In this chapter:
· The 1985 Summer Course.
· Tanabe Sensei.
· Sandan grading.
· Torquay Summer Course.
· Perpetually on the road.
· The miner’s strike. A slight brush with the law.
This one session, Sugasawa Sensei had got a bee in his bonnet about a low dropping extended gyakuzuki, competition style. We repeated it and repeated it; we’d done it against a partner, we’d done it against a wall, lightly but quickly tagging the wall to get the appreciation of distancing and the extended footwork intended to cover as much ground as possible. This was a lesson he was determined to hammer home. It was only later that I reaped the benefit of this training.
To explain:
In 1985 the UKKW was experimenting with yet another new venue its karate summer course. This time it was a slightly care-worn Pontins holiday camp at Bracklesham Bay, Sussex. Another seaside location that on paper looked ideal, and… it was cheap.
The holiday camp in its better days.
We were billeted in what were optimistically referred to as ‘chalets’, which were very basic with a bathroom and a bedroom; rooms all laid out in long lines with walkways crossing rows of identical numbered doors.
They had big picture windows, which meant that when people walked past, they got a full-on intimate view of your bed. As someone who valued their privacy, that week I lived in a state of permanent darkness with the curtains closed.
It was good to meet up with Keith Walker again. He had been newly elevated to 1st Dan the previous year and arrived in Sussex with a small group from Leeds; Keith Henry, Martin Pemberton, and Jeffery, who had failed to book himself a room and thus sneaked into the camp on a day pass and surreptitiously slept on the floor of the room that Keith had booked. In a very ‘Yorkshire’ way, he considered it a victory against the establishment.
Bracklesham Bay. L to R; Keith Henry, Keith Walker and myself. ‘chalets’ in the background. Photo; courtesy of Keith Walker.
The first part of the week it rained heavily. One afternoon, after training, Tim Dixon and I decided we needed to leave the camp and explore the world outside.
The ‘beach’ was a depressing affair; overcast sky, threatening clouds and a foreshore bereft of sand, only unforgiving fist-sized boulders, a total wasteland. We only did it the once.
Outside of the training, the only bright spot in the day was the bar and ballroom. For us this meant an evening of insipid cheap lager and trying to outdo each other with the filthiest jokes we could think of (Walker won on that one).
Occasionally, they put on ‘entertainment’ for the campers (as they referred to us). One performance in particular sticks in my mind. A magician, whose opening trick was to walk out on to the dance floor to a crowded 360 degrees audience with a large flattened cardboard box tucked under his arm. With appropriate showy flourishes he steadily opened out the box, unfolding it to construct it to its full three-dimensional shape, closed the top flaps, he then waved his hand over it… and a girl jumped out! We were amazed.
There was no way she could have got in there, the 360-degree audience and full floodlights would have made it impossible. To this day, I don’t know how he did it. What he did for the rest of the performance I have no recollection; we were just stunned by his opening trick.
The Japanese instructors presiding over the course were; Suzuki Sensei, Tanabe Sensei, Shiomitsu Sensei, Sakagami Sensei, Iwasaki Sensei and Sugasawa Sensei. I think it was Senseis Iwasaki and Shiomitsu who one evening did a short, but very dynamic demonstration on that same ballroom floor for the course members and the other campers. My memory of it was that Iwasaki Sensei took some really heavy falls; so much so that we all winced as he hit the deck for the umpteenth time, and the locks were clamped on hard – that must have hurt. Shiomitsu Sensei took no prisoners with his Uke, as we saw at Crystal Palace at the Nationals. I am not so sure it was necessary.
L to R, Senseis Sakagami, Shiomitsu, Suzuki, Tanabe, Iwasaki and Sugasawa. Photo; courtesy of Keith Walker.
Tanabe Sensei, the younger of the two Tanabe brothers, was over as a guest from Japan. He was very likable and people automatically warmed to him.
The training venue was reminiscent of that memorable nightclub floor we trained on in Great Yarmouth years previous. For that’s just what it was, complete with sticky carpet and a rather worn-out dancefloor.
Keith Walker was on a roll all week. He was totally in his element and as there was a lot of fighting programmed in (maybe because of Tanabe Sensei’s presence) he was like a fish in water. Until he got a bit too cocky when sparring with Shiomitsu Sensei. I think he must have lofted-up one too many mawashigeris round Shiomitsu Sensei ears, and I think clocked him with one. To be fair, Shiomitsu Sensei did warn him: ‘groin open’ he said. But Walker wasn’t in listening mode, he was having too much fun, that was until he got kicked in the unmentionables and was on the floor gasping for air. Oh how we laughed.
For, me the most memorable of my own fights was against one of the regular England squad fighters. Tanabe Sensei was watching the bout as he knew my opponent from his time in Japan. There was a lot of heavy pressure coming my way, it was then that Sugasawa Sensei’s gyakuzuki lesson came into play; I dropped low and put everything into the punch and he ran on to it. Tanabe Sensei stopped the fight and told the other fighter that this would have been his opportunity to use nagashizuki (the evasion punch, almost unique to Wado). My opponent then moved up the gear box and I never got another technique in on him. I was really impressed with his speed and power that day; a really enjoyable experience.
A few words about Tanabe Sensei: This was Tanabe Hideo, who was chief coach at Nihon University. He visited the UK quite a few times. His elder brother, Fumihiro, who was interviewed by Bob Flowers in 1988 for Frank Johnson’s ‘Wado World’ magazine and was then 8th Dan with the Wado Ryu Karate-Do Renmei, was also a member of the executive committee of the All Japan Wado-Ryu Renmei, as well as being employed at Nihon university.
L, Tanabe Fumihiro Sensei. R. Tanabe Hideo Sensei. Photo courtesy of Frank Johnson and Wado World magazine.