Josh Gold
In this new series of articles, our contributing editor, Jay Gluck links aikido with other arts and activities, many of which he has personally studied, and offers the suggestion that many of these might be used to expand the range of subjects taught in aiki dojos outside Japan. This is the first part of a two part article. Read the second part here.
In summer, 1951, Tai Chi was introduced for the first time in New York to non-Orientals by Li Chi Chao, a graceful warrior and professional modern dancer. This was at the Asia Institute, where I was deputy director. There were no kung-fu Bruce Lee or Karate Kid movies popularizing it then so no one enrolled, except myself and my dancer sister who had introduced fellow modern dance trouper Chao, but as we were both tuition-free staff members, there was no class.
The Institute regularly offered an MA degree, in which I was enrolled, and some 20 Asian languages for New York Regents-approved college credit. Matriculated and part-time students included exchange students from other colleges with no Asian courses, working international traders, would-be diplomats, and interested individuals, from guitar-playing Asia finks to two uniformed US Army intelligence officers.
We also mounted exhibitions of Asian art in the halls and gallery of the beautiful Victorian mansion on 67th Street off Fifth Avenue, which drew crowds. As we were a night school, except for gallery-goers, our valuable real estate was unused all day. I added a number of public symposia on timely subjects, non-academic classes, and cultural activities to the institute’s offerings. These included tai chi, ikebana (no takers), Chinese brush painting and calligraphy (good turnout), Japanese dance (no takers), Cambodian dance (six students), shakuhachi bamboo flute (no takers), and some others I cannot now recall.
Soshitsu Sen, son of the grand tea master of the largest tea school, Urasenke, was visiting the US to lecture and demonstrate at churches and Buddhist temples. At the “Japan Night” of our series “1,001 Asian Nights,” he presented his tea service for the first time to a Caucasian American audience and repeated it on WJZ TV. At war’s end, Sen had been in training as a kamikaze pilot and I was in US Navy night torpedo bombers, sometimes referred to as “Yankee kamikazes” due to our high loss rate. Neither of us saw action. He said we were Kamikaze-doshi (both kamikazes) and he invited me as his “younger brother-in-suicide” to come to Kyoto as his guest. This would fulfill my director’s wishes that I spend some time on my own in Asia after graduation and before entering the State Department or CIA, as was my career plan.
So at the end of the year, I sailed on a slow freighter to Osaka port. My travel companion and I became the first two American students in postwar Kyoto, if not in Japan. I immediately immersed myself in cultural studies starting with the convenient sado, or chado, literally “Tea-Way” but usually translated by the clumsy expression “tea ceremony.” Though popularly associated with girls in kimono and dumpling shaped matrons, tea masters are men and sado has long been an important educational discipline for Zen monks, merchant-gentlemen, and samurai alike.
In summer, 1951, Tai Chi was introduced for the first time in New York to non-Orientals by Li Chi Chao, graceful warrior and professional modern dancer. This was at the Asia Institute, where I was deputy director. There were no kung-fu Bruce Lee or Karate Kid movies popularizing it then so no one enrolled, except myself and my dancer sister who had introduced fellow modern dance trouper Chao, but as we were both tuition-free staff members, there was no class.
I spent six months in Kyoto playing at studying tea, to the great benefit of my understanding of Japan, and meeting the artists, artisans, and intellectuals who gravitated around the tea universe. Then I moved to Tokyo as editor of an English language weekly and later a Life-type monthly. My grounding in tea was of great benefit in dealing with the Japanese elite I met, from corporate leaders to defeated generals and admirals.
Through a Korean former classmate of mine from New York, I was introduced to some karate and kendo demonstrations by Korean residents, and when I left the magazines to get married and move to a fishing village near Hiroshima for a two-year honeymoon, I decided to look into martial arts seriously, starting with kendo, as a marvelous old master lived nearby. Thus began my sojourn in the world of martial arts as chronicled in these pages in previous issues.
By 1955, after a period with karate, I found aikido. I was living in a small village near Hiroshima, doing kendo with white-bearded Sohei Nakamura, 9th-dan hanshi (judge), kyudo(archery) with one of the two top female senseis, Tsuruko Ogasawara, 8th-dan, and brush painting-calligraphy. There were very few aikido dojos at that time, so I took the 18-hour steam train trip up to Tokyo every couple of months for a few weeks of intensive aikido at the Aikikai Hombu Dojo with Koichi Tohei Sensei and Nobuyoshi Tamura.
Jay Gluck Profile
Jay Gluck is a native New Yorker, educated in New York, England and at five U.S. universities. He was one of the first two “freelance” American students to go to Japan during the last days of the Occupation, when he lived in Kyoto. He has traveled extensively and researched combat forms in many cultures, particularly those of Persian origins. He is author of the popular guidebook to Japan, Japan Inside Out. His 1958 book Zen Combat introduced the Japanese martial arts to a worldwide audience.
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