Sent packing by a serene sensei

Here’s a happy ending to start the year. The story takes place in North Carolina, at the Bushiken Karate Dojo. A dojo, as everyone knows who has just looked it up, is a venue where martial arts are taught. The Japanese word means literally ‘‘the place of the way’’, or, in English, ‘‘back room at rec centre’’.

Picture the scene: a weekday evening and a karate class has just ended. American children, wearing the heavy-duty pyjamas without which the martial arts cannot be practised, are being collected by their parents, cautiously since the little ones have been inducted into the way of barehanded killing. Randall Ephraim, the instructor or sensei, beams over his flock. The word sensei, as everyone knows who has just looked it up, means ‘‘one who has gone before’’.

Enter, unexpectedly, a woman. She is distraught. A man, she says, has just tried to abduct her. And smack on cue a man enters, still intent on abduction. But he is now inside the dojo. Up steps the one who has gone before, the sensei Ephraim. He stands before the man and calmly asks him to leave. But the man is in a state of emotional agitation and he places his hands on Mr Ephraim and – has your mind already raced ahead to a conclusion? – he pushes him.

Now then, in the early 1970s a chemistry teacher arrived at Brighton Grammar School. Perhaps you heard about it. His name was Ken Cobb. Not only did Mr Cobb go on to teach us how to titrate potassium permanganate – a skill I’d hate to be without – but he also offered classes in aikido. Aikido was billed as self-defence but we boys knew better. We signed up in droves to learn how to kill.

For somehow in our suburban western world we were in thrall to a myth of the mystic east, in which men – it was always men – so devoted themselves to the martial arts that they made a lethal weapon of their flesh and at the same time – though how was not clear, or indeed of any interest – achieved spiritual serenity.

‘‘Aikido was billed as selfdefence but we boys knew better.’’

Ken Cobb was an improbable sensei – 5ft tall, and so heavily bespectacled that he had to lean slightly backwards, which gave him the air of a sniffing mole – but the start of the first aikido lesson was all we hoped. He made us swear an oath that we would never unsheathe in public the terrible skills we were about to learn, except in self-defence, and then only in extremis. We gladly swore. Then we went to it.

By the end of a term I had learned much. If someone tried to stab me I knew how to fling him to the floor and disarm him, provided that he came at me from a prescribed direction, that he did so slowly, that he paused on request to allow me to get the correct grip and that he didn’t actually try to stab me.

Thus honed I decided it was time for me to move out from under the feet of the sensei and seek my own way with the way. I’ve since kept the vow of peace.

But I have never faced the situation faced by sensei Ephraim. How I would have reacted I cannot tell you. How sensei Ephraim reacted .˜.˜. well, here are his words: ‘‘I went into action defending myself and got him out of the dojo. Once outside he attempted to attack again and was dealt with accordingly.’’

Ah, the enviable modesty of the passive voice. The cops took the man to hospital.