Read Memoirs of a Karate Fighter for Free Online

was much better to be hit while in the
dojo
rather than while out on the streets. The YMCA
dojo
was full of cruel kindnesses that night. On seeing the lower grades partnering the brown and black belts I had expected their blood to be spilt, especially when they were instructed to disregard their natural inclination to retreat as fists and feet flew towards them. But they did as they were told, they stepped in to meet their attackers, and through the fear, to counter the techniques that were thrown (now I was looking at them from the sidelines) with frightening velocity.
    Amongst the orange and green belts the levels of success varied greatly. Danny Moore, a wiry and tough green belt, was performing well and throwing counter-techniques with unfailing accuracy. The Bryan brothers, Mick and Neville, looked sharp, as did Flash, a stick-thin green belt whose smile was the only thing about him that could be described as broad. Don Hamilton, only an orange belt, never missed an opening. He had joined the club at the age of sixteen and had entered the
dojo
with the cockiness of an accomplished street-fighter. As a boy he had taken on three grown men who had racially abused him and he had turned up at the club with a fraction too much self-confidence for his own good – but it only took a front kick from one of the black belts to correct his attitude. Don had only been training for two years but he was already looking like an accomplished karate fighter. It was only when Eddie Cox brought the lesson to an end with the two ceremonial bows that I noticed that one of the best green belts was missing. Dalton was an ex-soldier who had joined the club three years previously to hone his fighting skills. I recalled that as a sixteen-year-old I had tried to ‘win’ my manhood the first timeI had encountered him. The sensei had probably thought he had found a remedy for my own cockiness by putting me to fight with Dalton.
    I was just out of school and he had recently left the British Army. He had a large physique and his punches were very hard. For several minutes I refused to be overwhelmed by this outsider, before the sensei, with a cruel smirk on his face, called an end to the bout. Dalton came over and congratulated me on my tenacity. Little did he know that within those several minutes of fighting he had almost succeeded in rearranging my internal organs. It was an exercise that made me recognize that I was still an adolescent, and left me passing blood in my urine for a week. Years later I would begin paying an annual visit to a renal specialist, and while I cannot say it was all due to Dalton, I think it is safe to assume that he had played a part in the unhealthy state of my kidneys.
    The buzz amongst the students in the changing room was due to the news that Dalton had been arrested for armed robbery. It was strange how what happened in the YMCA unwittingly replicated events in Japan, where in some minds karate is regarded as a low-level fighting art that is indelibly linked with the criminal activities of the
yazuka
. Perhaps this is due to karate being a fairly direct martial art without the nuances of the more traditional aikido or iaido schools. Also, some private karate
dojos
were situated in areas of Japanese cities where criminal gangs were located and the type of person attracted to enrol at these schools would have naturally reflected this. The YMCA’s
dojo
was in the middle of a red-light district; the hall was very basic and with very few facilities. The training fee was small – and sometimes overlooked completely. The young men who joined the YMCA were automatically drawn from the rougher parts of town: some of them were criminals before they ever started training, while others became criminals once they had mastered, in part, the control of fear and the ability to keep a cool head while under pressure. But at the YMCA no criminal had ever got beyond the rank of brown belt and there seemed to be a lesson