official story would be. But in recent times (especially since the advent of the free press, multi-channel TV, the internet, Wikipedia, etc.), it has often been written by anyone, including people who may know little about a given subject, who have an agenda that slants their telling, whose egos float astronomically higher than their IQs and knowledge, and so on. This has been especially true in the martial arts, where history was often based more on legend, mythology, and writer bias than fact. I think Bruce Haines’ Karate’s History and Traditions was the first book I read in which the writer actually did an academic investigation into things. It was flawed but not for lack of trying.

Until recently, most martial arts history was passed down via word of mouth. Philosopher Karl Popper called this “subjective knowledge,” knowledge that often changes with each retelling or personal slant and would disappear with the death of the last person to hear it.

“Objective Knowledge” is knowledge put into some form of hard copy (books, magazines, video files, pdf, etc.) that enables it to be Googled or microfiched or whatever and accessed by students or researchers possibly forever. This can be a good or a bad thing.

There are a few qualities a person must possess it they are to undertake certain tasks. If they want to be a security guard, they can’t be blind. If they want to become a piano tuner, they can’t be deaf. And it they want to write a history, they can’t be less than honest and truthful to a fault.

Several years ago, I was asked for assistance from a writer who was putting together a book on the history of karate in America. I supplied him with a fair amount of info he didn’t have and some rare photos, if I remember right.

In our last conversation, he asked me about a local martial artists who I had had problems with. A woman had enrolled her son in his school but quickly left, referring to them as “hokey”. She brought her son to us and, after being with us for a few months, she wrote me a note that said “Karate at CKA (my dojo) was the best thing she ever did for her son.” I asked her if it would be okay if I used her quote in an ad for the dojo. She said she was happy to recommend us.

I ran an ad that featured her quote and placed her name under it. It was a great ad that brought us many students. After some period of time, our local competitor ran the same exact ad, with her quote and name in it. She was livid. I sent a letter to the guy, explaining the situation. I figured he would do the right thing and stop running it. I was wrong. He said he had been given the ad by a management company, who said I had given them permission to use it. It was trademarked and I never gave them permission. In fact, I had told them they couldn’t use it.

When he refused to stop running the ad, I had my attorney contact him and politely let him know it was illegal for him to use it. He got an attorney, who wrote back that they would fight us and that we would lose because of some technicality. I had a student who oversaw the hiring of proprietary attorneys for a major corporation. He referred me to an attorney in San Francisco who was considered the top expert in the field. She sent the instructor a letter that shut down his attorney. The guy stopped running the ad, although only because he had to, not because it was the right thing to do.

The book author got very defensive of the local guy. He thought he was the greatest martial artist in the world and I was obviously a jerk for not seeing that. So when his book came out, in which he listed the credentials and accomplishments of most American martial arts instructors, the only comment associated with my name was “martial arts administrator.”

What’s the big deal? Well, if a future writer (maybe next week, month, year, ten years, or a hundred years) researched this era for an article or book, my name and role could be deemed inconsequential, or diminished, based upon what had been written about me – either rightly or wrongly. And this is not just some theoretical fear I have about something that might possibly happen in the future. Next time, I’ll discuss a case in which I was attacked in a history book because of something I never said or did.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Karate and the Olympics

Thanks to Sensei Claudio Iedwah for the following on Delcourt and Nishiyama efforts relative to the Olympics. http://www.eurokarate.eu/02recogn/040220.htm Lots of interesting stuff.