The "Sensei" who is both things is a charismatic man. He is graceful, kind eloquent, flawed, powerful, gentle, broad-minded, dogmatic, patient and irascible. He is patently a nut. When I met him, he had been in the United States for eighteen months and had come to Washington DC to teach an Aikido seminar that I attended. At the time he often wore flowing robes that he made for himself. Since Washington is a polyglot city with tourists and businessmen from everywhere, his dress caused little remark. but sensei has a flair for dramatics--a skill that helps make him a wonderful teacher--and sometimes, walking through the business district, I felt as if I were in the train of an old testament prophet. More than once in the first month that I knew him, I hung back as he waded nonchalantly into traffic against the light, blithely certain that it would stop.

Somehow it always did.

In those days Sensei's English was not very good. It got very slowly better in the subsequent ten years, but there has often been a need for someone to interpret from English on his behalf. I have done it myself on occasion and it can be a frustrating undertaking.

There is an anecdote about Sensei going to a drive-in in Florida shortly after he arrived in the states. He ordered coffee (Japanese: "KOE-HEE") and repeated it two or three times until the waitress understood.

"Oh, Coffee..." she said.

"So da," (Japanese. Literally: "That's right") said Sensei.

"Soda?" said the waitress.

"No. KOE-HEE."

"Coffee."

"So da."

"Soda???"

"No. KOE-HEE!"

Some have suspected that this exchange was not entirely innocent.

Sensei can be obscure for many reasons: because he lacks the exact English; because what he is trying to communicate is intrinsically hard to comprehend; or because he is a good teacher and wants you to think for yourself. But sometimes I think he is just having some fun at our expense.

For all of this, you must understand that, in the early seventies, Sensei was an acknowledged, world-class athlete in Aikido. To this day he remains a world-class practitioner, a world-class coach, and a world-class teacher. I didn't know this when we met, and I hadn't the background to see it by myself. Still, I could see that there was something in his Aikido that could be important for me, and that, whatever it was, I could learn it from him. As my letter home hints, the story of my involvement in Aikido is inseparable from the story of my building a life in Washington.

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