ON A HOT JULY EVENING IN 1986, I was standing in the dojo (martial arts training hall) listening to Matayoshi Shinpo explain one of the postures of Kakuho, a form (kata) from the Kingai-ryu system. We had been walking up and down the floor in crane stance, the toes of one foot curled under, ready to throw small pebbles or sand into an attacker’s face, arms out to the side like wings. Matayoshi had come down earlier to watch kobudo training. When we had finished, we began training some of the empty-hand kata of Matayoshi’s family system and our own Goju-ryu.
It was already late in the evening. Sometimes Matayoshi would stop and try to explain something with the few English words he knew and then laugh. “You no show,” he would say. “OK?” That summer, sitting in an ice cream shop in downtown Naha, Matayoshi had heard a particularly strident American pop song. The singers’ voices were harsh and nasal as they repeated the chorus, “Show me; show me.” Matayoshi had asked what the words meant, and from then on, he used the words frequently, and laughed.
At the moment, however, he was trying to explain how one of the moves in the kata was used. Although the application seemed obvious, we couldn’t figure out what he was trying to get across. With Matayoshi’s peculiar collection of a few dozen English words or phrases and our handful of Japanese words, it was like some hilarious game of charades. Matayoshi would bend down and pretend to pull up clumps of imaginary grass (we later realized). Then he would rear back with both arms up in front of his body, elbows in, forearms vertical, wrists bent so that the hands, held above the head, formed claws. Then he would stop and hold one hand up with index finger and thumb spread apart.
Language: English
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