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
