In 1976, a twelve-year-old boy emigrated to California from the
other side of the world. Beset with dangers, he sought strength in
martial arts. It saved his life.
In 1906, a sixteen-year-old boy emigrated to Hawaii from the other
side of the world. Beset with dangers, he sought strength in martial
arts. It saved his life.
The first boy was Mike Esmailzadeh. Not Iranian by heritage, he was
born in Germany. After his parents divorced when he was four, his
mother married an Iranian; the family promptly moved to Iran. By the
time they moved again, this time to Los Angeles, Esmailzadeh spoke his
adoptive stepfather’s Farsi and his mother’s German, but not much
else.
“I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anyone, and I couldn’t really
speak English,” says Esmailzadeh. Martial arts doesn’t require a lot of
language skills, so he enrolled in classes. “Suddenly I felt that I had
someone to turn to.” And he was acquiring skills that would prove even
more useful over the next few years as the Iranian revolution raged
overseas and his family, like many Iranians in Los Angeles at that
time, became the targets of taunts and aggression.
Both inside and out, “martial arts saved my life,” Esmailzadeh says
resolutely. Vowing to “give back to others what I got out of it,” he
founded Suigetsukan (103 International Blvd., Oakland), a
nonprofit dojo or school whose five-session Martial Arts Day
Camp for kids ages six through fifteen starts on Monday, July 6.
Suigetsukan is a nonprofit, so all classes and workshops “have a
sliding scale that goes down to zero.” The day camp costs $50 to $100
for those who can afford it; for anyone else, it’s free. At least half
of the students who train at Suigetsukan pay nothing at all.
Esmailzadeh’s impressive rankings include Rokudan in Danzan Ryu
Jujitsu, the martial-arts style that will be the day camp’s main focus.
Encompassing an array of techniques including throws, chokes, strikes,
joint-locks, and breaks, it also features an escape component: When
survival’s at stake, sometimes running away is the best
self-defense.
Danzan Ryu Jujitsu was developed by that other immigrant
youth, the one in Hawaii. Born in Japan, Henry Seishiro Okazaki was
living in Hilo when he was diagnosed with incurable tuberculosis.
Defying that fate, the youth enrolled in martial-arts classes. His
lungs improved. Assembling techniques from various styles including
Okinawan karate and Filipino knifework, Okazaki soared to fame. He
spent the next thirty years touring the world, founding dojos, and
establishing a Honolulu sanitorium for patients with neurological
disorders.
Esmailzadeh admires Okazaki, who died in 1951: “He was one of the
first people to open up martial arts to non-Japanese students. So his
schools were the first of what we now consider modern public
martial-arts schools, open to anyone who wants to train. Accessibility
was important to him.” In homage, that’s important to Esmailzadeh, too.
9 a.m. Suigetsukan.org
