Happy 77th birthday to Sensei Yaguchi!
The 77th birthday is highly significant in the Japanese culture. This is the "joyous year," or ga no iwai. The Japanese characters mean "Joy" and "Long life."
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Our First Tournaments
Sensei Yaguchi was an instructor with the JKA during the early days of tournaments. He attended the first All-Japan Tournament, held in 1957, the year Sensei Funakoshi died. An exerpt from the book:
"Because this was the first tournament that many of us had ever attended, it provided a number of memorable moments. Nobody un derstood the rules completely. Some rules were made up on the spot. I made history by being the first person ever to foul out of an event -- we call it hansoku.
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The Process
Despite the fact that I understand Sensei's English about as well as anyone, it's still a very limited conversation and there have been times when we both really struggled; him to communicate, and me to understand. In order to interview Sensei Yaguchi for the book, we decided that we would hold the interview in Japanese, using translators.
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Understanding Sensei Yaguchi
Interestingly, I'm one of the best translators of Sensei Yaguchi's English I know. Cathy Cline is the only person I know personally who can understand him better. I do know that he's never really gotten the hang of English. What he speaks is Japanese, but using English words with Japanese "glue" words.
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My Sensei For Over 20 Years
I'm starting this blog to talk about my experiences in writing Sensei Yutaka' Yaguchi's memoirs. He has been my Sensei for over 20 years. He is one of those instructors that one remembers forever. When I started training in Denver in the early 80s his classes were so hard that sometimes I thought I might actually get killed or permanently injured. There were guys in those classes that were karate-ka by day, and robbed liquor stores at night. I was swept, punched and kicked almost daily, and I thrived on it.
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