MAS OYAMA STORIES by JON BLUMING in the Past, I've Avoided
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MAS OYAMA STORIES By JON BLUMING In the past, I've avoided discussing the "famous" Kyokushin Kaikan karate business. I needed some time to think about saying anything now, too, as I wanted to be strictly honest toward the memory of my old "friend and teacher, Mas Oyama. He did a lot for me, introducing me to the karate world and giving me a new purpose in life. This changed my life completely for the best. For me, Oyama was like a father I never had. In the old days, he showed me all the things you need to be a teacher and helped me through some rough times. On the other hand, I am tired of all the phonies who did not go the straight way. So, let me tell it like it was. Published accounts describing Oyama preparing for the big karate championships in 1947 are very funny. Especially the Americans, who fought the Japanese in World War II, should know that. MacArthur was the big honcho in Japan from August 1945, until the Korean War, and he declared right away that there was to be no more budo in Japan until he declared otherwise. He even rounded up all the samurai swords he could lay his hands on and had them dropped in Tokyo Bay. They would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. He was not messing around and nobody dared disobey his rules. Around 1948, judo started again at the old Kodokan on Suidobashi. Karate was done mainly by the Shotokan, where sparring matches were not allowed until the late 1950s, and by the Goju Kai and Wado@ryu, where the sparring was so soft that a split lip or a nose bleed would throw the officials into a state of shock. So while there might have been some professional boxing clubs where fighting was done on a knockout basis, a karate championship in Kyoto done on such a basis was absolutely out of the question. When hearing stories about the old days, remember that the Japanese are great storytellers. If the story is good, they don't check to see if it is true. Even today, I meet people who heard from their fathers or grandfathers about the roughhousing I supposedly did in my younger days. It doesn't amaze me anymore and I am tired of telling people that the stories are impossible because if you hit somebody, you were hauled into a police station, charged, and sent to jail or kicked out of the country. I admit I had a few fights, but always with witnesses saying that I did not start it. As for Oyama's alleged 270 American bouts, remember that he was in the States as a professional wrestler. Since when are professional wrestling matches on the level? All Oyama ever told me about those days was that Americans were crazy, that their wrestling was phony and prearranged, and that as fighters, they were weak. My guess is that most of what he did was just break bricks and things between matches. If he had ever fought any of the American professional wrestlers, really fought them, I think he would have beaten most of them easily. The story about Oyama fighting bulls is not true. He never met a real bull, for he never visited Spain. I also doubt that he was gored, for he never told me about it and he used to tell me everything. Kurosaki Kenji was there and he told me what happened. They went early in the morning to a stock- yard in Tateyama Prefecture. Workmen prepared a fat old ox for Oyama by hitting one of its horns with a hammer so that it was quite loose. Oyama did not kill the ox he only knocked off the loose horn. Oyama showed Bill Backhus and I the 16mm "bull fighting" movie in 1959. I told Oyama never to show this film in Europe because it looked too phony and everyone would laugh at him. As far as I know, nobody saw that movie again. Even Oyama's famous world championships of the 1970s were a joke. By then, foreigners were not allowed to win. To prevent it, Oyama had all the gaijin fight each other first, and of course pitted the best against each other. Because everyone wanted to win, the injuries were terrible. Meanwhile, he put the leading Japanese against low quality Japanese from his own school, who knew their place and of course didn't try too hard. So they had it easy. Occasionally, in the finals, the referee would give a good foreign fighter a decision over a Japanese fighter. Oyama would stand up all red in the face. Then he'd call the referee over to his table and chew him out and reverse his decision. This was against all the rules of sportsmanship. Read Nakamura Tadashi's book or go talk to him in New York. It is very emotional and very sad. Oyama was a strong man in his young days, but I never saw him fight anybody, not even in his own dojo. So his "countless encounters" and "challenges" were all before my time. Kurosaki Kenji tells me that they were all before his time, too, and that goes back to 1952, when they both trained at Yamaguchi Gogen's dojo in Tokyo. So I think maybe he never fought in his life. But he was a great teacher who trained many good fighters and his books were very popular. When I read his first book, What Is Karate? (1957), 1 was really impressed. I was in his second book (This Is Karate, 1965) and had the opportunity to look into the way he did things. The thing that amazed me most was "the monkey business" (Oyama's own words) involved in the breaking tricks. I didn't know about this when I did my first breaking demonstration in Holland. Since I had read in Oyama's book, What Is Karate?, about somebody breaking twenty-five roofing tiles at once, I simply brought some tiles I had found along the road. I thought that twenty-five sounded like a lot, for these things were heavy and felt strong. So I only put eight on top of each other and gave it my best. I made it but nearly broke my wrist. Of course I wondered how that kid managed twenty-five. Well, I found out while working on the book, This Is Karate. I went to the pile of tiles they had prepared for punishment and picked up the top tile. It felt like paper, it was so light, and on its underside was a baked-in line along the length of the tile. So the middle of the tile was maybe a millimeter thick. No wonder a 110-pound chicken could go through twenty-five of them! The bricks were no different. They were specially baked and if someone leaned on them they would crumble. His wood was also very lightweight. As for that famous bottle trick, first you prepare the bottle by rolling a sharp stone around the bottle's neck. That way when you hit it, it breaks along the carved line. Kurosaki Kenji was the only one who really impressed me with his breaking tricks. Using his head, he broke two red bricks from British television. The nasty cracking sound horrified everybody watching. I was a good breaker, too, but I paid the price for my mistakes. Which brings me to the ice-breaking trick. When you break ice blocks, be careful. If you aren't, you'll hit the edge of the ice with your wrist rather than your shuto (knife-hand) and break your wrist instead of the ice. This happened to me in 1975. During a demonstration, Loek Hollander had arranged for each of us to break several big blocks of ice. What I did not know until years later is that he had arranged for workmen to cut his blocks almost in half using diamond strings and then refreeze them so that nobody would notice the cuts. On the other hand, my blocks were solid. Anyway, Loek broke his three blocks so easily that I forgot the rule about the wrist and immediately broke the little bone under my wrist. I was so angry that right away I hit again and went through the ice anyway. I was in a plaster cast for the next six weeks. As I said before, in 1963 I opened my own budo club called the Budokai. Kurosaki Kenji came over in 1966, about the time Oyama started calling himself "the Godhand." Even the Japanese press laughs at that one. In 1990, we changed the club's name to Kyokushin Budokai and, in 1966, some friends and I renamed it the International Budokaikan. Today it has many associated clubs and some real good fighters. In the Budokai we teach no kata, only fighting. Excepting Donn Draeger, I've never known a kata champion who could beat by grandmother in randori if she had her umbrella. To keep injuries down, we provide students with a lot of coaching and supervision. But, as the Japanese method of slapping people into line doesn't work in Europe, we don't make anyone do anything he doesn't want to do. Therefore, the standards are only as high as the individual makes them. Which can be very high, as the teams we send to full-contact tournaments usually win. For instance, in Tokyo in 1993, Chris Dolmen, our only 9th dan, became the first world champion in "free fighting." From 1994 to 1997, Budokai teams won the Japanese All-Round Karate Championships in Tokyo.