There Will Never Be Peace!!

[sensei8]

Collectively?? No. Separately?? Possibly. Individually?? Hopefully. The attainability of peace amongst us Shindokanists is a highly complex as well as debatable issue. 

Shindokan techniques are not meant to earn points or trophies or things of ego but to end confrontation. This was what the latest hierarchy of the SKKA wanted, and that thought was completely alien to the entire student body because that was not what Soke and Dai-Soke/Kaicho taught us.

We fought hard against the latest hierarchy changes because their leadership was laced with conflict, war, chaos, violence, turmoil, and unrest; pick any one of these antonyms that suits best. What we were exposed to was tension, disorder, and hostility at their leadership. Shindokan means “The House of the Heart Way”, under the SKKA new leadership, both the Way and the Heart was broken, and the infrastructure of the House that once stood, quickly collapsed.

Our Soke lived in a time of Okinawa when karate wasn’t taught openly, not structured for mass learning and not separated into styles. 

My Soke only had one core student, the rest of us Shindokanists, once he moved to the USA, were students under the then his assigned Kaicho, with the Soke’s every watchful eye, diligently overseeing our every move. Whenever Soke did teach us, it was understood that we were not his students directly.

I never really understood Soke’s mind set regarding us. After all, Soke and his student came to the USA to establish first his dojo, then established the SKKA in the USA, accepted USA students, promoted USA students, and accepted money from USA students but treated us USA students from afar. We had to go through Kaicho in order to speak directly to Soke; not many got that close, especially at first. Even the chosen few of us that were eventually accepted by Soke were still not his students at all.

Shindokan didn’t spread widely. Soke had no desire to build a large organization, nor did he aspire for a global federation. Soke didn’t adapt to competition or sport, but in refusing to change, he preserved something rare, to separate Shindokan from the modern trappings.

Is the Shindokan heart still there?!? Let me give it to you straight face to face…has Shindokan really disappeared, just another dying style?? 

Ever since the Shindokan civil war, and the permanent collapse and closure of the SKKA for cause, the disbandment reached at its peak, the Shindokan dojo network splintered, more like an implosion that not one dojo survived intact as before, but more like a leper colony going our own martial art way.

Since the closing of the SKKA, the last hierarchy of the SKKA have been ostracized, and we’ve cast them off to such a degree that to us Shindokanists, they never existed. I still keep in touch with the student body as well as many Senior Dans but not as often as I would have hoped for. 

We all have truly gone our own way!!

My own memoir has stalled once again because a memoir is not the place to write for revenge. What the last hierarchy did still hurts, and like a festering wound, it might never heal. 

The fact that there will never be peace as far as the SKKA is concerned haunts me unceasingly and weighs heavily on my heart. What’s done is done, and there’s nothing that can be done to change neither the scope of the situation nor the final outcome.

But for the love of me, I just can’t shake this thing of profound sadness and remorsefulness that’s taken a permanent residence in my mind.