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This is a very interesting interviews by Jon Bluming a pioneer in martial arts circles. In this interview he discusses Judo, Kyokushinkai and Mas Oyama. To say the least many Kyoshinkai practitioners are not going to like what he says BUT unlike others he was there when Kyoshinkai was beginning. Please listen to it in its entirety and post your thoughts. Thanks!
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Interview de. Légendes et réalités sont parfois bien différentes.
See Translation
David B Wong The "book" Jon sensei pulled out was a "manga"---comic type picture books. Very popular in Japan and almost every person owes a few and subscribe to them. Now they are here in every bookstore also.
Some people are the same anywhere...they believe "anything" in books, dvd, movie, newspapers, etc. are all "real".
Mas Oyama was very good businessman. Before the internet, manga was the most popular media in Asia. He used it to built his kyokushin empire.
Kayo HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/kayo.ong.79?fref=ufi"Ong He and Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church were good friends... There are much more............
Kayo HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/kayo.ong.79?fref=ufi"Ong Saved from the past... Broken into six parts for it was too large to posted as one
MAS OYAMA STORIES
By JON BLUMING
In the past, I've avoided discussing the "famous" Kyokushin Kaikan karate business. I needed some time to think about saying anything now, too, as I wanted to be strictly honest toward the memory of my
old "friend and teacher, Mas Oyama. He did a lot for me, introducing me to the karate world and giving me a new purpose in life. This changed my life completely for the best. For me, Oyama was like a
father I never had. In the old days, he showed me all the things you need to be a teacher and helped me through some rough times. On the other hand, I am tired of all the phonies who did not go the straight
way.
So, let me tell it like it was. Published accounts describing Oyama preparing for the big karate
championships in 1947 are very funny. Especially the Americans, who fought the Japanese in World War 11, should know that. MacArthur was the big honcho in Japan from August 1945, until the Korean War, and he declared right away that there was to be no more budo in Japan until he declared otherwise. He even rounded up all the samurai swords he could lay his hands on and had them dropped in Tokyo Bay. They would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. He was not messing around and
nobody dared disobey his rules.
Around 1948, judo started again at the old Kodokan on Suidobashi. Karate was done mainly by the Shotokan, where sparring matches were not allowed until the late 1950s, and by the Goju Kai and Wado@ryu, where the sparring was so soft that a split lip or a nose bleed would throw the officials into a state of shock. So while there might have been some professional boxing clubs where fighting was done on a knockout basis, a karate championship in Kyoto done on such a basis was absolutely out of the question.
When hearing stories about the old days, remember that the Japanese are great storytellers. If the story is good, they don't check to see if it is true. Even today, I meet people who heard from their fathers or grandfathers about the roughhousing I supposedly did in my younger days. It doesn't amaze me anymore and I am tired of telling people that the stories are impossible because if you hit somebody, you were hauled into a police station, charged, and sent to jail or kicked out of the country. I admit I had a few fights, but always with witnesses saying that I did not start it.
As for Oyama's alleged 270 American bouts, remember that he was in the States as a professional wrestler. Since when are professional wrestling matches on the level? All Oyama ever told me about those days was that Americans were crazy, that their wrestling was phony and prearranged, and that as fighters, they were weak. My guess is that most of what he did was just break bricks and things between matches. If he had ever fought any of the American professional wrestlers, really fought them, I think he would have beaten most of them easily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euPiir-uBCI
The story about Oyama fighting bulls is not true. He never met a real bull, for he never visited Spain. I also doubt that he was gored, for he never told me about it and he used to tell me everything. Kurosaki Kenji was there and he told me what happened. They went early in the morning to a stock- yard in Tateyama Prefecture. Workmen prepared a fat old ox for Oyama by hitting one of its horns with a hammer so that it was quite loose. Oyama did not kill the ox he only knocked off the loose horn.
Oyama showed Bill Backhus and I the 16mm "bull fighting" movie in 1959. 1 told Oyama never to show this film in Europe because it looked too phony and everyone would laugh at him. As far as I know, nobody saw that movie again.
Even Oyama's famous world championships of the 1970s were a joke. By then, foreigners were not allowed to win. To prevent it, Oyama had all the gaijin fight each other first, and of course pitted the best against each other. Because everyone wanted to win, the injuries were terrible. Meanwhile, he put the leading Japanese against low quality Japanese from his own school, who knew their place and of course didn't try too hard. So they had it easy.
Occasionally, in the finals, the referee would give a good foreign fighter a decision over a Japanese fighter. Oyama would stand up all red in the face. Then he'd call the referee over to his table and chew him out and reverse his decision. This was against all the rules of sportsmanship. Read Nakamura Tadashi's book or go talk to him in New York. It is very emotional and very sad.
Oyama was a strong man in his young days, but I never saw him fight anybody, not even in his own dojo. So his "countless encounters" and "challenges" were all before my time. Kurosaki Kenji tells me that they were all before his time, too, and that goes back to 1952, when they both trained at Yamaguchi Gogen's dojo in Tokyo. So I think maybe he never fought in his life.
But he was a great teacher who trained many good fighters and his books were very popular. When I read his first book, What Is Karate? (1957), 1 was really impressed. I was in his second book (This Is Karate, 1965) and had the opportunity to look into the way he did things.
The thing that amazed me most was "the monkey business" (Oyama's own words) involved in the breaking tricks. I didn't know about this when I did my first breaking demonstration in Holland. Since I had read in Oyama's book, What Is Karate?, about somebody breaking twenty-five roofing tiles at once, I simply brought some tiles I had found along the road. I thought that twenty-five sounded like a lot, for these things were heavy and felt strong. So I only put eight on top of each other and gave it my best. I made it but nearly broke my wrist. Of course I wondered how that kid managed twenty-five.
Well, I found out while working on the book, This Is Karate. I went to the pile of tiles they had prepared for punishment and picked up the top tile. It felt like paper, it was so light, and on its underside was a baked-in line along the length of the tile. So the middle of the tile was maybe a millimeter thick. No wonder a 110-pound chicken could go through twenty-five of them!
The bricks were no different. They were specially baked and ii some- one leaned on them they would crumble. His wood was also very lightweight. As for that famous bottle trick, first you prepare the bottle by rolling a sharp stone around the bottle's neck. That way when you hit it, it breaks along the carved line.
Kurosaki Kenji was the only one who really impressed me with his breaking tricks. Using his head, he broke two red bricks from British television. The nasty cracking sound horrified everybody watching. I was a good breaker, too, but I paid the price for my mistakes. Which brings me to the ice-breaking trick. When you break ice blocks, be careful. If you aren't, you'll hit the edge of the ice with your wrist rather than your shuto (knife-hand) and break your wrist instead of the ice. This happened to me in 1975.
During a demonstration, Loek Hollander had arranged for each of us to break several big blocks of ice. What I did not know until years later is that he had arranged for workmen to cut his blocks almost in half using diamond strings and then refreeze them so that nobody would notice the cuts. On the other hand, my blocks were solid. Anyway, Loek broke his three blocks so easily that I forgot the rule about the wrist and immediately broke the little bone under my wrist. I was so angry that right away I hit again and went through the ice anyway. I was in a plaster cast for the next six weeks.
As I said before, in 1963 1 opened my own budo club called the Budokai. Kurosaki Kenji came over in 1966, about the time Oyama started calling himself "the Godhand." Even the Japanese press laughs at that one. In 1990, we changed the club's name to Kyokushin Budokai and, in 1966, some friends and I renamed it the International Budokaikan. Today it has many associated clubs and some real good fighters. In the Budokai we teach no kata, only fighting. Excepting Donn Draeger, I've never known a kata champion who could beat by grandmother in randori if she had her umbrella. To keep injuries down, we provide students with a lot of coaching and supervision. But, as the Japanese method of slapping people into line doesn't work in Europe, we don't make anyone do anything he doesn't want to do. Therefore, the standards are only as high as the individual makes them. Which can be very high, as the teams we send to full-contact tournaments usually win. For instance, in Tokyo in 1993, Chris Dolmen, our only 9th dan, became the first world champion in "free fighting." From 1994 to 1997, Budokai teams won the Japanese All-Round Karate Championships in Tokyo. As a result, the Japanese no longer allow us to compete.
Unfortunately, there isn't much money in teaching budo this way. Today I'm retired, but to earn a living when I was younger, I took a fifteen percent partnership in a casino. The work kept me very busy, especially at night. I acted in seven movies, too, but the movies pay poorly in Holland so eventually I quit. Between the workload and the political squalor within the European Kyokushin Kaikan, in 197 1, I told Oyama that I was too busy to lead the organization and to give the job to Loek Hollander. Oyama was real@ ly upset. He pleaded with me, but I wanted to stop. Finally he gave in and Hollander got the job. Hollander then went and filled his pockets and killed the Kyokushin 'Kaikan. I now think that giving up the leadership to Hollander was the stupidest thing I ever did in my entire life.
In 1976, some buddies and I were in Korea getting decorated for our service during the war. Afterwards, my wife and I went to Tokyo where I visited the Kyokushinkai honbu dojo for the first time in years. On the street in front were guards. The place looked like a yakuza headquarters - and for all I know, it is. Although he called himself "the Godhand," everybody else called Oyama "Mr. Ten Percent." This was due to his relations with various politicians and businessmen, including one Time magazine called the Godfather of Japan. In The "Young Lions" of Mas Oyama's Kyokushin Karate Headquarters (1985), Necef Artan tells how Oyama's students spent four hours a day going through Tokyo "asking shop keepers to display posters in their windows." Such activities would be protected rackets in Europe or America. But in Japan, politics and the yakuza are like a hand and a glove on a very cold day and one never does business without the other. Anyway, I went in the door and up the stairs to Oyama's office. Although Oyama wasn't there, the old memories came back and I got all choked up. The young black belts posted as guards obviously didn't recog, nize me, even though my picture was hanging on the wall. One went to stop me, so I gave him my best cold look and told him in Japanese who I was and added that if he touched me he would be a cripple instantly. The poor kid nearly had a heart attack, as Oyama had told them all kinds of stories about me. When I left, some of the kids touched my arm or shoulder and said they were honored. I talked to Oyama on the phone later the same day and afterward we ate dinner at an expensive Kobe beef restaurant.
When Oyama went to wash his hands, his wife told me that he wanted me back with the Kyokushin Kaikan. So when he returned, we talked and I told him I would try again if he would first get rid of Loek Hollander. He wouldn't and that was that. The last time I saw Oyama alive was in 1983. 1 was visiting Korea and a Korean general asked me what I did for work. When I told him, he said that he had a friend visiting from Japan who was a famous karate teacher named Oyama. Surprised, I told him my story. The general laughed and said, "Now I know why your name was familiar - you're Bluming, the Beast from Amsterdam!" Then he called Oyama and arranged for us to meet. The old man was really glad to see me and we had a good talk. He said he would send me a first class airline ticket so that I could come to Tokyo the following year. He even agreed to get rid of Loek Hollander. But in November 1983, 1 got a letter from the Kyokushin Kaikan saying that it did not want me back, and that I should look after my own business. It seems that Loek Hollander had told Oyama at a world conference that I was a gangster and had held up a bank with a drawn pistol. Now I admit that I was a partner in a casino, but that's hardly the same as being a gangster. What's more, if I were robbing banks with drawn pistols, then I wouldn't have been selected to serve as an honorary bodyguard for Dutch Prince Bernhard in 1986, 1991, and 1996. But anyway, Oyama believed Hollander's story, as have a lot of other people. Shortly before his death, Oyama discovered that I'd been right and Loek Hollander had been wrong. That's why today you'll find no articles about Loek Hollander or a picture with his name under it in any of the Japanese budo magazines: Oyama forbade it. To make things right, Oyama even sent Maeda Akira, 7th dan, to Holland in the autumn of 1993. In April 1994, 1 was scheduled to go to Tokyo to talk to Oyama when I received a fax saying that he had just died of cancer. I cried and cried. I was so sad, jettaylor57@gmail.com <jettaylor57@gmail.com>;angry, and frustrated.
During the following months, I had several meetings with the new Kyokushin Kaikan leaders. Loek Hollander was still there and he and his cronies still struck me as more interested in money than in budo. Mean- while, the Japanese walked and talked like the hottest thing on earth - and still couldn't put together a team that could win against shoot- boxing, which in my eyes is a very weak kind of freestyle fighting. So that was the end of that.
As for Mas Oyama, in the teaching of the Buddha it is written, "Can a student be angry with his teacher?" The more devoted the student, the more privileges he has! But those privileges do not include lies. To a stranger I might sound bitter but I am not. Mas Oyama turned my life around, all for the best. He had a good heart and was an excellent teacher. As for every- thing else, I wish the politics in the various judo and karate organizations would have been less. I wish I'd been born a better diplomat, as maybe that would have helped. I wish Oyama hadn't died, as his death means I can't talk to him anymore or tell him the love I still have for him because of the old days. I wish the Japanese weren't so nationalistic and conceited, and that they would have given Donn Draeger the credit he deserved as a teacher, coach, fighter, and writer. What makes me saddest, though, is to have to admit that so much of what passes for budo is really nothing more than monkey business.
David B Wong There are some worst then monkey business in the martial art world...and them monkeys are still dancing around today and many think they are the authorities....
Narda HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/nardalee?fref=ufi" HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/nardalee?fref=ufi"Wakoluk /\
David B Wong When Nakamura broke away, they tried to kill him...
Kayo HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/kayo.ong.79?fref=ufi"Ong David, the K.I.A.....
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