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CHAPTER FOUR

Japan

Several weeks after his walk on the beach with Suenaka, O’Sensei returned to his homeland. Suenaka and his family joined others in bidding their formal good-byes to the Founder, seeing him off at Honolulu International Airport the day of his departure. Although Tohei Sensei remained in Hawaii for a short while, once again guiding the development of the local aikidoka, Suenaka had little time for practice, occupied as he was with preparations for his imminent move to Japan. And so it was that in early March of 1961, less than a month after his first meeting with O’Sensei, Airman Suenaka found himself, duffel in hand, standing on the tarmac at Tachikawa Air Base.

The first thing one does when arriving at a new military station is to report to one’s immediate command, receive one’s housing assignment, and get settled in. This, of course, is assuming your command is aware of and anticipating your arrival. Upon reporting to the Tachikawa HQ Squadron CBPO (Central Base Personnel Office), Suenaka was told there was no record of his assignment there—for some reason, his orders were nowhere to be found. Straightening things out would take days, perhaps weeks, and Suenaka was placed on a list of “surplus airmen” and told to find something to do in the interim. The choice was easy. After taking only as much time as necessary to drop off his bags at his barracks and pack a few essentials, Suenaka hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Tokyo and the Aikikai Hombu.

With Tachikawa AFB a good thirty miles outside the city limits, the driver was somewhat reluctant to make the journey. However, after assurances that he had enough money to pay for the trip (“It cost me about 3,000 yen, which was only about $8.50 then; I think today it would cost about $300!”), Suenaka was on his way.

Even today, Tokyo’s labyrinthine streets and haphazard addresses make navigation difficult, so much so that even natives have a tough time finding their destination. It was no different in 1961, as Suenaka recalls:

“The taxi driver said, ‘Well, where’s the dojo?’ And I said, ‘Shinjuku-ku,’ which is a district in Tokyo, one of the largest. He said, ‘We are in Shinjuku-ku—where in Shinjukuku?’ And I said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho,’ which is like a borough, or part of a town. And he said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho?’ So we drove around for what seemed like an hour, until finally he said, ‘This is Wakamatsu-cho.’ Then we had to find Nishi Okubo, which is in Western Okubo, which is a neighborhood there in Wakamatsu-cho, like a subdivision, and it’s also the name of the main street in Nishi Okubo. We kept driving and he asked around—we finally found Nishi Okubo, the street, and we drove and drove and drove looking for Nuke-Benten, which was a store or supermarket near the Hombu on Nishi Okubo . . . [The driver said], ‘This is the town, but where’s the house?,’ and so about another half-an-hour or so, we were driving around and I looked at a telephone pole right on the side of the road with a little sign with ‘aikido’ calligraphy on it and an arrow pointing down the lane. I yelled, ‘This is it! We found it!’ The taxi driver was elated . . . It took about an hour-and-a-half to drive thirty miles and find it.”

Although Suenaka told O’Sensei in Hawaii that he would soon be in Tokyo, he hadn’t called ahead to inform the Aikikai of his arrival. Consequently, when he walked into the Hombu dojo and announced he wished to see the Founder, the staff afforded him a polite, yet understandably cool reception:

Morihei Ueshiba O’Sensei in his Iwama dojo; Aiki Festival, April, 1964.

“I walked in; there were secretaries there, and the office manager, and they said, ‘Who are you?’ I said I had just arrived from Hawaii, and they said, ‘Oh! O’Sensei just returned from there!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know, I saw him there.’ So I said, ‘Can I see him?,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t know, we can’t bother O’Sensei.’ Apparently, though, somebody had gone back (into the dojo) and said there was a visitor from Hawaii. So I sat in the office, and they served me tea.

“There were Dutch doors that led from the outer office to the dojo—the bottom part was open, and the top was shut. As I was sitting there, I could see partially into the dojo, under the door ... I saw O’Sensei walking. Suddenly he stopped, and then he bent over and peeked under the doors and saw me, and he ducked under the Dutch door and came into the room. He couldn’t remember my name, so he said, ‘Hawaii Boy! How are you, how are you?,’ and he came up and hugged me. He was really happy to see me, and I was even happier than he was! [There were] all these stories that we heard about him that he was untouchable, he was unapproachable, you had to get permission from his chief disciples to even get close to him, let alone talk to him, so when he came in and hugged me, I thought, ‘Hey! This is real special!’ And, of course, that’s when our relationship began.”

The office staff was dumbfounded at the reception the usually formal and reserved O’Sensei afforded this young man from Hawaii. Suenaka recalls the staff telling him later that they had never before seen O’Sensei embrace anyone, and Suenaka himself cannot recall ever again seeing the Founder greet anyone in that way. Yet that warm encounter set a precedent between the two. “Every time I would see him, I would run up to him and say, ‘O’Sensei!,’ and hug him, and he just loved that!” Indeed, to this day, at all of Suenaka Sensei’s schools, at the end of class all students embrace each and every fellow aikidoka before leaving the mat. The tradition is as essential to dojo etiquette as bowing to the kamiza before and after each practice session, and is a direct result of that first Hombu encounter. One may also consider it, as Suenaka Sensei does, another demonstration of O’Sensei’s guiding philosophy that “The true nature of budo lies in the loving protection of all things.” When new students, at first uncomfortable with the practice, ask why they must embrace at the end of class, always Suenaka Sensei’s reply is, “Because O’Sensei hugged me.”

At O’Sensei’s invitation, Suenaka remained at the Hombu that day. Nobuyoshi Tamura, at the time one of O’Sensei’s uchi deshi (live-in disciples) and whom Suenaka had briefly met with O’Sensei in Hawaii, was kind enough to give him a tour of the Hombu and to make arrangements for Suenaka to stay the night, seeing to it he had a room and could find his way. After managing to squeeze a bit of practice into what was already a very full day, Suenaka was preparing to retire when O’Sensei happened by and extended an invitation to join him at breakfast the next morning. Suenaka went to bed a happy man.

Suenaka Sensei with O’Sensei at Iwama, home of the Aiki Jinja (shrine); April, 1964.

What was originally intended to be a brief afternoon visit turned into a three-day stay. Suenaka rose the next morning, making sure he was at table by seven o’clock sharp for breakfast with the Founder. “I was overwhelmed by the honor,” Suenaka recalls. “I don’t remember much about it other than that. The fact that my Japanese wasn’t all that great kept me from really carrying on a conversation, but I did ask him many questions. It was just a very honorable event to be there.”

Breakfast concluded, Suenaka headed off for the day’s first class. As the years passed and their relationship progressed, O’Sensei often invited Suenaka not only to breakfast, but dinner as well, a pattern that began during this first visit and continued throughout all of Suenaka Sensei’s stays at the Hombu in the years to come. “Naturally, I was always there. I never missed out having breakfast or dinner with him!” Suenaka usually sat with others at the same table as O’Sensei, rather than the separate table reserved for deshi, while O’Sensei’s wife Hatsu, as per custom, took her meals in the kitchen with the domestic help.

The first full day at the Hombu unfolded predictably enough. Sometimes O’Sensei would teach the first class, although often, at his father’s discretion, the first class of the day was taught by Kisshomaru Ueshiba Doshu, known then as wakasensei, a title given to the son of a system founder before he becomes the successor (today, Moriteru Ueshiba, son of Doshu, bears the title wakasensei). Afterwards, Doshu would usually turn his attention to administrative duties, leaving the day’s instruction in the hands of a shihan. At that time, Koichi Tohei was still in Hawaii, but when at the Hombu the responsibility of teaching the next few classes was his, though he would often designate various students to teach throughout the day. Instruction commenced at around 6:30 a.m., and ended just before 9:00 p.m. Suenaka attended as many classes as he could, and enjoyed dinner with the Founder before retiring that night. The third day proceeded as the first: breakfast with O’Sensei, then classes all day long, and dinner before falling into bed.

O’Sensei at Iwama during the Aiki-Matsuri (Aiki Festival); April, 1964.

For more than the obvious reasons, Suenaka found his first aikido instruction at the Hombu, and his study there in the ensuing years, a singular experience. When one studies an art or style of art, no matter what it may be, under one instructor or group of instructors for a long period of time and then visits another dojo teaching the same art or style, quite often the student notices differences in technique—sometimes subtle, sometimes significant—that can make it seem as if he or she has studied an entirely different art. There is always a degree of pride at stake, of wanting to acquit oneself and one’s teachers well in a familiar, yet foreign environment. It was no different for Suenaka; indeed, if anything, the responsibility he felt was even greater. He had spent eight years studying aikido in Hawaii, thousands of miles away from where he now stood, under the watchful eyes of the Founder. He was one of the first fruits of the seed Koichi Tohei planted in Hawaii in 1953, and very much represented the outcome of that maiden effort. And there was another source of pressure as well. Though Japanese by blood, Suenaka was American by birth. While completely Japanese in appearance, English was his native tongue; as Suenaka has noted several times earlier, though he could make himself understood, he was at the time by no means fluent in Japanese. He was, in many ways, a foreigner, as much as any American serviceman stationed in Japan, though in his case his native hosts’ expectations of his behavior were immeasurably higher.

It was with a mixture of confident anticipation and wariness that Suenaka first stepped onto the Hombu mat. The other students were friendly, but distant, and were obviously testing him with each and every technique. Despite his credentials, learning aikido under Tohei Sensei and his designated instructors, Suenaka realized he would have to prove himself. It is a tribute to his skill and tutelage that he was not found wanting:

“The waza at the Hombu was somewhat different, in that there were several other shihan teaching, so the style of aikido, so to speak, was a little different from what I had learned in Hawaii. Everybody had his own interpretation of what aikido was, under O’Sensei, so it wasn’t really drastically different, but I noticed little differences here and there, which made it interesting for my study. My aikido fit in pretty well, because at that time, or course, Tohei Sensei was the chief instructor, and so everybody pretty much followed suit; his particular style of aikido was reflected in all the other instructors’ aikido.”

During his years at the Hombu, Suenaka noticed one major difference between the way O’Sensei taught and the way Koichi Tohei taught, a difference that prophesied Tohei’s later split with the Aikikai:

“O’Sensei never really emphasized ki. He talked about ki, but more than, you could say, ‘instructing’ ki, he demonstrated ki in his waza, whereas Tohei Sensei really stressed ki development and using ki in aikido techniques. O’Sensei would give lectures on ki, but not while he was demonstrating aikido. He would mention specific techniques during his lectures, and demonstrated using ki in techniques as part of the lecture, in a lot of different ways. But Tohei Sensei stressed ki a lot more while he was teaching waza than O’Sensei did.”

Though he needed no further convincing after his private experiences with O’Sensei in Hawaii, it was during one of O’Sensei’s lectures that Suenaka received a forceful demonstration of the power of ki:

“O’Sensei was demonstrating what true ki was supposed to be like or feel like, and he used me as uke. He was holding a chopstick in his hand, but he didn’t say what he was going to do. I was kind of skeptical, but I trusted him. I never hesitated to attack him. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me or really hurt me badly. He didn’t tell me how to attack him, he just said, you know, ‘Come get me.’ As I attacked him, he struck me in the forehead with the chopstick and knocked me down. He knocked the heck out of me! I almost lost consciousness, very close to it. Everything went white for a few seconds, then I got up and went back to my place and sat down, and I asked someone there ‘What happened?’ They said, ‘Man, he knocked you down with a chopstick!’ I had a big welt in the middle of my forehead from where he’d hit me with this chopstick! He knocked me silly!”

As Suenaka says, while O’Sensei never lectured about ki during waza, the strength of his ki—as well as his considerable physical strength, despite his advanced years—was apparent:

“There was another time, when we were doing katate-tori,

where I would go in and grab O’Sensei. He would grab my wrist as he countered the attack and throw me across the room. And when I got up, there would be a bruise already forming on my wrist from where he’d grabbed me. [O’Sensei] didn’t like it when the uke didn’t give him a strong attack; some-times it would seem like he would throw you even harder if you didn’t attack him hard. And then he would hardly ever use you as an uke again. [O’Sensei] used me as an uke a lot, because I always came in and attacked him hard! I knew he would wipe me out when I did, but again, I knew he would throw me even harder if I didn’t! Anyway, I didn’t care; I loved it!”

Despite his prodigious martial skill, the ease with which he tossed his ardent uke about the dojo and his uncanny command of ki, Suenaka Sensei remembers O’Sensei more than anything as a gentle man, kind, and forgiving. Though quick to erupt into awe-inspiring anger when provoked, sending his students immediately to their knees in respectful seiza (sitting posture), his anger disappeared almost as soon as it surfaced. For O’Sensei, it would seem as if anger was a tool, serving to get the offending party’s attention; though no doubt genuine, it was put away as soon as it had served its purpose. Again, this is in keeping with the guiding philosophy of aikido, as expressed by the Founder.

Suenaka recalls an incident during one of his evening meals with O’Sensei during his first visit, which echoed their first encounter in O’Sensei’s hotel room in Hawaii a month earlier. The event impressed on him, in an unexpected and almost comic way, aikido’s guiding philosophy; that O’Sensei, martial master though he was, literally wouldn’t even harm a fly:

“As we got ready to eat, he noticed a fly on his bowl of rice. There were some other uchi deshi eating with him as well, and we all noticed the fly and were ready to chase it away, and he stopped us. ‘The little fly won’t eat too much,’ he said. ‘We’ll just let him eat his fill and then let him go away, happy.’ We tried to tell him about flies carrying diseases and all that, but we all ended up just sitting there watching the fly eat until it eventually flew away.”

On his fourth day in Japan, Suenaka realized it would probably be in his best interest to report back to his duty station before the MPs began searching for him. After taking his leave of O’Sensei, Suenaka hopped a cab back to Tachikawa Air Force Base and again reported to the CBPO. This time, he was sent to his squadron for assignment. It was there that Suenaka met Captain Rausch, his squadron commander and the man who was to unwittingly play a pivotal role in Suenaka’s continuing martial education.

Captain Rausch was young, barely ten years older than the twenty-one year old Suenaka. In answer to Rausch’s query, Suenaka said he was supposed to report to Civil Engineering, whose primary responsibility it was to keep the base’s physical plant in good repair, but that there was no record of his orders. “What’s your AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code)?,” Rausch asked. As luck would have it, he was frustrated with CE’s slow reponse to his repeated requests for service: whenever he needed something fixed, it took them days to attend to it. “I can’t even get them to come by and change my lightbulbs!,” Rausch lamented. When Suenaka informed him he was an electrician, Rausch asked, “Would you take care of my lightbulbs, electrical switches, everything? Can you repair things?,” he asked. “Oh, I can repair anything!,” Suenaka responded. That’s all the answer Capt. Rausch needed. Before the day was through, Suenaka found himself assigned directly under Rausch, charged with the awesome duty of pretty much killing time until a lightbulb burned out. He was issued his own supply card to requisition supplies as needed, and was left alone.

Opportunity was banging on the barracks door. Suenaka wasted no time in approaching the barracks houseboy, Yama-san, who made about forty dollars a month to see to the household chores of all the airmen on Suenaka’s floor: shining shoes, cleaning house, laundering clothes and uniforms. Would Yama-san be interested in earning an extra 2,000 yen (at the time, $5.60) a month to change lightbulbs and electrical switches? For Yama-san, it was close to a week’s extra salary, so naturally, his answer was yes.

As long as his light bulbs and switches were changed whenever needed, Capt. Rausch cared little who changed them. Suenaka left his supply card and the Hombu phone number with Yama-san and headed for Tokyo. He stayed at the Hombu for weeks at a time, checking in occasionally with Yama-san to make sure everything was okay, and returning about once a month to meet with Capt. Rausch in person to ensure he was satisfied. “Very satisfactory,” Rausch would say. ‘You’re doing a good job!” And so Suenaka would thank his CO, pay Yama-san his 2,000 yen, and return to the Hombu. Paid by Uncle Sam to study aikido under the Founder; it was a pretty sweet deal.

Even with his near constant study at the Hombu, Suenaka from time to time took a few days to travel from dojo to dojo to observe and study other styles, both familiar and foreign. Suenaka visited dojos not only in Tokyo, but in Shizuoka, Nagano, Beppu, Osaka, and other cities. Many of these visits were part of his travels with O’Sensei, Tohei Sensei, and other uchi deshi as part of teaching assignments, both during his time at Tachikawa and during his subsequent years in Okinawa (discussed later), but just as many were undertaken alone. (Note: Many of the events described hereinafter occurred over a period of several years, for reasons which will also be addressed later.)

Suenaka Sensei with judo Meijin (10th dan master) Kazuo Ito at the Kodokan in Tokyo; Winter, 1969

One of the first places Suenaka visited was the Kodokan, established in 1882 by judo founder Jigoro Kano, the Mecca for judoka worldwide as much as the Aikikai Hombu is for aikidoka. It was there that Suenaka met Meijin Kyuzo Mifune, one of the world’s most celebrated judoka, and Meijin Kazuo Ito, under whom Suenaka studied whenever he was at the Kodokan. Suenaka had the great honor and good fortune of occasionally practicing with Mifune Sensei: “He threw me around quite a few times!,” recalls Suenaka. “It was very pleasurable being thrown around by him; it was like being used as an uke by O’Sensei.” Suenaka also studied from time to time under Ito contemporary Sumiyuki Kotani, but it was Ito Sensei with whom he spent most of his time. The judo and jujutsu master, at the time in his early sixties, took the young Hawaiian under his wing, and the two soon developed a relationship much like Suenaka’s relationship with O’Sensei, with Suenaka serving as Ito’s deshi whenever he was at the Kodokan. One might think O’Sensei would have discouraged Suenaka’s study of other arts, but the contrary proved to be true. It was precisely because of Suenaka’s pre-aikido experience in judo, kempo, and jujutsu that the Founder gave his blessing to Suenaka’s extracurricular studies. Indeed, O’Sensei made a point of discussing Suenaka’s outside studies with him whenever he returned to the Hombu: “He would ask me how they were teaching, and what I thought about them. Of course, he was very happy when I told him that nothing compared to aikido!” Ultimately, in his position as president of the Kodokan promotional board, it was Ito Sensei who, in 1970, encouraged Suenaka Sensei to request promotion to sandan (third degree black belt) in judo and jujutsu, and who personally awarded him those ranks; his dual certificate is signed by Ito Sensei and Risei Kano, son of Jigoro Kano.

Less frequent but no less educational were Suenaka’s occasional visits to Masutatsu Oyama’s Kyokushin-kai karate hombu, his first introduction to that rather brutal and unforgiving martial art form. All three of his brothers had studied Kyokushin-kai in Hawaii under Edward “Bobby” Lowe, one of Mas Oyama’s chief pupils, but Suenaka himself had been too busy with his other martial studies to join them. Fit and experienced as he was, Suenaka was forced to limit his study to a maximum of two hours a week, lest he risk injuries that would interfere with his judo and aikido studies. Still, he relished his time there, and the hard lessons learned.

Despite his outside studies, Suenaka’s heart remained true to aikido, and the more time he spent with O’Sensei, the more their relationship grew. The Founder seemed to have a distinct fondness for “Suenaka-kun” (kun is an affectionate term; roughly, “Young Suenaka”), perhaps because of their unique first meetings. Regardless of the reasons, Suenaka found himself spending a lot of time with O’Sensei. He often served as his kaban mochi (personal valet) when O’Sensei traveled; carrying his bags, holding doors open, or assisting the vigorous but nevertheless aged Founder up and down stairs. Often, O’Sensei personally requested that Suenaka accompany him. Other times, Suenaka was chosen by Tendokan founder Kenji Shimizu, a favorite uchi deshi of O’Sensei. Suenaka was also lucky enough to be invited to join O’Sensei from time to time as the Founder visited area temples to meditate, or traveled to the Aiki Jinja (aikido shrine) at his country home in Iwama, for practice and meditation. (Morihiro Saito Sensei, at the time in his early 30s, was the assigned caretaker of the jinja, a duty he maintains today.) Though an enviable honor, traveling with O’Sensei was pretty much a formal affair, as Suenaka recalls:

“[O’Sensei] never really talked too much. He was very private, very busy. The only time we really talked was when he was relaxing, or while we were eating. Usually when he traveled, he never talked too much. You couldn’t really go up to him and engage him in conversation, not from your side. If he asked you to come sit with him and talk, that’s when you talked. Otherwise, in our travels, he would spend his free time resting or sleeping.”

There are stories of O’Sensei, particularly in the early days of aikido, putting his attendants to the test; for example, changing his mind about boarding a train at the last possible moment, sending his valets scrambling to retrieve his bags and arrange new transportation. However, Suenaka never experienced any of this:

“It might be true that in the old days O’Sensei did that, but he wasn’t like that while I was [in Japan]. He never really tested us or tried to fool us like that. He might have done that before, playfully, or maybe just decided to change his mind for whatever reason, but it was all pretty straightforward when we were with him. He was a real serious guy.”

As Suenaka’s relationship with O’Sensei grew, so did his relationship with the man who first introduced him to aikido, Koichi Tohei. Thanks to the Air Force, Suenaka was one of the few original Hawaiian aikidoka who was able to spend an appreciable length of time studying at the Hombu, and so developed a relationship with Tohei perhaps unrivaled by those whose aikido practice began as his did, with Tohei’s first Hawaiian visit in 1953. Just over forty years old at the time of Suenaka’s arrival in Japan, Tohei was entering into his physical and martial prime. Handsome, charismatic, and boasting powerful technique, he was a commanding and popular presence on the mat and off, and had an equally powerful personal effect on young Suenaka. Tohei Sensei recognized Suenaka from his many trips to Hawaii, and upon returning to Japan about a month after Suenaka’s arrival there, Tohei took the younger man under his wing from the very start: “My relationship with Tohei Sensei was, I guess you would say, like a father and son . . . we had a lot of respect for each other, a lot of love for each other . . . . And even today, [I] have a lot of love and respect for him.”

Suenaka Sensei with Koichi Tohei at Iwama; April, 1964.

As their relationship grew, Tohei took Suenaka with him on his frequent travels throughout Japan as his personal deshi, teaching aikido and lecturing and, after the day’s work was done, spending the night on the town. “We did a lot of things together,” Suenaka recalls. “We went out together, partied together, went nightclubbing together, ate together. . . . He had a lot of friends, and was a very popular person all over Japan.” In his position as chief Hombu instructor, Tohei Sensei pretty much set his own schedule, arranging his own demonstrations and lectures, departing and returning to the Hombu as he wished.

Kisshomaru Ueshiba and Suenaka Sensei, at O’Sensei’s Iwama dojo; April 1964. The figure seen in silhouette in the doorway behind them is O’Sensei.

Suenaka Sensei with Kisshomaru Ueshiba at the Aikikai Hombu; December, 1993.

Where his relationship with Tohei Sensei was close, Suenaka’s relationship with Kisshomaru Ueshiba Doshu was more formal. This was not so much a function of temperment as it was position. As the son of the Founder, Doshu was charged with the day-to-day administrative duties necessary to run the organization. Suenaka describes his relationship with Doshu as “. . . business-like. Knowing that Tohei Sensei and I were very close, and I was one of his deshi, Doshu didn’t ignore me, but he left me to Tohei Sensei’s guidance.” Still, there were many times during the years Suenaka studied at the Hombu during which he accompanied Doshu to the Aiki Jinja in Iwama to meditate and say prayers. Whenever he traveled to the Hombu, Suenaka would formally request permission to spend a few moments with Doshu, both out of respect for Doshu’s position and out of curiosity and a sincere desire to get to know him better. “He always had time to talk to me,” Suenaka says. “Of course, I would bring gifts. In Japan, you have to bring gifts . . . they bring gifts, you bring gifts. I brought real good gifts—Napoleon brandy and Henessey cognac—so they were very appreciative! But I wasn’t buying favors, and they understood that. He gave me his time, and I respect him for that. Whenever we got together, [Doshu] was such a warm person. He is reserved, but very humble, self-effacing. He is a very gracious person.”

With Koichi Tohei, Suenaka also found the opportunity to practice misogi (ritual purification) with disciples of Shin-Shin Toitsu Do (“Way of Mind and Body Coordinated”), the spiritual development system founded by Tempu Nakamura and based on elements of yoga and other spiritual disciplines, as well as swordsmanship. Suenaka and others would make pilgrimages into the mountains, kneeling in meditation in the snow, then plunging shirtless into an icy mountain stream, kneeling in the water up to their necks, then running back to kneel in the snow once again and continue meditating. “After a while, the water felt warmer than the air!,” says Suenaka. “But it really focused you, and made you tough.”

Nakamura’s teachings had an even greater influence on Tohei. When he ultimately severed relations with the Hombu in the years following O’Sensei’s death, Tohei Sensei christened his new organization Shin-Shin Toitsu aikido (Aikido with Mind and Body Coordinated), and gradually shifted his teaching emphasis from physical waza to ki development almost exclusively (discussed later).

The arrangement at the Hombu was too good to be true, and so perhaps too good to last. In May of 1961, about three months after his arrival in Japan, Airman Suenaka unexpectedly received transfer orders. He was still considered a surplus airman, remaining in Japan only until the Air Force could find room for him elsewhere, which they did—in Korea. Suenaka was shocked. Regardless of its close geographic proximity, it might as well have been on another planet. But having just tasted what it was like to study with O’Sensei, he wasn’t about to give it up without a fight. Fortunately, he had a cousin who was assigned to the 5th Air Force, the regional command. Suenaka pleaded with him to do whatever he could to allow him to remain in Japan. “He said, ‘The best I can do for you is Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.” The U.S. government was constructing a missile base there to help defend the Japanese mainland, Okinawa and nearby smaller islands against possible attack by the Communist Chinese, and servicemen possessing electrical engineering skills like Suenaka were in high demand. Still, at the time, Okinawa seemed to him no better than Korea. It was even more distant from Tokyo, and the likelihood of being able to spend weeks at a time studying at the Hombu, as he was then, seemed remote at best. On the other hand, Okinawa was obviously more akin culturally to Japan than was Korea, so Suenaka would feel more at home, especially considering that while his Japanese was still rusty, he spoke no Korean. And while travel to the Hombu might be difficult, it wouldn’t be impossible. Okinawa was clearly his best alternative, and he accepted the assignment. Once again, though, it seemed as if divine providence was guiding Suenaka’s life; far from being a disappointment, his stay in Okinawa was to become one of the most significant periods in both his martial development and his personal life.