it,” I protested. “You must know that.”
He shrugged, “Miyagi said it’s broken because of you, so you can be the one to fix it. There are tools in the shed over there, and some new planks. When you’ve finished, come back inside and rejoin the class.”
That evening I discovered that despite being a simple piece of apparatus, the makiwara is quite difficult to replace. The plank was sunk deep into the ground and the earth around it trodden down hard. A spade made no impression on the sunbaked ground and I was forced to resort to a pickaxe. An hour later, I was down near the base. It was then that I discovered the plank had two crossbars for stability, so I was forced to dig wide as well. When the jagged stump was finally out, I set about making a new one.
I collected a new plank from the shed. It was already tapered at one end, presumably for just such a purpose. I also found straw, rope, and glue and set about replicating the broken makiwara. I was good with wood, thanks to all the time I’d spent with my father mending his boat and recreated the crossbars on the base quite accurately. Next, I attached the straw padding, wrapped over it with rope, and glued it down in a faithful reproduction of the previous makiwara. It wasn’t until I’d sunk my new creation into the hole that I noticed night had fallen. I was still stamping the earth down when Shinzato reappeared. He held the makiwara and shook it to check how solid it was, then stamped on the ground to make it firmer. Finally, he balled his fist and struck the pad. I held my breath, praying it would stand up to his blows.
“It’s time to go now,” he said, without commenting on the makiwara. “Put the tools back and hurry, so I can lock up.”
I returned the tools to the shed and then followed him to the gate. The other boys had already left.
“Where was Master Miyagi tonight, Sempai?” I asked, using the polite form of address for the class senior.
“At a meeting in Shuri,” Shinzato said, “But don’t worry. He’ll be back next time.”
I wanted to tell Shinzato I wasn’t worried, that I would have been happy to learn to-te from him, but it might have sounded stupid. “Goodnight Sempai,” I said as he held the gate open for me. I didn’t know what else to say.
Shinzato grunted a reply as he turned the key in the lock and I walked down the road casually until I’d turned the corner, then ran, eager to get home and tell father how I’d built a makiwara for Sensei Miyagi.
On my third training session, Miyagi taught me Sanchin. He showed me how to grip the ground with my feet, rooting myself to the floorboards, just as he had rooted himself to the cliff-tops in the storm. He showed me how to create a fist and punch, how to block, and how to breathe slowly and deeply into my tanden, the central point of the body two inches below the navel, in the same way he’d shown me to breathe when I was diving.
Sanchin was just one of the sequences known as “kata.” It was simple to learn, but, Miyagi warned me, difficult to master. “Practice Sanchin deeply each day and you will always be strong,” he said. The other kata were more complex than Sanchin, yet to Miyagi, Sanchin was the trunk from which all the others branched out and the root that pulled them all together.
No one but Miyagi was allowed to teach kata to a student, since it took too long to unlearn bad habits, and no one else was allowed to do the painful shime testing that I’d seen him perform on Shinzato. Miyagi stood behind me and pressed my muscles with his fingers.
“Tense here,” he would say, tapping my shoulder, or my side, or my thigh. “Bring your muscle up. Good!” If his fingers felt a lack of response, his iron hard palm would slap until I brought the required tension to that part of my body. I was aware that he was slapping very lightly compared to what he had done to Shinzato, but the impact of his heavy hands was still quite dreadful. After what seemed like an hour, but was more likely ten minutes, he placed his palm on my stomach. Exhausted, I tensed nonetheless, but he tapped my belly gently.
“You have been diving for pearls?” he asked.
“Yes Sensei,” I said, delighted that he had remembered our conversation of some years earlier.
“Did you find any?”
“Not yet.”
“One day, perhaps.”
“If I find one, I will give it to you,” I said, “as payment for your teachings.”
“And I will be happy to accept it,” he smiled. “Now practice for a while,” he said lightly, turning his attention to another boy.
I performed Sanchin once again, alone this time.
Sanchin means Three Battles, and the first of my battles had begun. In this never-ending struggle to achieve harmony between mind, body, and spirit, the first battle was the body, the simple struggle to position myself correctly and make myself strong. Later, the second battle would join the first, as I sought to develop the subtlety of technique that makes Sanchin so powerful. And lastly, the final battle would enter the fray, the struggle to understand the effect of such an exercise on a man’s innermost soul. This final battle was one that I would wage for many years to come.
By the age of fifteen, I’d grown tall and strong despite my skinny frame. Father decided it was time for us to visit his brother Anko, who lived and worked in Naha. Anko owned a trading ship that he sailed around the Ryukyu Islands and farther, to Fuzhou and Shanghai in China, and Kagoshima in Japan.
Father wanted me to help out on my uncle’s ship during the holidays. Though he never said it, I knew he wanted me to be more than a fisherman, and he saw this as a way for me to gain new experience in the world. My uncle was dubious at first, saying I was a little young for such work, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. “Kenichi is deceptively strong,” he insisted. “He’s been training for a year with Miyagi Sensei.”
This piqued my uncle’s interest. “He’s lucky to train with such a man,” he said, looking me up and down with a fresh eye. “He can start next weekend.”
And so I abandoned my weekends of diving and beach training to work on my uncle’s ship. Loading cargo and climbing ropes was backbreaking work, but I didn’t mind. I knew it would make me even stronger. At first, the other deckhands ignored me. I heard them muttering that I was too small to be any help on a boat, but when Uncle Anko told them I trained with Miyagi, their mutterings ceased. They began to give me tedious tasks to perform, which I did to the best of my ability. Soon, little by little, I was included in their conversations, and when they finally began to call me by my name, I knew I’d been accepted by these rough men.
On the days when I did work for my uncle, I slept on board. I was much closer to Miyagi’s dojo and didn’t need to hurry home after class. Instead, I was free to stay behind and enjoy Miyagi’s impromptu lectures. Miyagi loved to talk and often continued late into the night, allowing us to stay or go as we pleased. To my surprise, I discovered that my sensei was warm and affable once the serious business of training had finished. He took a personal interest in each of his students, questioning the younger ones on their schoolwork and the older ones on their jobs, giving advice on health and lecturing on morality.
The subject of his lectures wandered from one topic to the next as the mood took him. One night he would tell us the history of the Ryukyu Islands before the Japanese invasion. On another, he would mystify us with the concepts of Yin, Yang, and Tao—and in each case, the topic
