Hiiiii-yah!

Like every white kid growing up in the 80s, I wanted to be a ninja. I mean lets face it in the 80s a ninja was about a freakin’-cool as it got! That was a weird time for martial arts as a whole giving rise to such completely untalented martial artists as Eric Roberts and Michael Dudikoff of American Ninja fame. This was long before North America really saw the martial talents of Jet Li and Donny Yen and a little after the reign of Bruce Lee. Regardless of the quality of the martial arts I saw I knew that I wanted to do that stuff. My local karate club was the only martial arts establishment within miles and they didn’t train little kids. So basically I watched a lot of ninja movies, got 2nd hand training from my teenaged neighbour to get a leg up and once I hit age 9 I joined Karate.

The style in question was actually Shotokan Karate. Shotokan is often classified as a “Simple”, “Linear” or “Brutal” form of Karate. The emphasis is dispatching your foe with often as little as 1 punch. Most 9 year old kids took about 2 months worth of classes and quickly got bored with the constant block, punch, block, punch of training. I, however, had a dedication to my training. Even without a Mr. Miyagi I spent 7 years waxing on kicking butt. Over my years in Shotokan I won 9 medals in sparring and 4 more for kata (forms.) Despite living in a rural town in Newfoundland my training was quite authentically Japanese. Our classes were taught in Japanese and my Sensei would even hit me with a bamboo shinai. However, like all martial arts in North America sometimes the message gets watered down.

Interestingly enough I was chit-chatting with a co-worker of mine who is also a Karate practitioner of the Goju-Ryu school. Lately she’s been dabbling in Shodokan as well and has been very impressed with the brutal efficiency of the style. In the course of our conversation she mentioned a book Shotokan's Secret: The Hidden Truth Behind Karate's Fighting Origins" which outlines a lot of the sources that created the Shotokan style. We chit-chatted about the application of a lot of the techniques from Shotokan and the discussion brought back a lot of that old 8-year old desire to be a ninja. I’d love to take martial arts again… if only there were 36 hours in a day and 10 days in a week. Stupid time!

I was a ninja once