Like all traditional budo, karatedo stressed self-discipline and arduous training. In those days, large-scale karate tournaments in Hawai'i were only then becoming mainstream. Martial arts was experiencing a boom, what with the popularity of Bruce Lee movies and the TV series "Kung Fu." But in Hawai'i, the popular stereotypes of martial arts as a badass fighting art was tempered by the traditions passed on for decades by generations of asian immigrants. Their perception of the budo weren't that they were exotic "deadly" fighting methods to hurt other people. They were healthful pursuits that were supposed to fit into a person's well-rounded lifestyle. So kids would take up karatedo and also soccer, both of which seen as normal and American as baseball.

But budo was beginning to falter under the weight of its own popularity. It seemed to me that karate, in particular, was becoming big business, with big egos and unsavory characters moving in and co-opting the ideals of budo for their own purposes. Instead of the simple, starched white cotton uwagi (training jacket) of judo or karatedo, some martial arts schools began to wear satin pajamas of varying flourescent colors at tournaments.

Competitors strutted and pranced about, acting like the poor man's Muhammed Ali, without his finesse or self-mockery. The pressure of completing my master's degree and my disgust with the direction the martial arts were taking made me shy away from training. One by one, I stopped regular training, until I only continued with jo (the art of the staff) and naginata-do (the art of the Japanese halberd). Such a long and unwieldy weapon was hardly of any practical use in a contemporary street fight. Tea, however, continued for me to be refined, subtle, subdued. I learned patterns of movement and the use of the body that echoed things I had learned in martial arts. I wasn't learning much self-defense, per se, but I was learning general body dynamics that were applicable, in theory, to the way the body was used in Asian martial arts. There was the similar use of "centering," of trying to control and focus one's breathing so as to calm one's spirit, the emphasis on proper posture and being aware and focused on the matters at hand.

When I was involved in karate, Jerry was my sempai, although he was a year younger than me. He had started karatedo several years before I did, which made him, in karate years, my sempai and I was his kohai, or "younger brother." On the other hand, in football practice, I was senior to his junior, so I was the upperclassman. We took the sempai-kohai thing lightly, however, and mainly simply trained, ignoring in large measure what we thought were unnecessary rituals of etiquette in lieu of simply meeting by the beach and training hard for hours on end, doing kata (prearranged forms) and kumite (sparring).We continued training through high school, and then we lost track of each other until years later, when we ran into each other on the University of Hawai'i campus. Jerry was finishing his master's degree in criminal law while working as a police officer, and I was getting my master's in fine arts.

Jerry's patrol beat was the late night shift on Hotel Street, certainly one of the toughest and most dangerous assignments I would have thought imaginable. Hotel Street was a run-down area near downtown Honolulu full of strip joints, low-light bars, X-rated movie theaters and porno video stores. Drug addicts prowled the streets at night, and hookers hung on the street corners, hustling for action.

Jerry, as a rookie, was assigned to that least-wanted beat, but he ended up thriving there and never thought of transferring out, even though he used to come back to his Waialua home some nights with his uniform in tatters, brought on by the violence he had to quell.

Jerry's ability to survive in those streets was all the more unusual because he was a transplanted haole, a Caucasian, from the mainland United States. He ended up hanging with my brother's gang of friends in high school, picked up the Hawai'i creole called pidgin English, absorbed the subtle cultural cues of the islands, and learned to play the ukulele. He also took up surfing, karatedo and football. From the time I first met him, when he was a skinny ninth grade haole kid ripe for being punched out by some senior haole-hating moke (local "brother"), he had evolved into a strapping, big-shouldered, six-foot tall man. Even mokes would think twice about picking on him, especially when his confidence had been steeled by years of intense traditional karate training.