UFC Fighter’s Journey to Black Belt in Okinawa

When did you first want to do karate?

I

always wanted to do karate. What do you mean? Wanted to do kung fu, watching Bruce Lee.

Then you watch Kickboxer, the movie. You want to do kickboxing, you watch Rocky, you want to be a boxer, Ninja Turtles, Dragon Ball Z.

Anything that had fighting in it I was interested in. Since I was growing up, I did a lot of many different martial arts, but I never stuck around because it either got boring or it got hard.

You know, you meet new people in high school, started talking with the guys and actually found out, oh, this guy does martial arts too.

Then of course, okay, let's go to the patch of grass and spar a little bit. These guys kicked my ass.

They told me about the training and it sounded insane. And so I told them, can I join you guys for a lesson at your gym?

They said, sure, yeah. Come 7:30pm I walk in the door, first thing I see is somebody get head kicked.

Apparently they told me the wrong time. The instructor comes to me kind of angry because I'm late and just start telling me, you know, to do the push ups.

So we did 200 push ups total. Then like 400 sit ups. Obviously midway, I'm like, hey, excuse me, I'm sorry, but I can't do it.

I've never done so many push ups. And he's like, if you don't want to do it, you can just go home right now, somehow grind through it and maybe a little bit of cheating on the technique.

Then he starts showing us forms. Then we did sparring and everybody kicked my ass again. And for dessert, he put everybody with their back to the wall, sitting on the floor in butterfly stretch.

Still not very flexible, but back then it was all the way here. The instructor puts one leg on one of my knees, and then he puts the other leg on the other knee and just forcefully pushes my knees to the ground.

And I was screaming in pain. And he told me, relax and count to 10. He gets off me, my legs just stay right where they are.

But that moment, I realized that a second ago I was telling him that I can't. And I just did. And it made me understand that everything you say you cannot do with the right push, you know, you can do it.

After two years of this sort of training, my coach told me he was going to fly to Okinawa to train with the karate masters over there.

And I asked him if I could join. And then I needed to ask my mom. So I went home. My mom was doing dishes, and I told her, hey, mom, is it Cool if I go with my coach to Okinawa in the summer to train karate?

And she was like, yeah, sure, honey. I think she wasn't even paying attention because she was very surprised the next day when I showed up home with the actual plane ticket.

Yeah, I think we got the cheapest flight possible from Tel Aviv to Okinawa. It must have had, like, four or five stops.

So we get there. Nobody speaks English. You think anywhere I travel in my life, everybody speaks English?

People would leave their store open when they take, like, an hour break. You can either just browse and come back when the owner is there, or sometimes they just have, like, a little holder thing.

You can grab something and just put money and leave. Most inviting place I've ever been to. We had a master in mind that we want to learn from.

We didn't know his address, his phone number. How do we get accepted? Like, like nothing. We found one person that spoke English at the town hall, so we asked for her to find Shinjo Sensei.

We go back a couple days in a row, and we actually even got to a point where we're just searching for him on a bicycle.

For some reason, we didn't have much success with this strategy. At the end, the town hall lady gave us the right number.

Something got lost in translation, and we got somewhere, but there was no dojo inside. We just see this old Japanese lady watering her plants, and we show her the paper.

We don't know any Japanese. We're just like. She reads it. She look kind of surprised, and she tells us to get in her car.

I'll never forget the kindness of this lady. She was minding her own business, and she drives us for 30 minutes to a different location for no reason other than just to be helpful.

So we get there, we see the master. We're in awe. We only seen him on the Discovery Channel, you know, we try to talk to him, and he doesn't speak a word of English.

And there's, like, one student he asked to translate, and they were like, can we come train? And they talk in Japanese, and the guy says, no, sensei will refer you to a different dojo.

And this is kind of like the Japanese method. He transfers you to a lesser teacher. That teacher transfers you to a lesser teacher until you end up at the end of the rope, especially to, like, foreigners.

He probably thought we were, like, tourists. But we did not accept this answer.

So next morning, we show up to Shinjo sensei's house. It's two floors. The top, he lives there, and the bottom floor is the Dojo.

We see the guy go to his balcony, and he sees us, and he's like, what are these two doing here again?

And we brought him, like, mango. It was like a big fancy box that cost us like 200 bucks. And we gave it to him.

My coach learned just how to say, like, teach us, please. So he's like, oshi e kudasai oshi etekuda sai.

He takes it, he says, thank you, kind of waves us off. We do the same thing the next morning and the next day.

And for almost a week, we show up every day with a different gift. Slowly, he reveals that he knows more English, that he let us know at the beginning.

So one day he says, okay, at noon, go to Shoredo to buy a GI. Come 7pm dojo training, I give you one shot.

On our way there, I saw a different gi store. And I told my coach, hey, maybe we can just buy it here.

And he's like, no, let's go to where Sensei said, sensei, show it up there. It was the test. He wants to see that we buy the gi, he said, when he said, and it's a very expensive gi.

It's custom made. They actually tailor it on you told us, okay, see you tonight at the dojo. It's all hardwood floors, no mats, push ups on the knuckles, hitting like a wooden kind of dummy, just until, like, your knuckles bleed.

And then body conditioning, kicking each other, punching each other to the arms, to the body, to the legs.

And the Japanese guys over there are super well conditioned. You would hit them as with what you want.

They don't feel it, but they hit you. And, like, one kick breaks your leg. And you just gotta stand there and take 10 more.

And at the end, there was sparring, and we were training, like, pretty savage way in Israel. And we didn't follow exactly the karate rules.

As far as sparring goes, it was kind of like a free for. So if my coach light jabbed the guy in the face, they told him, like, stop.

You can't do this. You gotta hit only the body. Me, I caught the guy against the wall, grabbed his gi and started pulling it into my knees.

They'd say, like, oh, you can't do that. But I think overall, the master was impressed. After the first night in the dojo, Shinjo Sensei actually took us out.

Then he told us, you guys are driving around your bicycles in Naha without your shirt. Please, no more.

And we look at each other like, how does he know? He says, I have Mickey Mouse ears now. You are my Students, you can't do anything that makes me look bad.

Just, you know, from that night learning like the codes of respect. What is kohai? What is senpai? Which means I'm younger, I'm kohai, I need to be of assistance for my elders.

Like I had to mix everybody's drinks, I had to go get the food, I had to carry the bags. You know, I learned a lot of it in the first time that I was there.

And then I had to go back home and finish my last year of school. And as soon as I could, I went back to Okinawa.

So first time we were training hard, but it was like a vacation a little bit.

Second time training schedule was a lot more busy. So 7am we would go to a school, private one, where they hired the master to teach karate classes.

Because in Japan you need a karate high school black belt to graduate. So got to do all the Kauai stuff, getting everybody water and whatever they need.

And then training starts. One class of about, I don't know, 100 students maybe go into a huge training hall and I train with them for an hour.

They leave, a different class comes in. Only one person stays, it's me. I'm still training. 30 minutes break, another group, another group, one hour break another group, another group.

And by the time we're finished at school, I already trained for 4, 5, 6 hours depending on the day I go back home, eat, and a few hours later, I'm already need to be at the dojo.

Now two things. First thing is I had my 18th birthday on that trip and I didn't really know how to manage money.

So unfortunately I spent too much too soon. So going home would consist of eating just rice and same thing for to get to the dojo.

I couldn't even afford to get on the bus. So I would ride my bicycle for 20 to 25 miles to get to the dojo.

It was all uphill. I lost like 10 kilos in the three months I was there. And after training, sometimes the master would decide, we're going out, everybody's having their drinks mixed by yours truly.

Now it's midnight or something and I would have to ride my bicycle back home. Sometimes the sensei would just tell us to sleep in the dojo and it would spread like a bamboo sheet

on the hardwood floor and just be like, good night. You wake up at 7am, you don't have your tooth brushed, you don't have nothing.

You get back to the school for training and kind of go over that day again. All the hard work and the grind and everything kind of led to this.

I was a brown belt in karate, but we would actually train all the time, me and my coach with white belts.

On nearing the end of my three months, Shinjo sensei said, in a couple weeks, before you leave, Nathan, you're going to test for shodan, which means black belt.

And my coach is going to train for Nidan 2nd degree black belt. He wanted to keep the hierarchy. And then the day prior he tells us, okay, good luck, guys.

Tomorrow you're both testing for shoda first degree black belt. My coach, he didn't, you know, see it fit that him and his student would get the same rank.

I was trying to calm him down and I was like, listen, it's okay. Tomorrow morning I ask him to not test, and he's like, no.

Sensei told us to be there tomorrow. You're gonna be there.

We passed the tests and he gives us a diploma. I get shodan first degree black belt, he gets nedan second degree black belt.

And I guess it was all another test. And I think it was kind of important for him to me to earn also, like a moment of showing up to the school where I was a dog for the past three months, where I was a shell of a man, just training again and again and again, and I had my black belt.