The floor now under my feet is a deep red
wood. Its
rough smoothness reminds me of my dojo. Two years have come and gone
since I left my first college’s Shotokan Karate Club, but it
still feels wrong to cross such floors barefoot, without gi
or
belt, with no ceremony whatsoever. Here, in this room, I slide,
rather than step, to the window, just to feel the raw friction
against my soles. It would be almost worth the splinters to do a kata
right now, sliding into stance, blocking invisible opponents,
countering, turning, advancing. “Yoi!” I hear my
sensei bellow. Steady on my feet, I ready my fists at my sides.
“Hajime!” My eyes shoot left and I step out into a
low stance, my forearm rising to block the first attack to my jaw.
Now, looking out this dorm window, I remember the promise I made to
myself and to Sensei.
His name is Jared, but it’s Sensei in the
dojo. On
day one, the club assembled in an old room in the gym’s
basement. The floor was a waxy yellow. We backed against the wall at
Sensei’s command, damp towels in hand, before leaning into a
sort of crouch-sprint, the wood skinning our knees as we ran the wet
cloth over the floor. My bare feet kept slipping on the slick wood.
We learned how to make a fist, how to bow, what to say to whom and
when. Yet, at the end of the hour, I was surprisingly sweat-free. “It
gets tougher,” Sensei assured us. “Come back Wednesday
ready to train.” We lined up according to rank, black belts at
the far end in their well-worn gis, novices in our
T-shirts
and gym shorts closest to the door. We kneeled. “Dojo Kun!”
announced the head black belt. “Seek perfection of character!”
We repeated in chorus. “Be faithful!” We held our backs
straight and alert. “Endeavor!” Our hands rested crisply
on our thighs. “Respect others!” I trained my eyes on the
mirror ahead. “Refrain from violent behavior!” But I kept
my peripheral vision on Sensei’s unflinching posture, his thick
sideburns, how his big toes crossed as he sat on his heels. Later, we
would learn how to deliver thrust kicks, hammer fists, and elbow
strikes, but that day, we learned that the dojo is more than four
mirrored walls and a stack of old wrestling mats; it’s an
attitude. We would remember it in our sore muscles that night, and
the next morning in the fresh scabs across our knees. You bow. Then,
you enter.
Outside the dojo, Jared was an unexpected
personality,
like a mischievous uncle. He was dating one of the black belts. But
wasn’t she a student like us? He wouldn’t tell us his
age. Twenty-eight? Thirty-five? One Thanksgiving when I couldn’t
afford a bus ticket home, Jared took me to his girlfriend’s
family’s house for dinner. I thought I’d nap in the car,
but Jared was restless for conversation. “Tell me about the
first time you had sex,” he said, casually, eyes gleaming in
the rearview mirror. He and his girlfriend’s casserole
contribution sat warm in my lap, their dog’s snout resting on
my thigh. I evaded the question, spouting general, expected
responses, anything that might inspire the conclusion that I actually
had something apparently worth hiding to say on the subject, but
Jared found other ways to embarrass and irritate me. “OK, when
was the first time you went to jail?” Though I'd never been to
jail, I felt my cheeks flush. Was this how all senseis broke the ice?
I glanced back at the rearview mirror. His eyes were laughing, but
not at me. Just laughing, inviting, encouraging. I waited for the
embarrassment to lift and my nerves to settle. The dog swallowed in
its sleep. Gently, I loosened my grip on the casserole and let one
hand rest on the dog’s soft gray belly.
Ninety minutes later, we were there,
crowding around two
small tables with the Italian family who offered me sausage and
cheese appetizers and a glass of red wine. Parents, grandparents,
uncles, aunts, and cousins bantered and reminisced freely,
questioning and addressing me as if I were one of their own. In the
lazy, full moments after dessert, an aunt began clearing the table,
but the talking hadn’t died down. Two younger cousins escaped
to the living room. I followed Jared into the kitchen. His arms
swept, naturally, into blocks and strikes. “Wanna know what
really hurts?” We, the outsiders, stood by the refrigerator
while his lover’s Italian family bustled in and out, pouring
more wine, chatting in the next room. “Sure,” I said,
watching his hands contort in ways I’d seen only the black
belts try. Then, he made a fist and raised his middle knuckle to form
a sharp point. Holding my wrist, he rammed his knuckle between the
thin bones on the back of my hand. I didn’t wince. From a
semester’s worth of trainings I’d learned not to show it
on my face, but even though he’d restrained himself from using
full force, the pain from the bruised pressure point shot up my arm.
You bow. You fight.
That night, he trained me in his own dojo,
an extension
of the small house he shared with his girlfriend. I recognized this
as a rare privilege. Sensei handed me an old, sweat-soaked gi.
It was too big. I had to roll the pant legs up several times before
my feet were free. I wrapped the fraying belt an extra time around my
waist. The long, rectangular dojo held a soft, cold silence, a
distilled power distinct from the cement brightness of our old
wrestling room in the gym basement. Sensei held a wooden staff level
with my chest. He meant for me to practice the distance of my blocks.
This was a first. We rarely used equipment in the dojo. My fists rose
and fell in haltingly ill-timed strikes. Easily discouraged, I fought
to keep my eyes from the floor, masking my shame with humility. When
he’d exhausted my range of blocks, Sensei grabbed a kick guard
and positioned it a few feet from my chest. “Pull back your
toes,” he said, teaching me to press at the same time with the
sole of my foot. “So you won’t break them,” he
said. Our training finished, I knelt on an imaginary line behind him.
As the highest ranking kohai in this dojo of two, I
knew my
responsibility. “Dojo Kun!” I announced. By then,
I’d learned it in Japanese. “Hitotsu! Jinkaku kansei
ni tsutomuru koto!” I felt my big toes overlap behind me.
“Hitotsu! Makoto no michi o mamoru koto!” There
were no mirrors in the room, but I knew well the contained ferocity
in Sensei’s eyes. “Hitotsu!Doryoku no
seichin
o yashinau koto!” How strange to hear his booming voice
repeat after mine! “Hitotsu! Reigi o omonzuru koto!”
But in this soft, cold dojo, my voice boomed, too, with a strength I
hadn’t heard before. “Hitotsu! Kekki no yu o
imashimuru koto!” You bow. You say, “Domo arigato
gozaimashita, Sensei.”
One week we trained outside, in cold, dewy
mornings. Our
feet slid through grass and dirt, as we ran to line up, paired off to
spar. One semester we were stuck with the new wrestling room, the
bottoms of our feet rubbing against the permanent mats. And one day,
my last day, I made stance in the corner while the entire dojo
attacked me one after the other in its sendoff ritual. I’d only
just earned my green belt. I didn’t want to go, but
out-of-state tuition was digging me deeper into debt than I could
stomach. So I steadied my feet and braced for the attack. Sweat flew
from hair falling free from worn elastic bands. Yellowing gis
loosened at the neck from two hours of intense training. Sensei’s
deep kiai, his spirit-yell, pressed like a force in
the air as
he stepped in stance to attack, sending a blow to my solar plexus, a
strike perfectly aimed and harder than usual. My feet gripped the
floor as the breath oomphed out of me. I steadied for the next
attack. The ceremony complete, we lined up at the familiar sound of
Sensei’s “Training finished!”
You form line, you obey, you recite because
it’s
what you do in the dojo. You don’t think about what you’ll
feel like when the calluses smooth over, when the bruises fade back
to flesh. There is a memory deeper than muscle that will not let you
forget. You bow. You go.
I wrote this story about my experiences training in a Shotokan
Karate Dojo in college.
I live in the
mountains of Western
North Carolina with an aloe plant and a sewing machine. I earned a
B.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. I work as a
production specialist in a manufacturing plant and enjoys the process
of transforming hodgepodge into usefulness and beauty.
