Kanazawa Sensei
12/08/2019
It is December 8, 2019 and Kanazawa Hirokazu is dead. I learn of his death from the comments of friends and teachers online. I have never heard this name, but I recognize the tone with which people speak it. It is a name I probably should know but I have never been a collector of names. No baseball cards or band idols for me. My memory is a movie of the stories and connections that inform my life, and those fragments often do not include names.
It is December 9th and I learn that Kanazawa Sensei was 88 years old. There is a link to a video of him. From the image on the link I know that this man is in fact one of my life’s fragments, even though his name is not. I remember the first time someone brought in a homemade videotape of some faraway martial artist performing kata and applications. For the first time we could watch a demonstration over and over. Pause, rewind, analyze. Such tapes were little help to novices, but for martial artists with a solid foundation, they were a new way to share information. Two decades later, the internet had made such videos ubiquitous, leading to unprecedented sharing of martial arts knowledge within and across styles.
It was the summer of 2008 and I had moved away from the dojo where I grew up training. I was about to switch to a career of teaching martial arts on my own in a new state. Suddenly these videos were very important. I could save, study, and learn from the good ones. Many of the kata I practice have their roots in Shotokan karate, and as I sorted out the useful videos, I noticed that almost all of them were of the same man. They were old transfers, likely from VHS tapes recorded in the late 70s or early 80s. The man’s name was not mentioned. His form was impeccable. The sound of his feet on the wood and of his gi snapping with his movements were iconic. Over the next decade of teaching and training I would refer back to them often. I would refresh kata that I hadn’t done in a while. I would learn kata that aren’t a part of my style. Feet on the wood. Gi snapping.
I will not know the man Kanazawa Hirokazu. Now that I grasp at the strings of his life, I read about his greatness, his life as a bridge to the early days and the founder of Shotokan. Was he truly great? A thoughtful man of humility, perseverance, wisdom? Or have the stories told by his students and colleagues been softened by reverence, prudence, and politics to create a perfect fiction? I can’t know that anymore since I will never touch his hands, exchange words with him, spar with him, be taught by him. What he is for me will always be feet on wood and a snapping gi.
It is December 10th and I teach my students a kata from Kanazawa Hirokazu’s videos. We take a moment to discuss how our lives can impact others, even when they never meet us. Something comes up in that discussion that sits with me: many famous artists, when asked about their greatest works, have little to say about them. The work was not part of a grand plan to change the world but only a moment in a lifetime of expression. A window for the outside world into a life in pursuit of art. I cannot know the man Kanazawa Hirokazu, but I can see the quality of his art through these windows. They are old windows revealing such skill that it has been unnecessary to recreate them with another practitioner in all the decades since. While the world is easily distracted by flashing lights, and glittering, twirling batons, none of it is more than a fleeting fireworks show unless it holds a mastery of the basics.
When I teach advanced martial artists, our recurring practice is about how to reconnect the most advanced principles back to the basics where all the power resides. When we see an artist possessed of these fundamentals, the way they perform what is difficult while demonstrating perfect balance, structure, fluidity, and timing, we see beauty. The goals of speed, power, control, even expression are meaningless if not built upon this structure. They are flashes that fade instead of the feet on wood and the snapping gi that will always hold a corner of my mind. I am fascinated by this thought of Kanazawa Hirokazu precisely because I know little else about him. The laurels of his life are distant to me, but his practice is personal. His fundamental skills speak to me across the bridge of anonymity.
It is December 11 and I train myself and my students in what would look like monotonous work to those who seek fireworks. I spar with one of my best students and hear myself say in response to his questions that he’s not doing anything wrong, but the skill he’s looking for will take another thousand hours of practice. I do the same pushups I did 36 years ago when my mother first walked me into a dojo. My muscles are still sore, I’m still bruised, I’m still thinking about my basics. I am flooded suddenly with emotion as I think about Kanazawa Hirokazu, whom I will never meet. My feet echo on the floor of my dojo. My gi snaps about me like a whip.