 Last week, we featured an episode that went into the history of Goju-Ru Karate. There is a link in the description if you haven't seen it, but we take a bit of a dive into one of Okinawa's pillar karate systems. In that episode, we had Goju Karateka and scholar, John Paul Williams as a guest. He gave us some great insight into the history, and he also just published his book, Goju-Ru Karate Do Desk Reference Volume 1, which is a very detailed documentation of the history of the art. Today, he is with us to talk about his experience with Goju-Ru. The research he put into the books addresses some misconceptions and talks about where Goju-Ru is today. So I'd like to talk a little bit about your background. So you started training in Goju-Ru in 1974. Did you particularly look for that art to set out with, or did you explore different arts to begin with? Actually, I didn't. I had no idea that was Goju-Ru. I was a little kid at the time, maybe five years old-ish or so. And it's where my dad went. And the kids of the parents just sat in the corner. It was mostly men, and I think what you were. After a little while, one day, someone caught on that we were all counting, that Sensei would say itch-nee-san-shi, and we'd say, Goju-Ru is a touch. It was just kind of a funny thing. And before we knew it, we all had doggie. I don't even remember the first day or the introduction or anything. I just remember one day we're in the corner, and another day we're not. So once you started training in the art, what made you continue with it? I started in New York, and when we came to California, my sister and I came to California. There was no thoughts about putting this into anything. And I was taken to, let's see, the first place was Judo, and that was for just the summer program. And by chance, that was with Keiko Fukuda, who was the teacher of it. And later on, we didn't know she was big and important at the time. But later on, of course, she became the most senior female Judo guy in the world. And she was a student of Jikoro Kano. She would happen to be a student of Jikoro Kano, but in 1975, 1976, 1977, no one thought about that. And as a little kid, I didn't think of that. I just thought of her as the kind lady who taught at the dojo. We went on to, or I went on to, let's see, Samuda Kwan and Takewondo at a few different locations. And then I didn't find Gojiru again until maybe 1985 or 84. So our godmother, per se, lady who was like my family friend that really took us around and took care of her, she stumbled upon a karate instructor. And his name was Cornell Watson. My chance Cornell Watson was on the very first WKF team to Japan in 1970. And he just happened to live around the corner. We didn't even know. I can hit his house with a football. No idea. Quite simply puts, I saw the fist on the wall. I knew that was home again. So stayed with it since then. So yeah, he was animus. And he had a saying that Gojiru players know their opponents and know more about other styles than the people who actually practiced them. I don't know exactly how serious he was about that, but it opened us up enough that we wanted to explore what were the Shito-Ru guys doing? What were the Wato-Ru and Shota-Kan-Ru guys doing? What were the Kobojitsu that guys doing? He didn't teach Kobo-Ru. Even what were the Taekwondo and Mutupon guys doing, Tengsudo guys doing. That was really big around the area back then. We had Ernie Reyes, West Coast Taekwondo here in town. And I even trained with him for maybe a year and a half, I think. Let's say for an example, working with the guys from Taekwondo and Hokusawa. Of course, they have a lot of kicks. And they can be kicks from wherever they're going to get that foot launched off and it's going to get you unless you know what to do. For a Goju-Ru player, because we practice so much Sabaki, Goju-Ru players should understand to close that distance. So you're not in the range of the kick. Out of the range of their kick would be closer to them. And since they don't use hands as much, of course, Goju has a lot of grappling. So go straight in and take over from the inside, not from the outside. And Goju-Ru is a close fighting art. So working with the Taekwondo guys, the Kukso-Wan guys, the Muda-Wan guys, spectacular opportunity. As well as it is for them, because they get to work with an opponent who fights close fighting. So you have to get the experience to understand your opponent, you need to learn about your opponent. When it comes to Goju-Ru, it's so deeply rooted in Okinawan karate. How would you say it differs from other styles of karate? Like any distinctive features or elements that go into the art that people might not know about? One of the biggest things, of course, everything in Goju-Ru is sanchin, sanchin, sanchin. You know, the heavy breathing, the breathing. Everything is sanchin. That's the beginning. That's the middle. That's the end. But the other major component of Goju-Ru is sanchin stance, the hourglass stance. Getting it correct, making sure your knees are over your toes. Your posture is vertical. Breathing from the lower abdomen below the belly button, the hara, a lot of it posture. Then there is the body tatani, which is kote kitai, when we hammer, hammer, hammer arms together for upper block, lower blocks, everything else. And of course, then there's the body conditioning. And Goju-Ru is huge on body conditioning, which is why we use those weird rudimentary kind of archaic tools, the chi-shi, the nigiri-game, which is the two vases that are just filled with sand and you're carrying them with your fingertips. You have to be strong, not just on the outside, on the muscles, but on the inside, which are heart. So regardless of how much it hurts, regardless of how hard it is, you just keep on going. You persevere. But the real meaning of osu! is you keep pushing. My old teacher, Cornell Watan, he required us to submit a 20-page thesis for a black belt test. And I submitted 100. Then shortly after, I started running the website Goju.net, and I started writing articles on Goju.net. When he died, by the time he died, I had a somewhat accurate, maybe 50% accurate, 50% inaccurate history of Goju-Ru. And it wasn't so great, a lot of people still have copies of that on their websites today. The version on my website is gone, I completely revamped that website. But what I did was I took all of those articles and the historic timeline, and I thought I was going to put it into one book and include all the kata of Goju. It turned out that the history of Goju itself was so vast, it took up 75% of volume one. Now there's still four more volumes to follow. The introduction of the book is mostly explaining what is karate. What is budo, and why is karate a budo? What is Goju-Ru karate, though? And why is it a karate? And then going through systematically, historically, chronologically, the timeline for Goju-Ru and the history of events that relate to Goju-Ru in one way or another. So overall, it's 20 years of work, but I didn't really start outlining it until May of 2016. So when you turned in your thesis, what was the feedback that you got on that? No, he handed it back to me the next day and said, it's wrong. Did that help kind of prompt you to go look more and more? Typical sensei, just wrong, wrong, wrong. Other people, he handed theirs back to them that day. But for me, he at least took a look at it because it was kind of thick, and of course he said wrong. But you have to understand, the guy was a, he worked at Stanford Linear Accelerator, which they do atomic testing for the military and for the government. He was a graduate of UCLA School of Engineering. So he was strict, strict, strict, strict, must be perfect, must be perfect. If it is, he's not going to tell you, he's going to tell you, go do it again. And that was just his way, and being that stern with a knucklehead teenager was good for me. Yeah, he died in 2015, and that's why in 2016 I was really looking for, how can I show my respect? And that's when I started organizing the one book that ended up turning into five. So this is just the very first one. So the book description mentions that you try to dispel a lot of martial arts myths. Can you give us an example of some of what those myths might be? No disrespect to Yamaguchi, but Yamaguchi Gouken-sensei, that he received his tent done from Miyagi. And it wasn't actually from Miyagi. It was, Miyagi was named as the honorary president for Gojukai, Japan. So he didn't actually sign it. His name appears on it, but that's because he's the honorary president of the association. So one myth without making it either look bad and without giving a personal opinion was I just display the tent non-certificates and make a brief, brief comment on this is the certificate, here's the date, here's who's name, here's who's stamp. However, that person, Miyagi-sensei, was the honorary president of Gojukai and wasn't the voted president. Another myth would be say Miyagi was evacuated from Okinawa and most people don't really realize that he was off the island. Or I set up an example giving two of his daughters died on board a ship that was being evacuated from Okinawa. So a few of his children died during the, during the war. Simple, simple little tidbits here and there that were always kind of misconceptions, misconceptions, and they were mostly answers to my own questions. And I'm sure a lot of other karate people had the same questions of if this was here and this was here, how is that possible? And I don't say anything about any of it or the myths being impossible. I just provide the dates, the scenario and the situation and a possible photo to back up the scenario. And I let the reader draw their own conclusion because I don't want to be the bad guy in it. But if there's a picture of you in Hawaii and everybody says that you were in China doing research and doesn't work out very well. So this fixes a lot of people's dates. How did you find the resources to confirm a lot of these details? Believe it or not, Taiwan has a lot of libraries and information that I would say outdo the national diet of Japan. The national diet of Japan is like the Library of Congress for USA. But theirs is fully digitized. Taiwan is even in more in depth and has more information available. Then there's one of the one of my biggest references that really helped to get everything up and going was the Encyclopedia for Karate Include. So this started getting the ball turning and really organizing some of the dates. I found a few dates in here that were impossible for some people also. Can't include them. All I can do is what can I include that's proper efforts in more than one place. And I can say, OK, this I guarantee is correct because there's also photo evidence to go along with it and other major instructors. Now, if Kenwama Boone's book says that this photo was with he and Miyagi and whatever dates and the Encyclopedia says the same, OK, we can go with that and say that's correct. If Miyazato's book includes the same information, then, OK, we have two different cross-references that come to the same conclusion. We can say this is accurate. Some things were from newspaper clinics. OK, we can say those are accurate and true. Some things were pure myth and hypothetical. Somebody wrote on the internet. Toss that out the window. We'll come back to it later because there might be supporting evidence for it. But a lot of that's gone. Tewakai was actually founded in 1972 by Suji Tazaki and he was a senior student of Yamaguchi Gogen at the time. The organization continues today under the leadership of his senior student Fujiwara Seiichi. We continue our training. Of course, we're under the umbrella of J.K.F. Gojukai and we follow quite closely the teaching for OGKK with a lot of the sport applications of Japan Karate Federation and WKF. Any advice to somebody who is looking to join Gojiru? Like what should they look for in terms of trying to find a school? Is there a difference in the way certain lineages train? So what should someone look for when they're trying to find a school? I would say first off, don't simply go to your neighborhood dojo. You might find something that's 10 minutes further away that's going to be much better for you. I was contacted recently by a friend in Alameda and she and her husband were taking their daughter to trial lessons at a place and they wanted her to sign in for a contract for one year and get this at a price of $800 a month or $45 per class. I went to look at the credentials of the instructor and it said eighth degree black belt. First of all, he teaches Chinese martial arts. There's nothing wrong with Chinese martial arts, but he called himself Shihan. Yeah, over the sign it says Karate. He's teaching Chinese martial arts. He calls himself Shihan, which is Japanese also. And he mixes in Taekwondo Pumsekata for everything, which amazingly, one of the Pumsekata was the requirement for the black belt. I'm sure some Taekwondo guys have made the same funny face that I made, but if that's how he wants to make his money, I can't knock him forward if it's working, it's working. There's going to be a lot of questions to be asked. So I would say just do basic research. Call another martial artist that you know and ask them what they think and be cautious even with their influence because it's not, it might not be their style. They might not be pleased that you're not going to their shodokan duplex or their wato duplex. They're their style. A great instructor. You don't find his name on the Megan's Law List. You've got to look, you do have to look. And if they work at a park and wreck, that means that they've had their background checked and they've been fingered. So do your background work. Run a check. Biome, don't be afraid to take a look. If they're karate, check the USA Karate website and see if they're listed as a participant or a member. If they're not, that's not necessarily a big deal or a problem. But if they are, that means that they have a background check. That means they've come up clean if their name is listed. So you've made one good step already. And also sit in on a class, not sit in on a trial class, but sit in on a class or maybe even two classes. Just watch and listen to the instructor. If the instructor keeps on looking over at you to see if you're paying attention and you're listening because he wants to sell you lessons, which he has the right to sell lessons, but is he teaching or is he recruiting? You want to make sure he's not putting on a show for you just to allure you in? You got it right on the button. Glad I didn't have to say it. But yeah. And take a look at the teacher and see how many times he looks over at you and he's putting on that show. When teaching, just teach. So now that we're talking about participating, we are now facing a new landscape where we're hopefully come out of the pandemic, which took a toll on a lot of different martial arts schools that closed. Do you have any advice on people going back to the schools or for school owners, anything that they could do to help kind of get back on their feet or how they should approach reactivating to the new to the new landscape? This is interesting because even I'm going through the same thing. I see the new landscape. This is me personally. I see the new landscape as being a hybrid model. The video training is on, which is strange because 10 years ago we shunned anybody who did a video, took a videotape of themselves and sent it across this country to someone else for review and then got a phone call with no staff. No way, but now we have live video conference. If we meet a few times in person and we meet a few times on video, the combination can work out. Video is still difficult because it's only two dimensional. In person, we can work on those smaller details and we can come back to it. So some things that we can't do on video will focus on when we're in person, some things that we can do on video will stick it into the video time. Working with an opponent, that's a little difficult. Your students are going to be punching air, but that's nothing more of a change than when they first started classes and they were doing basics anyway. They were punching and blocking air. So the hybrid model is here. We have to face it until the 3D projection arrives with lasers on each corner of your room, projecting a image of the person in the middle room. Are you hinting at a new project? No, I'm hinting at what I already know. I'm in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. Ah, I can go to a trade show and there's Elon Musk as a projection walking across stage. It's here, it's expensive, but it's here. But video conferencing was expensive 10 years ago also. And we should adapt and start adjusting ourselves now. Start training ourselves to get ready for it's coming. That the goal of Budo is to become a better citizen. To become a better citizen, we also have to understand the technology that runs our current world. The characters of others in our current world and our current world just went through a drastic change. So we have to adapt to it to continue on. The most successful Dojo or Dojang or Chinese martial arts clubs in the country or the world are going to be those who made the adaptations. So just kind of the same way to talk about a little bit of the future and going forward, I understand. So you've got more volumes of the book in the works, books in the works. Is there anything you share with us about what they might be covering and what we could expect to see in them in future volumes? Oh, volume two, I'm going to go over how people can read their certificates. Yeah, a lot of people think their fifth non-certificate it says Shihan, who doesn't almost none do. Very few organizations use a grade certificate also as a Shihan license certificate. I also go over where that terminology Shihan comes from or Renchi, Kyoshi and Anchi. I list that by the dates that they were changed and volume one as a historic reference. But in volume two, I actually go over a bit more of the meeting. How to read your Shihan certificate, how to read your Black Belt certificate or your Don certificate. Then there is an old timeline that's still followed in Japan today. When grades are officially given. An example is this. I used to have a friend who had a 13-year-old fourth degree Black Belt. Yeah, a 13-year-old fourth degree Black Belt should not be in the same line as you. Even if I was only a first-degree Black Belt. Over 50 years old, he just doesn't have a life experience nor the size to take me on. And I'm a big guy. So maybe he's learned a few things and he knows his forms or his kato or his bumsu. But does he have an understanding and he might say yes. And I'm telling you at 14, we didn't have an understanding of what we were doing. Regardless of how much of a hot shot we thought we were. So I go over a lot of that. I go over in volume two, what the correct line-up arrangement of your class should be. What is the name of that front wall? Why is it there? How come you shouldn't have pictures of living people at the front wall? Shomen has only put dead people there. Put those living people on the side or in the back. Dead people, the most respectful and the oldest. The founder of Gojiru, his picture goes up there. My teacher, my teacher, Fujiwara and Vasishian, they go to the side or over here behind us. They shouldn't go on the door front. Simple, they're simple things, but most people don't know this. They don't know you placed the front of the room. Shomen, the area that you vow to is a furthest wall away from the door. If you've ever looked at a Japanese certificate in the upper right hand corner, there's always another stamp, but half of it is off the page. Most of the American members in my, I should say, actually all of the American members in our own USA division, they had no idea. What is that thing? So I had to, in volume two, I explained things like that. What are all these things? What are all these little nuances that make a dojo, an organization, a style, what it is? Jumball, I definitely appreciate your time. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show with us, sharing your knowledge, sharing your work. And we definitely look forward to what you bring us in the future. Awesome, well, hopefully if you have me back for anything or any questions you'd like to field, I'd be more than happy to jump in on it. It would be wonderful to be an auditor. Thank you. Celebrate the art of Gojiru karate with this commemorative forefather t-shirt available only here at Art of One Dojo. Pick yours up on the product shelf below the video or at the link in the description.