LITMIR.BIZ

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aggressors, but they focused their attention on my friend. Had he done something to rouse their wrath? It was all happening so fast. My mind spun in bewilderment. I was not ready at all.

      Mantia was shouting at my friend, taunting him with abrupt shoves. Horrified, I stood and stared. I was frozen, unable to move. Some of Mantia’s cohorts surrounded my friend so that he could not escape. Two of them positioned themselves in front of me so that I could not move to my friend’s aid.

      I was 13 then. Up to that point, I had experienced only a few playground skirmishes with bullies at school. Most of those encounters had been mere shoving and shouting and amateurish grappling, and were over with before anyone had been seriously hurt.

      This guy was another reality altogether. He had grabbed my friend by the wrist and was spinning him around in a circle, increasing his speed and jerking until my friend was on his knees in the dust. Once he had him down, Mantia began pounding his fists into the back of my friend’s head. He was swearing horrifically, using savage language shocking to my young ears in the 1960s.

      An older man walked by and saw what was happening, and shouted at Mantia and his buddies to knock it off. But the hangers-on moved at him aggressively and chased him away with curses and threatening fists. Time moved in agonizing slow motion. I beheld in horror Mantia’s fists bouncing off the back of my friend’s head. Swearing fiercely and swinging his arms in over and over, he appeared to be the embodiment of pure uncontrolled raging evil.

      I felt cold. I was doubtless shaking. Cut off by the older boys blocking my way, I was powerless to help my friend. But truth told, those boys blocking me had little threat from me. I was immobilized, paralyzed with shock and trepidation and adrenalized lock-up. I stood there frozen. My mouth twisted in a silent scream. I was incapable of moving. I watched in horror as my friend went from resisting, to attempting to cover from the blows, to defeated resignation. I could not believe what was happening.

      And then it was all over. Mantia was done. He and his buddies moved as a pack of wolves back to the drug store, tossing savage insults at us over their shoulders. My friend rose to his feet. Amazingly, he was still very conscious, and no blood was showing from the pummeling he had taken. He dusted himself off, mumbled something, and we were once again walking home.

      I was so furious and confused and embarrassed. I could not speak. We walked in silence, awkwardly trying to put the past moments behind us. But deep inside, something primordial had come awake in me. A strange blend of rage, and oddly at the same time compassion, overwhelmed me.

      I vowed I would do whatever it took to never be forced to stand by in helplessness while a pure and wholesome innocent took a beating again. I had no idea how I would do it. But I would make a difference in the world. I would find a way to stand up to senseless violence, to stop it in its tracks. When others chose brutality and savagery, I would make there be peace. I would be there for the defenseless. I would show the beautiful and kind the way to temporarily become a raging force for good.

      I knew of no martial arts schools in Dayton, Ohio, back then. I had no idea how I would accomplish my vows. I only knew in my core that I would devote my life to righting the wrong I had just witnessed. I made a solemn promise. I pledged a holy vow.

      Thus Began a Life of Studying Violence and How to Overcome It

      In 1967 I picked Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, because I had seen a boy in a white do-gi training suit walking in the gym. “Must be a member of the judo club,” commented the tour guide casually when I quickly grabbed him and asked about the boy. I made up my mind right then and there that I would attend Miami. At last I would begin my long-awaited study of judo, the Japanese secrets of self-defense called “the supple art.”

      Unfortunately, once I got to campus, it turned out there was no judo club at Miami. The guide had been mistaken. There was however a Tang Soo Do training group. But it was run by a Navy Commander and restricted to members of the Navy ROTC in the Vietnam War days. Daunted but nonetheless determined, I somehow prevailed on the Commander to accept me, even though I was not in the Navy. I took to Tang Soo Do training with an unexcelled passion. Nobody at Miami trained harder. Nobody was more determined. None made practice sessions more often than I did.

      Years of training added up. During summers away from college, I trained with other martial arts clubs wherever I went. I made Black Belt by late in my junior year.

      One evening during a play rehearsal in my senior year, when a group of us was sitting around waiting to go on, I got to chatting with a fellow theater student. He had grown up a tough street scrapper in a miserably poor neighborhood, but had miraculously ended up at the university. I was telling him about my karate training, a strange and rare thing back in those days. I demonstrated a twisting punch to his up-held palm. The punch started out up-side-down, pierced straight out, and twisted into palm-down position at the moment of impact. I held my shoulder upright and in place. His hand moved back with the hit.

      The boy cocked his head in admiration. “Wow! I’ve never seen anything like that. So cool!” He then looked aside, seemingly in embarrassment. “On the streets, we’d just throw our fists and hide behind them until we connected.” He lifted his hand and leaned in with his shoulder and sent a loose relaxed looping strike that suddenly tightened into a hit against my up-held palm. The smack noise and follow-through sent my hand flying back behind my shoulder.

      I was stunned. In all of my years of Tang Soo Do training, I had never dealt with a typical American street punch. If someone had thrown one of those at me in anger, I had no idea how I would have responded. It was a chilling revelation of my ignorant vulnerability.

      My world collapsed. I felt breathless, naked, and invaded. I was confused and angry. How could my training completely ignore the reality of the streets like that? At the same time, I felt strangely excited. Instantly I was somehow bigger and freer than I had been. It was indeed a huge world out there — the study of violence and how to subdue it — and I was in an instant more awake than I had ever been. I would take that freedom and rejoice in it. I would follow it as far as I could for as long as it took.

      Now Fifty Years Later…

      Throughout the decades of my involvement in the Asian martial and meditation disciplines, my own purpose continued to be to discover those methods, attitudes, and insights that could advance me in my quest. I ran out of lessons in karate and boxing, and I became disappointed in champions my own age who had succumbed to the allure of ego, who lived shattered lives, and were victims of the drug culture of the 1970s. I turned my attention to Japan and the long-admired secret art of the ninja. I had read about the mysterious art in a James Bond novel in high school. I would go to Japan. I would meet and train with elders who handed down the ninja martial art for generations of secrecy. I would learn punching and kicking skills of course. But I would also learn the grappling and choking and weapons that I had so missed in my training. Also hinted at were the secrets of mental and even spiritual power that awaited.

      Meditation plays an important role in gaining control of the mind’s reactions in To-Shin Do.

      Ninja training in Japan turned out to be quite different from what I had expected. The dojo was tiny, a mere cleared out storage room in the grandmaster’s house. In remote Noda City, student numbers were extremely small—15 at the highest. 33rd Togakure Ryu ninja grandmaster Toshitsugu Takamatsu had just died over a year before, and the 34th grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi was using those few nights per week to review and explore what he had been taught.

      There was no curriculum at all. There was no class for beginners as opposed to senior practitioners. All just trained together in the tiny room. Random kata fight examples were read from handwritten books and acted out. Most times, the kata was not identified as to its ryu lineage or scroll.

      Things would start out far apart. A punch or kick or grab would bring the training partners closer to each other. A defense or two would be thrown up. Control of the attacker would be gained. He would be taken to the ground where he was broken or killed. Each student kept his own notes as to what was studied each night.

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