and his two elder brothers, Denkichi and Shokichi, emigrated to Honolulu, Hawaii, in search of a new beginning. Yoshigoro and his brothers worked in the sugar cane fields by day, and continued to practice their ancestral budo (warrior arts) when the day’s work was done, striving to keep their heritage alive in their new home. In November of 1913, Yoshigoro’s youngest son, Warren Kenji, was born, and it was into this proud, centuries-old samurai tradition that Roy Yukio Suenaka, the first of four sons, was born to Warren Kenji and Ruth Masako Suenaka (nee Iwahiro) on June 25, 1940.
From the moment of his birth, Suenaka’s survival was in doubt. He was a “breach baby,” born feet first; a difficult enough birth in a hospital, made even more hazardous by his home delivery by a midwife. The family physician, Doctor Yamamoto, was quickly summoned and, working with the midwife, was able to deliver the baby. Still, newborn Suenaka would not breathe. Knowing they had but a few minutes before oxygen deprivation would result in irreparable brain damage, the midwife, Yamamoto, and Suenaka’s maternal grandfather, Tsurujiro Iwahiro, worked feverishly to revive the infant: the physician using the accouterments of Western medicine, while Grandfather Tsurujiro applied his decades of skill in reiki—the projection of ki (vital life energy) through the laying on of hands. Finally, almost five minutes after his delivery, technically long enough for brain damage to occur, Roy Suenaka took his first breath.
Though he suffered no permanent damage as the result of his difficult birth, Suenaka’s youth was plagued with related health problems. He was barely months old before he was diagnosed with bronchial asthma. Attacks were frequent, sudden, and severe, his respiratory tract becoming clogged with mucous, often to the point where he would stop breathing altogether. Tsurujiro would immediately begin performing reiki while Dr. Yamamoto, who fortunately lived but minutes away, was summoned. Eastern and Western medicine again worked together to handle the crisis.
Despite his condition, Suenaka began physical training, under the apt tutelage of his father, almost as soon as he was able to walk. Young as he was, Suenaka was introduced to the basics of weight training, doing his best to imitate his father as he joined him in his daily workouts. Though Suenaka no doubt considered these sessions more like play than work, his father was consciously laying the foundation for what was to become a lifetime of physical and martial study. This early education was accelerated at age four, when Warren Suenaka introduced his son to the family arts of jujutsu and kenjutsu, as well as judo, having begun his study of this system during one of his many trips back to Japan, and continuing upon returning to Hawaii.
Clockwise, from, top left: Calvin, Greg and Wesley Suenaka, Warren Suenaka, Roy Suenaka, in front of their home in Honolulu; 1966
Warren Suenaka also introduced his son to the fundamentals of Western boxing and wrestling, skills that served the boy well in countless schoolyard brawls and neighborhood street fights. Throughout his youth and early adulthood, young Suenaka and his peers would constantly challenge one another to see who was tougher, more skilled, or simply the most stubborn. While adolescent brawls are a common rite of passage for many young men, in Suenaka’s case these constant challenges served as an early crucible in which the efficacy of martial technique learned on the mat was put to practical test on the street. This ultimate proof was to become one of the guiding philosophies behind Suenaka Sensei’s waza (martial technique) throughout his life: in short, if a technique doesn’t work “on the street,” regardless of how impressive it may look on the mat or how commonplace or accepted its practice, then that technique does not work, period, and so has no place being taught at all.
It is interesting to note that one of Suenaka’s earliest schoolyard sparring partners was Paul Fujii, a good friend from, as Suenaka puts it, their “hanabata” days (literally, “nose butter,” or runny-nosed toddler days) through high school. Suenaka recalls brawling with Fujii “practically every day,” beginning in kindergarten in 1945, though less, of course, as they grew older. Eighteen years later, Fujii defeated Sandro Lopopolo of Italy to win the world junior welterweight boxing title. Even at such an early age, Suenaka’s training was world-class.
This early training also had an unexpected, though very welcome, additional benefit. As Suenaka grew older and his training increased in frequency and intensity, his asthma attacks decreased until, at age twenty-one, they ceased entirely, never to return. Although puberty no doubt played a role, Suenaka unhesitatingly credits his training with the cure, particularly the constant ibuki breathing exercises and intense misogi (ritual purification and meditation) sessions.
As Warren Suenaka saw to the martial education of his son, so too did he attend to his own continuing education. Already a black belt practitioner of judo, jujutsu, and kempo (and, later, aikido) and an experienced, respected local street fighter (“He was a bit of a brawler,” says Suenaka), the elder Suenaka made certain he was well-familiar with all martial styles and systems taught in the area. With a trained eye discriminating and demanding, he visited every area school, carefully observing both style and instructor before ultimately choosing three systems that were to constitute his son’s first formal martial arts training. It is because of this, combined with his personal tutelage, that Warren Suenakas influence on his son’s martial education cannot be underestimated.
In 1948, when Suenaka was eight years old, his father deemed him ready to begin training in Kodenkan jujutsu under founder Henry Seishiro Okazaki. For young Suenaka, there was no choice: “(My father) said, ‘You ought to study this. . . you will study this, too!’ And of course, I really enjoyed it.” Suenaka recalls Okazaki Sensei as “an intimidating man, burly. His voice was real gruff, but yet you could see that he was a very kind person. He wasn’t very mean; he just looked mean.” While his personality might have been forgiving, Suenaka found Okazaki Sensei physically intimidating: “He was a fairly big man, I would say around five feet six inches or five feet seven inches. To us, he was very tall. He weighed around two-hundred pounds, with big, solid muscles and huge arms. A very, very powerful man.”
While no stranger to jujutsu even at that early age, Suenaka found Okazaki-ryu jujutsu somewhat different from the more traditional Daito-ryu style learned under his father. “He (Okazaki) had other jujutsu styles . . . that were incorporated or combined with the Okazaki system, even a lot of techniques from lua, the Hawaiian martial art. He also studied Western boxing and wrestling. He studied everything that he could.” Other than his father, Okazaki Sensei would become one of Suenaka’s most influential pre-aikido martial arts instructors, and Suenaka studied Kodenkan jujutsu from 1948 until Okazaki Sensei’s death in 1952. Kodenkan jujutsu is still taught and practiced in Hawaii and elsewhere, including the mainland United States, although it is now more commonly known as Danzan-ryu (“the Hawaiian style”) jujutsu.
One year later, in 1949, Suenaka was introduced to his second most influential pre-aikido teacher as he began instruction in Koshoryu kempo under James Masayoshi Mitose. One of kempo’s most renowned practitioners, Mitose Sensei, a Buddhist priest and later an ordained Presbyterian minister, was the man who introduced kempo to the United States. The name Kosho-ryu translates as “old pine tree style,” and is a unique family style, a combination of Japanese jujutsu and traditional Chinese Shaolin boxing, which is itself the largely the progenitor of present-day Okinawan karate.
Soft-spoken yet stern, powerful yet kind, Mitose Sensei remained one of Suenaka’s primary instructors until his move to Los Angeles in December of 1952 (some say early 1953), at which time Thomas Young, a Chinese-Hawaiian and then Mitoses senior student, assumed his master’s teaching duties in Hawaii. Like Henry Okazaki, James Mitose had a profound influence on young Suenaka, so much so that when Mitose departed Hawaii, Suenaka gradually decreased his study of Koshu-ryu. “We were so used to learning under Mitose Sensei,” Suenaka recalls. “I really loved him; he was a good teacher. Like Jesus Christ, he was the best.”
In 1950, Warren Suenaka introduced his son, now ten, to judo, the third and final martial system Suenaka was to study prior to his introduction to aikido.
