Gary got hooked on karate when he was a middle school student in Omaha, Nebraska. He joined a very hard core dojo there.
What IS a hard core dojo? In Gary’s case it meant training as many days as a week that were possible. At first it all depended on whether or not he could get a ride from his mother or another mother. As soon as he got his driver’s license he drove himself as often as he could. So attendance was a big part of it.
The other thing was etiquette. His sensei insisted that they follow rigorous rules that he himself had learned when he studied in Japan. And Gary was intrigued by it all. It wasn’t just bowing and memorizing forms. There were also unexpected things like cleaning the dojo before and after practice. His mother had been highly impressed by this.
Gary stayed in town for college partially because he wanted to keep training at the dojo. His college offered a Japanese language class and he enrolled. But he didn’t do very well and he was simply impatient to get to Japan and immerse himself in the karate world.
To nobody’s surprise, the minute he graduated college he was off to Japan. Rainy Japan. Nobody had told him about the rainy season. All he had was his own teacher’s introduction to a dojo in Kyoto. It was enough.
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