Complete Aikido. Christopher Watson G.
probably a half-mile or so down the beach. We were walking in silence—I couldn’t converse with him, because I didn’t speak very good Japanese then. So we walked, and it was enjoyable because just standing next to O’Sensei gave one the feeling of exhilaration. Just being next to him, the energy coming from him made my hair stand up! He was right beside me, brushing arms as we were walking, and that’s when I felt it, like a high-voltage transformer . . . that kind of energy. And that’s when I looked at him and thought to myself, ‘My God, such a little man—I bet I could really hit him and knock him out.”
What happened next shook Suenaka to his very core:
“As soon as I thought that, he stopped me and said, ‘Thinking thoughts like that is not good for you. You always have to think positively.’ Well, I just collapsed right there, my legs turned to rubber and I just fell down on my knees, right there on the beach. I thought he was going to kill me! I began to apologize, over and over, and he said something to the effect that, ‘One apology is enough—more apologies make you look more like a fool. . . . There’s no need to apologize more than one time for any mistake; therefore, make one mistake at a time.’ I thought that was a wonderful philosophy.
That was my first experience with enlightenment.
“So then I got back up [and] we contined to walk, and then we turned around and went back to the house. He thanked me and I thanked him. It was the most exciting experience of my life, to that point, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me!”
Of course, the enlightenment of which Suenaka spoke is O’Sensei’s enlightenment; the experience of being in the presence of one who has attained that state of higher knowledge and perception to which all earnest budoka aspire. It was Suenaka’s first personal, incontrovertible proof that, in his words, “there was a force, a God-like force, that all humans could achieve that level of energy. I believed in his philosophy then—I said, ‘There’s no doubting such a thing.’”
Although Suenaka related his experience to his father and a few close friends, he generally kept it to himself. He knew there were those in the community who might resent the fact that he, still basically a kid at twenty-years-old, was granted a rare private moment with the Founder. In the weeks to come Suenaka would play the walk on the beach over and over in his mind, pondering the apparent impossibility of what he had experienced, yet finding his doubts time and again swept away by the undeniable reality of the event. Just as the arrival of Koichi Tohei in 1953 marked the end of the first stage of his martial development and the beginning of his aikido education, Suenaka Sensei’s experiences with O’Sensei, culminating in this extraordinary occurrence, marked the end of his days in Hawaii, and set the stage for the next steps in his martial development, which would begin less than a month later, upon his arrival in Japan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Japan
Several weeks after his walk on the beach with Suenaka, O’Sensei returned to his homeland. Suenaka and his family joined others in bidding their formal good-byes to the Founder, seeing him off at Honolulu International Airport the day of his departure. Although Tohei Sensei remained in Hawaii for a short while, once again guiding the development of the local aikidoka, Suenaka had little time for practice, occupied as he was with preparations for his imminent move to Japan. And so it was that in early March of 1961, less than a month after his first meeting with O’Sensei, Airman Suenaka found himself, duffel in hand, standing on the tarmac at Tachikawa Air Base.
The first thing one does when arriving at a new military station is to report to one’s immediate command, receive one’s housing assignment, and get settled in. This, of course, is assuming your command is aware of and anticipating your arrival. Upon reporting to the Tachikawa HQ Squadron CBPO (Central Base Personnel Office), Suenaka was told there was no record of his assignment there—for some reason, his orders were nowhere to be found. Straightening things out would take days, perhaps weeks, and Suenaka was placed on a list of “surplus airmen” and told to find something to do in the interim. The choice was easy. After taking only as much time as necessary to drop off his bags at his barracks and pack a few essentials, Suenaka hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Tokyo and the Aikikai Hombu.
With Tachikawa AFB a good thirty miles outside the city limits, the driver was somewhat reluctant to make the journey. However, after assurances that he had enough money to pay for the trip (“It cost me about 3,000 yen, which was only about $8.50 then; I think today it would cost about $300!”), Suenaka was on his way.
Even today, Tokyo’s labyrinthine streets and haphazard addresses make navigation difficult, so much so that even natives have a tough time finding their destination. It was no different in 1961, as Suenaka recalls:
“The taxi driver said, ‘Well, where’s the dojo?’ And I said, ‘Shinjuku-ku,’ which is a district in Tokyo, one of the largest. He said, ‘We are in Shinjuku-ku—where in Shinjukuku?’ And I said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho,’ which is like a borough, or part of a town. And he said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho?’ So we drove around for what seemed like an hour, until finally he said, ‘This is Wakamatsu-cho.’ Then we had to find Nishi Okubo, which is in Western Okubo, which is a neighborhood there in Wakamatsu-cho, like a subdivision, and it’s also the name of the main street in Nishi Okubo. We kept driving and he asked around—we finally found Nishi Okubo, the street, and we drove and drove and drove looking for Nuke-Benten, which was a store or supermarket near the Hombu on Nishi Okubo . . . [The driver said], ‘This is the town, but where’s the house?,’ and so about another half-an-hour or so, we were driving around and I looked at a telephone pole right on the side of the road with a little sign with ‘aikido’ calligraphy on it and an arrow pointing down the lane. I yelled, ‘This is it! We found it!’ The taxi driver was elated . . . It took about an hour-and-a-half to drive thirty miles and find it.”
Although Suenaka told O’Sensei in Hawaii that he would soon be in Tokyo, he hadn’t called ahead to inform the Aikikai of his arrival. Consequently, when he walked into the Hombu dojo and announced he wished to see the Founder, the staff afforded him a polite, yet understandably cool reception:
Morihei Ueshiba O’Sensei in his Iwama dojo; Aiki Festival, April, 1964.
“I walked in; there were secretaries there, and the office manager, and they said, ‘Who are you?’ I said I had just arrived from Hawaii, and they said, ‘Oh! O’Sensei just returned from there!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know, I saw him there.’ So I said, ‘Can I see him?,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t know, we can’t bother O’Sensei.’ Apparently, though, somebody had gone back (into the dojo) and said there was a visitor from Hawaii. So I sat in the office, and they served me tea.
“There were Dutch doors that led from the outer office to the dojo—the bottom part was open, and the top was shut. As I was sitting there, I could see partially into the dojo, under the door ... I saw O’Sensei walking. Suddenly he stopped, and then he bent over and peeked under the doors and saw me, and he ducked under the Dutch door and came into the room. He couldn’t remember my name, so he said, ‘Hawaii Boy! How are you, how are you?,’ and he came up and hugged me. He was really happy to see me, and I was even happier than he was! [There were] all these stories that we heard about him that he was untouchable, he was unapproachable, you had to get permission from his chief disciples to even get close to him, let alone talk to him, so when he came in and hugged me, I thought, ‘Hey! This is real special!’ And, of course, that’s when our relationship began.”
The office staff was dumbfounded at the reception the usually formal and reserved O’Sensei afforded this young man from Hawaii. Suenaka recalls the staff telling him later that they had never before seen O’Sensei embrace anyone, and Suenaka himself cannot recall ever again seeing the Founder greet anyone in that way. Yet that warm encounter set a precedent between the two. “Every time I would see him, I would run up to him and say, ‘O’Sensei!,’ and hug him, and he just loved that!” Indeed, to this day, at