I had been practicing Aikido for four years at Musashi University’s Aikido club in Tokyo. I
became a captain of the club and received the 2nd Dan upon my graduation in 1976. I imagined that I also graduated from Aikido and wasn’t planning to continue to practice.
I asked him several times about Ki. He had always told me that Ki doesn’t come out of his body even during his Aikido demonstration. One time I asked him, “Then when does Ki come out? Have you ever experienced this?”
But I changed my mind when I came to the U.S. I met Kanai Sensei for the first time in 1978
while I was learning English at Babson College. I not only started Aikido under the instruction of Kanai Sensei, but I also decided to stay in Boston indefinitely. I was really attracted by his
Aikido and by him as a human being.
He answered me “Probably once, while I was in Japan. I think that experience was the only time when I felt my Ki come out of my body.”
The experience he had was in Nagoya. He was uchi deshi at Hombu dojo and he was teaching
Aikido periodically at Tashiro dojo in Nagoya then.
It happened when he finished teaching. He went out of the dojo and passed in front of a subway construction site. There were six or seven construction workers hanging around. They approached him and tried to pick a fight. Then they surrounded him.
His students were still in the dojo and some of them were watching the scene from the 2nd floor windows. They thought Sensei had no way out. So they immediately ran down the stairs and tried to help him.
But by the time they arrived at the site, it was already all over. They saw all the construction
workers piled up on the ground. I have seen an incident like this in the movies, but it was the first time I ever heard that such an incident was real.
He told me he still remembered it vividly: “When those construction workers were coming to
attack me, I felt something overflowing from my entire body. I don’t remember how I moved
while dealing with them, but since then I have never felt such an invigorating experience. After the incident, when I reflected on the experience, I started to think it was Ki.”
