08 Aug

PAWMA Camp: Shihan Fukuda

PAWMA board president Rosanne Boudreau greets Shihan Keiko Fukuda at Friday night’s opening class.

Late this spring, I promised my taller half that I would come with him to Pickathon, a music festival in Oregon. When I realized it was the same weekend as the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists camp, I told him I didn’t mind not going to camp this year.

Then I found out that Shihan Keiko Fukuda was going to be there for the opening class.

When we talk living legends of women’s martial arts, Fukuda should be at the top of anyone’s list. At 99 she is the last living student of Jiguro Kano, the founder of Judo. She is the highest ranking woman in Judo: 10th dan according to the US Judo Federation, and 9th dan with the Kodokan in Japan, where the men who run things aren’t quite prepared to give a woman the highest honors, no matter how overwhelmingly she deserves them.

Fortunately my husband is a bit more sensible and modern than what I assume is a panel of old Japanese men, and I was able to convince him that this was a once in a lifetime sort of thing, worth skipping a music festival for.

Shihan Fukuda still teaches three times a week, despite being wheelchair bound, and is assisted by her black belts. The piece she chose to share with us was ju-no-kata, the “gentle form.” She demonstrated this form at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The form does not include actual throws, but rather the lead up to throws – tori takes uke to the point when they are just about to fall, and then sets them down gently again. It was a very slow and deliberate form.

I took a lot of rapid fire sequences of photos during camp and made some into gifs, including this one of Shihan Fukuda’s black belts demonstrating one of the almost-but-not-quite throws of ju-no-kata.

I don’t have any pictures of the camp participants practicing the form, since I was in on the class and there was another photographer taking pictures at that point, but we learned a part that involved joint locks, not throws.

After the class session, we got to watch Mrs. Judo, a brand spanking new documentary on Fukuda and her life. Here’s the trailer.

The rest of camp involved a lot more mat artists than usual, which I really liked. Last year while I was living in Alaska, I trained for several months with the Sitka Judo Club, and got my yellow belt. Here’s another giffed set of pictures from one of the classes taught by Sensei Denise Gonzales.

Stay tuned, because I have several hundred decent photos from camp, and dozens of really great ones, and I’ll share some here in the next week or three. If you were at camp, I will be putting all the good photos up online somewhere else and you will get an email from the organization with a link. If you’re a lapsed member, send in your dues so you can be on the email list to get that link! And if you’re a maybe kinda thinking about it prospective member of the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists, I strongly encourage you to sign up, because camp is wonderful for three days, and it is also a door into a beautiful community of strong, inspiring, women.

It doesn’t matter if you started training last week – do you catch the white belt in the above gif? That woman has been training for about a month. You have no excuse. Join PAWMA and come play with us next year!