Once
upon a time, not so long ago, Copacabana and Ipanema were full of martial arts academies of
all kinds. Jiu-jitsu supplanted most of them. Mehdi Academia de Judo was never
going to be replaced because Mehdi taught the jiu-jitsu guys how to throw. But karate had all but vanished. The Academia Shoto-kan, at Rua Visconde
de Piraja 585/201 in Ipanema, was the only karate school I came across. (There
are a few others in other parts of Rio.)
Academia
Shoto-kan was an attractive, traditional looking dojo, with clean, waxed wooden
floors, and mirrors all along the walls. A group of karate students were
practicing their basic stepping, striking, kicking, and blocking techniques,
marching across the floor at the command of the sensei, locking out each
punch for extra power. The students capped off the 80 minute class with about 5
minutes of free-sparring. Shotokan strikes are so powerful that even non-contact
sparring can only be permitted for brief periods and under the close supervision
of a high ranking master who himself has advanced well beyond the need for
sparring practice.
The
sensei glanced over at me once or twice, but otherwise ignored me. None of the
students took any interest in me. The receptionist also ignored me, although she
responded to my request for some printed information (from which I learned that
karate training, at 115 reais per month, is more expensive than jiu-jitsu
(most academies charge less than 100 reais), but less expensive than the
240 reais Mehdi charges for three judo classes per week).
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It
was the only school I visited in Rio where I wasn’t invited to train. Was it
because karate training is too dangerous for a novice? (But no one bothered to
ask me if I had any previous training.) Did I somehow unintentionally project a
skeptical attitude that put people there on the defensive? (It’s possible.)
After
the training was finished, the sensei sat down in the receptionist’s chair and
fired up a cigarette (I didn’t notice any jiu-jitsu professors sparking up,
but maybe that’s because they spar with their students and in most cases still
compete themselves). I asked the sensei if I might ask him a few questions. He
apathetically agreed. We spoke in Japanese, because he said he didn’t speak
English, and the verb inflections make Portuguese easy to understand but hard to
produce. He was Hiroyasu Inoki, a 6th degree black belt, he said. I
asked him if he sometimes went back to Japan to train. He said no, but he went
to Los Angeles regularly, since he was from Los Angeles. How was it then that he
didn’t speak English, I wondered?
The
most impressive things about Academia Shoto-kan were the nice floors and the
fact that it exists at all, in this city that is so thoroughly dominated by
Gracie jiu-jitsu.
Update September 11, 2002. I might have been too harsh in my short profile above, written around summer 1999. The Academia Shoto-Kan students were apparently content with what they were getting. I also might have had a different impression if I had met the other mestre, Paulo Góes. I confess that I spent five years practicing karate myself, which made me extremely unsympathetic to karate， its training methods, and the culture of the "dojo" with its rigid Japanese "one size fits all" mentality.
(c) 2000-2００２, R. A. Pedreira. All rights reserved.