or leave, speak or remain silent, Suenaka remained seated, watching the Founder as he read. To say he was nervous would be an understatement, and he wondered if the Founder was angry for being spied on. A few minutes later, O’Sensei again challenged Suenaka’s perception.
“After the cockroach incident, I just continued sitting there and watching him as he was reading. There might have been a breeze or something, I don’t know, but . . . I was watching the page just turn by itself, and I was thinking, ‘My God! Such power!’ I was really impressed! But I really don’t know if it was a breeze or not that did it. He didn’t touch the page at all . . . To this day, I don’t know.
“We didn’t converse at all. Only when he said,’ See, look at this,’ and I went ‘Uh hum.’ But after a while, he looked up at me and looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Okay, you can go now.’ Then he smiled, and I left.”
As may be expected, this first face-to-face meeting with O’Sensei had a profound effect on Suenaka, who in the days to follow observed O’Sensei even more intently than before. For his part, O’Sensei obviously remembered his unexpected evening visitor. Several days after their initial meeting, Suenaka paid another, more formal, visit to O’Sensei at his bungalow, this time as part of a group which included his father, brothers, and others. During the visit, O’Sensei made a point of asking Suenaka if he planned to attend yet another luau in his honor, an upcoming weekend affair organized by Dr. Wakatake, an aikidoka and respected local physician (who was later president of the Hawaii Aikikai), and held at his country home in Punaluu, on the other side of Oahu. Naturally, Suenaka answered yes.
The luau was a grand affair, featuring professional musicians, dancers, and other entertainers, as well as an seemingly endless supply of food. Rather than travel back and forth from home to the party, Suenaka and others stayed on Wakatake’s estate. One night, after O’Sensei had gone to bed, several of the older aikidoka dared Suenaka to slip into O’Sensei’s room and leave a note on his nightstand without being detected. The note itself contained a message to the effect of “Gotcha!,” meaning someone had managed to sneak up on the preternaturally perceptive Founder without his knowledge. As Suenaka stealthily entered the room, he saw O’Sensei had his back turned to the door and was facing the wall, apparently asleep. Carefully, he lay the note on the nightstand and hastily made his exit. “The next day, after he got up,” recalls Suenaka, “O’Sensei handed me the paper and said, ‘You forgot this on my nightstand last night.’ Everybody laughed and thought it was funny; I was just dumbfounded.”
The second day of the luau passed much as the first, with demonstrations and classes during the day, and Saturday night filled with food and entertainment. With festivities still in full swing, O’Sensei again decided to retire early, and called for his otomo (valet) to assist him. However, his otomo was nowhere to be found; it was soon discovered he had instead elected to enjoy the Honolulu nightlife. Suenaka recalls his first glimpse of O’Sensei’s formidable anger:
“He was enraged—he was yelling and carrying on and everybody was scared. Everybody just spread out, nobody wanted to be around him—they thought the world was going to explode! . . . [But] he got right over it. That’s the way I am now, and maybe it was something he ingrained in me. I told O’Sensei later I had learned that from him—he said, ‘Well, you maintain that frame of mind!”’
His otomo absent, O’Sensei changed his mind about retiring and instead decided to take a walk along the beach to enjoy the cool of the early evening. Even though O’Sensei didn’t even know the name of the young Hawaiian who had just recently unceremoniously invaded his privacy, to his delight, Suenaka was invited to join him:
“We walked across the street—the beach was right across the street from the country home. So we were walking along the beach on the sand, and I was on the outside, the road side, and O’Sensei was walking on the inside. We walked probably a half-mile or so down the beach. We were walking in silence—I couldn’t converse with him, because I didn’t speak very good Japanese then. So we walked, and it was enjoyable because just standing next to O’Sensei gave one the feeling of exhilaration. Just being next to him, the energy coming from him made my hair stand up! He was right beside me, brushing arms as we were walking, and that’s when I felt it, like a high-voltage transformer . . . that kind of energy. And that’s when I looked at him and thought to myself, ‘My God, such a little man—I bet I could really hit him and knock him out.”
What happened next shook Suenaka to his very core:
“As soon as I thought that, he stopped me and said, ‘Thinking thoughts like that is not good for you. You always have to think positively.’ Well, I just collapsed right there, my legs turned to rubber and I just fell down on my knees, right there on the beach. I thought he was going to kill me! I began to apologize, over and over, and he said something to the effect that, ‘One apology is enough—more apologies make you look more like a fool. . . . There’s no need to apologize more than one time for any mistake; therefore, make one mistake at a time.’ I thought that was a wonderful philosophy.
That was my first experience with enlightenment.
“So then I got back up [and] we contined to walk, and then we turned around and went back to the house. He thanked me and I thanked him. It was the most exciting experience of my life, to that point, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me!”
Of course, the enlightenment of which Suenaka spoke is O’Sensei’s enlightenment; the experience of being in the presence of one who has attained that state of higher knowledge and perception to which all earnest budoka aspire. It was Suenaka’s first personal, incontrovertible proof that, in his words, “there was a force, a God-like force, that all humans could achieve that level of energy. I believed in his philosophy then—I said, ‘There’s no doubting such a thing.’”
Although Suenaka related his experience to his father and a few close friends, he generally kept it to himself. He knew there were those in the community who might resent the fact that he, still basically a kid at twenty-years-old, was granted a rare private moment with the Founder. In the weeks to come Suenaka would play the walk on the beach over and over in his mind, pondering the apparent impossibility of what he had experienced, yet finding his doubts time and again swept away by the undeniable reality of the event. Just as the arrival of Koichi Tohei in 1953 marked the end of the first stage of his martial development and the beginning of his aikido education, Suenaka Sensei’s experiences with O’Sensei, culminating in this extraordinary occurrence, marked the end of his days in Hawaii, and set the stage for the next steps in his martial development, which would begin less than a month later, upon his arrival in Japan.
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
