life, Yamashita had been instrumental in training its security personnel. It was a complicated history, filled with good things and bad. Some of them had almost gotten us both killed.
I didn’t respond to his comment and Ito took a sipping breath. “We would be honored if you would help us, Dr. Burke.”
“I think,” I said as I stood up, “that you are not telling me everything, Ito-san. I think you’re looking for someone who can find her, sure, but you also know she’s not going to want to come home, and whoever finds her is going to have to knock some heads together.” He started to respond but I held up a hand to silence him. “And it wouldn’t look good to have some Japanese government agents involved in what would essentially be a kidnapping. So you figured I could do the scut work for you and take the heat. You know, for old times’ sake. Am I right?”
His eyes never wavered. “We will pay you generously.”
“Great. I can buy extra cigarettes in prison,” I told him. I headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Ito called. His partner, who had remained in the background during our discussion, moved to block my way out of the suite.
“Get out of my way,” I told him. But he didn’t move.
“Please, Dr. Burke,” Ito continued. “It is an extremely delicate situation. And extremely complicated.”
I turned my head back toward Ito. “Not half as complicated as your friend’s life is going to be if he doesn’t get out of my way.” I felt the early tremble of an adrenalin dump start to work its way through my muscles. Ito must have sensed it as well. He made a quick motion and the man by the door stood aside.
“Did I tell you how we got those pictures?” Ito called as I headed out into the hall. I kept moving, but his voice followed me.
“Chie sends them to her father.”
Chapter 3
The training hall is called a dojo—a place of the Way. The name has all the exotic allure of the Mystic East: the promise of hidden wisdom and esoteric powers. But step inside a training hall and stay awhile. Venture out onto the floor with us. There are no wizened sages popping out cryptic advice. Instead there is the bark of commands and the hard, relentless gaze of your sensei. There is sweat in the eyes, the burn of muscle, and the constant presence of fear, surprise, pain, and frustration. Yet occasionally, as your hand slides in to grip the hard wooden shaft of the training sword, in the steamy pause between bouts when your heart is hammering in your ears and your breath scrapes in and out, something wells up inside you. It touches you like a phantom hand: the sense of connection, of potential, and the overwhelmingly clear beauty of the moment. Then it’s gone.
So if there’s a way we pursue in the dojo, it’s a way back to that sensation, as intense and fleeting as a flash of light at midnight. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
I’ve been chasing the spark for almost thirty years. I’ve spent close to twenty of them with Yamashita, practicing the brutally elegant system he teaches. It encompasses sword and staff arts, unarmed combat, and more. If modern systems like judo or karate specialize on one segment of the fighting spectrum, the Yamashita-ha Itto Ryu blends as many of these segments as possible into an integrated whole. My teacher uses sword and staff as the main vehicles for his teaching, but insists they are merely means to an end. He trains warriors, and uses whatever is on hand to do so.
He once showed us a tanto, a short knife. Yamashita held it comfortably in his thick hand, moving the blade so the light played dully along its surface. “This,” he said, “is a sharp piece of metal. Nothing more. In one man’s hand it is good for cutting carrots. In another …” he held it up for the assembled class to take another look. He smiled. Then his face went totally blank. The sudden movement of his arm was fluid and almost too fast to see. The tanto shot across the room and buried its point into one of the wooden pillars along the dojo’s perimeter. You could almost hear the metal hum as it struck home.
“In another,” Yamashita concluded, “it is something very different. So …” He smiled at us. “In swordsmanship there is ki, ken, tai.” Spirit, sword, body. “Without spirit, without the force of the warrior, there is no sword.” He shrugged. “It is a spike, perhaps, or a cleaver. Just metal.” His eyes narrowed. “You make it dangerous. You create the sword.”
And then the lesson continued. He left the knife buried in the wood of that pillar as a reminder to us all.
I carry on that tradition, but without the elegance of my master. All of the pupils he accepts for training are required to have black belts in more than one martial art. Many of them have trained with bokken, the oak sword that forms the centerpiece of Yamashita’s training, but they have rarely plumbed its depths. As a result, new students often focus on the sword too intently, momentarily forgetting the other valuable lessons they have learned.
So I have to remind them. I like to think of it as an awareness exercise. But as some of my students limped off the floor after one session, I heard them ruefully calling it “hammer time.”
I’m not a cruel man, you understand. Yamashita used to chide me for sometimes being too gentle with the students. And over time, I’ve learned ours is an austere discipline, set against a hard world. Compassion is only possible when it follows mastery. But even in the rigors of training, I remind myself what is taking place is not mere battery, but a pounding more akin to the blows of a swordsmith as he forges metal into a blade of terrible beauty.
That day on the dojo floor we were working on different counters for attacks at distant and close intervals. Most sword work takes place in issoku itto no ma, the distance where you cross swords with an opponent and one small step will bring your weapon into striking distance. Some of the students had spent time studying kendo, the modern version of Japanese swordsmanship, so the concept was second nature to them. And the others quickly got the hang of it. They all had the body awareness of fighters.
The members of the class were paired off, a long line of swordsmen in the midnight blue of the traditional uniform, gripping the white oak bokken. I worked their wrist and forearm muscles in the quick jerking parries that are designed to deflect a strike and, with luck, expose an opening for a counterattack. We moved on to the sliding deflection of the suriage technique, then the move known as kaeshi, and finally to uchiotoshi. By that time, I could see the fabric of their heavy training jackets growing limp with sweat. In the pauses when we would rotate partners, people wiped their hands on their uniforms to keep their swords from slipping out of their hands. The constant repetition of the training session, the ceaseless back and forth of attack and counterattack, was taking its toll on them. They were straining to maintain focus, working hard at their swordsmanship. It was, as they say, a teachable moment.
I called the class to a halt and asked for a volunteer. A guy named Rick stood up. He had been training with me for almost a year, a diligent student who was skilled enough to be a good demo partner. We paired off and the others dropped to one knee to watch, grateful for the break. “So,” I began as I squared off with Rick. The tips of our bokken crossed. We were in issoku itto no ma. “From this interval, a number of attacks are possible. And a number of parries.” I nodded at him and we began, running in sequence through the techniques we had been practicing. As the senior member of the duo, I would attack, giving my junior a chance to respond. He did. Then we squared off once more and I came at him with a different technique. Again, the smooth response. I held up a hand to pause as we squared off one more time. “But now, what happens if something changes?”
Up to this point, I had been moving in what I call training speed. It was fast enough to be dangerous, but not so fast
