Racism Digression
The reason I find the racism accusation to be the most offensive is that it is one of the worst stigmas you can carry in our times. But if I were a racist, I would not have been teaching at the Metro Club in Westbourne Park in the early Seventies. All of my students were Black Panther supporters—in fact, they even filled in the Goju fist in black to represent black power. I often was invited to the Mango Club. Come on! Floyd Brown once joked that he would make me an ‘honourary black man’ and I take that as a true compliment. Whenever Chinese or Japanese visitors came to Earlham Street, I made it a habit to take them out for a meal and make them feel welcome in my country. Joseph Cheng and Yap Leung were two good friends. I judge people by what they are, not what they look like or where they come from. So it is incredibly offensive to read this shit on forums. It’s untrue.
It wasn’t because of their nationality that I disrespected the Japanese. And let’s get one thing straight. When it comes to bowing down to people, you’ve got to remember, I was kicked out of the Army for being anti-authoritarian as well as for fighting. I once even threw my stripes at a Colonel and told him if he wanted some menial task done, he could do it himself. I was twenty years old. I’m not the kowtowing type. I respect the achievements of a great athlete, but that doesn’t mean I see him as a superior human being. And the thing with the Japanese masters is that they aren’t great athletes. They haven’t made the athletic achievements of somebody like Muhammed Ali nor have they achieved the spirituality of, say, a Tibetan monk—but they expect everybody to bow down before them all the same.
As a child, as a teenager, and as an adult I have lived in many different countries on four continents. I’ve had to adapt to different cultures and to live and work among people very different from myself. When I went to Japan in 1968, I was unaware of the extent of Japanese war crimes, but very aware that America had dropped the bomb on them and I was sensitive to the devastating effect that would have had. I was obliging, eager to please, and keen to make a respectful impression as a Westerner.
But what transpired shocked me. I’ve never, ever, in any country been treated with such contempt by people in the street who didn’t even know me. I was being judged purely on my ethnicity, and I was spat on, ridiculed, and made to feel extremely unwelcome. This was true in the dojo and on the streets. And I wasn’t living in a posh hotel. I didn’t have any money. I travelled on public transport, and when I couldn’t afford that, I walked. I worked as a dishwasher in Benihana restaurant and I lived on the lowest-costing food and slept in a room the size of a broom closet. My view of Japan was not the tourist view. But I believe it was the more real view.
It was no different when I went to Okinawa. But that could have been attributable to the presence of American troops and the friction between the islanders and the U.S. servicemen. Indeed, Miyazato Eiichi initially refused me entry to his small, private dojo on the basis that he believed I was an American. After reluctantly relenting and allowing me to train, he tried to be as friendly as he could, but the seniors and other grades at the dojo did not. Some of them were openly hostile. Everybody who knows me knows that I'm open, friendly and respectful. It's only when provoked that I will suddenly switch and the other side of my nature is revealed. This is what happened when their unprovoked resentment of me came out during Sanchin testing. I had severe sunburn at the time, and my back was already red raw. The tester was taking obvious sadistic pleasure in the slapping. It wasn't the pain that got to me--I'd suffered worse at the hands of my own mother. I was simply jacked-off with their treatment of me. That's why I challenged the lot of them to fight, then and there.
For a long time I couldn’t understand why I had experienced this. I’d lived in Germany just after WWII and there was no trace of the Third Reich except for the bombed-out buildings. It was only when I started to research the Emperor system that I began to understand what it was all about.
But when we come to the topic of racial harmony, let’s consider what that meant in Japan prior to 1945.
From 1895-1945 Japan’s activities within her occupied territories included murder, torture, rape, beating, enslavement, the forcing into prostitution of local women, the production and distribution of narcotics, plundering natural resources, looting the territories of their national and religious treasures, and robbing the people of their personal wealth. In addition, through a compulsory educational system that included the practice of martial arts, the Japanese implemented a program of moral, cultural and linguistic hegemony as part of a national polity ‘Hakko Ichiu’ to ‘bring the eight corners of the world under one roof’: in other words, under the divine rule of the Emperor.
This stamping out of local language, culture, and values was nowhere better seen than on the island of Okinawa. In 1879 during the annexation of Okinawa, those who opposed the Japanese were assassinated by the military. Okinawans were forced to adopt Japanese culture, language, and morality and even to change their names. In fact, schoolchildren caught speaking in their local dialects were forced to wear placards around their necks reminding them never to do so again. And from what I remember, this practice was still carried out in the 1950s. Indeed, I often wonder how many schoolchildren the schoolteacher Funakoshi hung placards around the necks of, so as to turn them into third class Japanese citizens.
Because in truth, from the Japanese perspective that’s all the Okinawans were. On the Japanese pyramidial dung-heap of social worth the Okinawans were placed alongside the barukumen (tanners, gravediggers, cremators and slaughtermen).
And here’s what I find hard to understand. Prior to the annexation, an Okinawan delegation sent to China failed to get support, and the Okinawan pechin class was faced with a situation similar to that faced by the Satsuma Clan, who were wiped out in the Satsuma rebellion of 1877. So I believe I understand why the Okinawan pechin caste cut off their topknots in a symbolic gesture of surrender to the Meiji government. After all, facing a Meiji conscript armed with a rifle with your nunchaku isn’t what I call a fair fight; you can’t blame them for surrendering. But what I can’t really understand is why so many masters of toudi kempo jutsu from the beginning of the 20 th century onwards were willing to adapt their toudi to fit into the requirements of the Japanese education system as it was enforced on Okinawa. By their dissimulation of toudi into the Japanese system (which in turn had strains of Prussian militarism embedded within it), they actually supported that very system that had taken away their culture, values, language and personal identification. Later, they not only allowed the toudi ‘china hand’ to be changed to karate ‘empty hand’ (there were objections, but it happened) but they also sought to fulfil the requirements of the Butokukai and suffixed the name to add ‘do’ so that toudi kempo jutsu became karate-do. And the Butokukai was an organ of the Emperor System. The ‘do’ as in modern Japanese ‘Bu-do’ was explicitly used as an indoctrinational tool. And that’s what I can’t understand about the Okinawan masters. How they could have given themselves up to a system that had taken away their culture.
But that’s another article.
The most notable of those organizations created to bring about forced assimilation of local people through what was effectively brainwashing was the Concordia Society or Kyowa Kai. Concordia’s façade appeared honourable, but it was in fact a fascistic mass party appendage controlled and manipulated by the Japanese military. Concordia was used not only for the purpose of making the local inhabitants loyal subjects to the Emperor, but in some cases (such as Manchuria) as a means of recruiting spies and informers to use to track the movements of local warlords, bandits, Russian troops, dissidents and troublemakers.
Many famous masters of Japanese Budo belonged to the Concordia society, including Yamaguchi Gogen, who was recruited by Nichiren Buddhist, Kanji Ishihara. Ishihara was the principal planner of the infamous Manchurian or Mukden Incident, in which the Japanese Army blew up a portion of railway line and then blamed it on the Chinese so as to have an excuse for the official invasion of Manchuria. Ishihara, as a Nichiren Buddhist (and admirer of Hitler incidentally), believed amongst other things in a cataclysmic war that would end all wars and would result in Japan ruling the world. Now there’s somebody who’s barking, Mr. Norris!
But more about Yamaguchi and Ishihara in further articles.
