In my early days at New England Aikikai, trips back to Japan for practice at Honbu Dojo
were fairly regularly scheduled. Sensei’s Kanai and Yamada would host these sojourns,
most likely as a way to finance their own travel home as there weren’t many of us
students back then and therefore very little money for their salaries.
Traveling to Japan in their company was extraordinary. We would practice at Honbu to
be sure, but the Sensei’s also personally took us sightseeing to many restaurants,
gardens, and temples.
At one, a group of us were gathered on the porch, looking out over the sculpted
landscape.
Kanai Sensei caught my eye and pointed upwards, towards the ceiling where to my
amazement were many bloody handprints clearly visible in the old cedar planks.
“Those are my relatives,” he said simply. And then making a wry face, added: “All
seppuku…The family saved the floorboards and now they’re up there.”
I realized that day that I’d become in a very small way a part of a great and long
tradition of warriors, that I was such a very, very lucky student that Kanai was my
Sensei, that by some accident I’d come to his dojo in Central Square and here I was in
Japan, pondering Hara Kiri on a veranda on a sunny day with someone for whom it was
heritage, his family’s history.
We early practitioners were a motley crew, in every way. A piano bar crooner, an MIT
physicist, a postal worker, a student from Tufts, a housewife from Newton. Sensei
welcomed and accepted all of us as we were, taught all of us bumbling but eager
Americans in the way of Bushido.
On the mat what surprised me the most was his sense of humor. He was also so kind –
never impatient. But it was him laughing or smiling to himself as he left a pair of
practitioners, both of them kneeling and bowing deeply, that is now a treasured image
for me, that twinkling he did. (See Bokken section of my film “Aikido” for that twinkle!)
His memory is a blessing. His teachings have never left me.
