Sensei (2 page)

You could usually hear a pin drop in that room. The slanting rays of the sun came in through the high windows. The angle was acute enough so that you never had to worry about being blinded (an important thing in a place where people hacked at each other with oak swords), but it showed the dust motes dancing around. Less wary students had been distracted by them. We had all been with Yamashita Sensei for a while, however, and that morning when he strode onto the floor, all eyes were riveted on him.

Yamashita was a small person: in street clothes he probably would have seemed surprisingly nondescript. In the martial arts dojo, his presence was palpable. It wasn't just the way he was dressed. Most of us had been banging around the martial arts world for years and so were pretty much used to the exotic uniforms. Yamashita was usually dressed like any other senior instructor in some of the more traditional arts: a heavy quilted top like the ones judo players wore and the pleated split skirt pants known as ha kama The wide legs of his uniform swished quietly as he knelt in front of the class. Even in this small action, there was a decisive precision. He gazed at us, his round head swiveling slowly up and down the line.

Other than his head, nothing moved, but you could almost feel the energy pulsing off him and washing over you. He was the

most demanding of taskmasters at the best of times, but today we were all tremendously apprehensive.

Yamashita was wearing white.

In Japan, white is the color of emptiness and humility. Many of us had started our training in arts like judo or karate, where the uniforms known as gi were traditionally white as a symbol of humility. Most mainline Japanese instructors I knew frowned on the American urge to branch out into personal color statements with their uniforms. The message was clear: a gi is not an expression of individuality. People wanting to make statements should probably rent billboards and avoid Japanese martial arts instructors. They are not focused on your needs. They are concerned only with the pursuit of the Way. You are free to come along. But your presence is not necessary.

You have to get used to that sort of attitude. In the martial arts, nobody owes you anything, least of all your teacher. The assumption is that you are pretty much worthless and lucky to be in the same room with your sensei. You do what he says. You don't talk back, You don't ask rude questions. You don't cop an attitude that's the sensei's prerogative.

In the sword arts Yamashita teaches, only the high-ranking teachers are eligible to wear white. Yamashita could. He had done so in Japan for years. But he didn't do it much here. If he was wearing white today, it meant that he was symbolically adopting the attitude that he was the lowliest of students. Humility is nice, of course. The only drawback here was that, if Yamashita was being humble, it meant that, as his students, we were somewhere way down in the crud with other lower forms of life.

As we sat there eyeing him warily, I heard some very quiet sighs up and down the line: we were in for a rough workout.

You don't get in the door of this particular dojo without having considerable experience and martial aptitude. In the first place,

it's hidden in Brooklyn among the warehouses down by the East River. We occasionally have trouble with our cars being broken into and stuff like that, but then a few us go out and spread the word that Mr. Yamashita is beginning to get annoyed. He's been in the same location for ten years and has had a number of "conversations" with the more felonious of his neighbors there are people walking those streets whose joints will never work correctly again.

The neighborhood is dirty and smelly and loud. Once you get inside the dojo, however, the rest of the world disappears. The training hall is a cavernous space. The walls are unadorned grayish white and the floor is polished hardwood. There are no decorations on the walls, no posters of Bruce Lee or the Buddha. To one side there's a small office area with a battered green metal desk and two doors leading to the changing rooms. Other than the weapons racks, that's it. There is absolutely nothing to distract you from the task at hand. It also means, of course, that there is nowhere to hide, either.

We don't do a great deal of conditioning. What we do is basics.

Yamashita's idea of basics, of course, is bewildering. He thinks basics are essentially illustrated through application. This is where the bang and crunch comes in, but with a difference. Anybody can slam someone into submission take a look at any tough-guy competition or kick-boxing match. Yamashita is after something different. He thinks that the essence of any particular technique should be demonstrated by its effectiveness. He doesn't separate form from results. He doesn't even admit they are two separate things. He likes us to destroy with elegance.

There are technical terms for this in Japanese. They can isolate the mechanics of technique and ri the quality of mastery that allows you to violate the appearance of form yet still remain true to its essence. It's hard to explain how they differ and how to separate them, since most of us have spent years in pursuit of ji and are pretty much conditioned to follow its dictates. Yamashita doesn't seem to have much of a problem, however. He prowls the floor like a predator correcting, encouraging, and demonstrating. And woe to the unlucky pupil whose focus slips during the exercise: Yamashita screams, "Mm ri," no til and slams you to the floor. It's a unique pedagogical technique, but it works for him.

So, beyond the sighs of anticipation, once the lesson started, none of us spent much time worrying about how tough things were. In the dojo of Yamashita Sensei, the only way to be is fully present and engaged in the activity at hand. The unfocused are quickly weeded out and rarely return. The rest of us endure, in the suspicion that all this will lead to something approximating the fierce skill of our master.

We were working that day on some tricky techniques that involve pressure on selected nerve centers in the forearm. At about the time when most of us were slowing down shaking our arms out in an effort to get the nerves to stop jangling Yamashita called that part of the lesson quits and picked up a bokken. We scurried to the lower end of the floor and sat down as he began his instructions.

The bokken is a hardwood replica of the katana the two-handed long sword used by the samurai. It has the curve and heft of a real sword and so is used to train students of the various sword arts that have evolved over the centuries in Japan. In the right hands, hardwood swords can be very dangerous. They have been known to shatter the shafts of katana, and people like the famous Miyamoto Musashi, armed with a bokken, used to regularly go up against swordsmen armed with real swords. The results were never pretty, but Musashi used to walk away intact, bokken in hand.

Bokken are also used in set series of training techniques called kata, which is typically how Yamashita had us tram with bokken.

Kata means "form": they are prearranged exercises. Don't be fooled, though. Kata practice in Yamashita's dojo is enough to make your hair stand on end. When we perform kata, we do them in pairs of attacker and defender, and the movements flow and the blade of the bokken moans through the air as it blurs its way to the target. There's nothing like the sight of an oak sword slashing at your head to focus your mind.

I was backpedaling furiously to dodge a slashing kesa-girl the cut that with a real sword would cleave you diagonally from your shoulder to the opposite hip when movement on the edge of the practice floor caught my eye.

The visitors filed swiftly in, bobbing their heads briefly in that really poor American version of bowing. There were three of them in street clothes and the fourth was dressed in a ha kama and top. The outfit caught my eye: the top was crimson red and looked like it was made out of some silky sort of material, the ha kama was a crisp jet black. Quite the costume, really, especially when its wearer had a shaved brown head the shape of a large bullet. He had come to make a statement, I guess. They sat quietly with their backs against the wall, watching the class with that hard-eyed, clenched-jaw look that is supposed to intimidate you. I suppose I should have been impressed, but my training partner would not let up. She was about as fierce and wiry as they come. And her sword work had a certain whip and quick snap to it, a slightly offbeat rapid rhythm that was hard to defend against,

even though in kata you theoretically know what's happening. She wasn't at all impressed with the visitors. She was a relatively new student who was mostly intent on making one of Yamashita's senior pupils me look less than accomplished.

So even though I was pretty curious about these guys Yamashita did not, as a rule, tolerate visitors and one of them was dressed like he came to play I quickly got more interested in not making a fool out of myself during bokken practice.

It's a pride thing. There's a lot of talk in the martial arts about letting go of your ego and all that, and we try, we really do, but the fact is that, at this level, you have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into developing your skills and attaining a certain ranking in the dojo, and you really get just a bit ticked off when something happens to threaten that. All the bowing and titles, the uniforms and colored belts, are about status, your sense of worth. It's a closed little world with its own system for ranking you, but it's still a status system, and human beings respond to that.

This woman was good with her weapon. I could sense that and so could she. She was pressing me a bit altering the tempo of the moves, delivering her cuts with something close to full force, shortening the time between parry and counter delivering a type of challenge to see whether I could meet it.

I could, of course, but that wasn't the real point. For me, the challenge was how to respond to her force with something more refined. It meant that instead of parrying her cuts with a force that would make our bokken bark out with the shock of impact, I needed to finesse it a bit.

I changed the angles slightly, moving my body just out of the line of attack, which served to place me out of the radius of her strikes. I tried to keep my hands supple as I parried, accepting the force of her blows and redirecting them slightly, but things were getting a bit sweaty and I didn't want the sword flying out of my hands and shooting across the room. It happens occasionally, and if nobody gets hit we all laugh and the one who let go gets ribbed unmercifully, but this was not a situation where I was willing to get laughed at.

I knew this woman was a relative beginner at the dojo, and I counted on her weapon fixation. It was an unfair advantage in a way, but it's also an example of what Yamashita calls heiho strategy.

Between shifting slightly and redirecting a bit more through the next series of movements in the kata, I built up enough frustration in my partner for her to over commit in her next strike a little too much shoulder in the technique, her head leading into it and it was all over. I simply let go of my bokken with my left hand, entered into her blind side, led her around in a tight little circle and took the sword away. It wasn't a move that was in the kata, but Yamashita tells us any time you can do tachi-dori (sword taking), you should, just to keep your partner on his or her toes.

The pivot took her around on her toes, all right. She knew what was happening about a split second after the spin began, but it was too late to get out of it. I handed her back the bokken. She smiled a bit ruefully and we bowed just as Yamashita called the class to order in preparation to bow out.

He glided to the head of the room and waited for us to line up. He was studiously avoiding looking at the gang of four in the back of the room, but you could tell from his body language that he was annoyed.

You don't come dressed to play unless you've been invited. Only the sensei can give permission for a student to train in the dojo. If you show up uninvited and suited up, it means that either you don't know anything about Japanese martial arts teachers and are in real risk of being beaten up, or you are purposefully being insulting and wish to challenge the sensei to a match. In which case, it is anyone's guess who gets beaten up.

I've seen this happen before. Not often, but you don't tend to forget it once you've seen it. Especially if you're a student of the teacher being challenged. You get used as a type of canon fodder for your teacher. He sends you or one of your pals out to fight the challenger, he watches the action, analyzes the skill level of the opponent. If the first student gets beaten, a more advanced pupil goes next, and so on up the line. By the time the challenger reaches the sensei (if he lasts that long), he has either revealed his strengths and weaknesses and so can be defeated, or become so tired that he's no longer much of a challenge to the sensei. It's not fair, of course. It's heiho.

We all knelt, a solid dark blue line stretching down the length of the dojo. Yamashita sat quietly for a minute, then turned to one of his senior pupils, a mild-mannered Japanese-American guy named Ken, who sat next to me at the end of the line reserved for higher ranks. He looked like he was dreading what was about to happen. Yamashita said to him, "I see we have visitors. Perhaps you would invite the colorful one to speak with me."

Ken bowed, got up, and scurried to the back of the room to deliver the invitation. The guy in the red top nodded, exchanged a series of ritual handshakes with his companions, and stepped onto the training floor. He struck a ready pose and let out a loud "UUUS." A few of us rolled our eyes. Some of the karate schools out there think that kind of thing makes you seem like a real hard charger.