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at it. It wasn’t just
    that as long as they did this exercise I didn’t have to worry
    about what else they might try to pull on me. It was because
    my teacher and his teachers before him and now, I suppose,
    even I, believed that the best learning takes place at the white
    hot juncture where the body and mind are thoroughly fatigued.
    And as I looked at the trainees, I sensed that some of them were
    starting to make the move their own.
    That’s what training in the martial arts is about.
    After a few more tortuous minutes, I called a break. I
    wanted to burn these people, not break them. They stood up
    gladly and walked around the room, blotting their foreheads
    with their sleeves, waiting for the muscle cramps to ebb a bit. I
    edged over to Sarah.
    “How’s it going?” I asked quietly.
    “I don’t know what you had planned for later tonight, Burke,
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    but dancing is definitely out of the question.” She smiled.
    “The Irish don’t dance,” I informed her.
    “Come on,” she protested, “I’ve seen those girls in those
    fancy little dresses jumping around. What’s it called?” I had
    recently taken Sarah to a feis, a festival that featured Irish step
    dancing, bagpipes, and other forms of Celtic torture.
    “Step dancing,” I told her. She nodded silently at my
    answer, as if her point were made. “But did you ever notice,” I
    continued, “that when they dance, they keep their arms pinned
    to their sides?”
    “So?”
    “That’s because in the old days, when the English lords
    would make the peasants dance, the Irish knew that they had
    to do it, but they decided that they would refuse to enjoy it.”
    Sarah looked me up and down, quietly pensive. “It explains
    so much about you, Burke,” she concluded. Then I saw the
    laughter in her eye and knew I was being teased.
    The seminar wound its way through the morning. We
    worked hard with bokken , the oak swords that are the basic
    training weapon here. We also did some empty-hand tech-
    niques, stressing joint locks and pressure point techniques that
    made the nerves jangle. It wasn’t totally new stuff to most people
    in the room—trainees in arts like iaido or aikido or kendo can see some faint hint of their styles in what Yamashita does. But
    there’s a difference: a harder edge, a more concise motion—it’s
    difficult to explain in words. To see it revealed clearly, you have
    to experience it. Which can be a problem. In the Yamashita-ha
    Itto Ryu, my master’s system, a full-bore demonstration usually
    leaves someone moaning on the ground.
    The demo had to come eventually, of course. It was what
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    they were all really here for. They’d heard about Yamashita; they
    wanted to see the real deal. But so far, all they got was me. I
    could tell it was bugging them. Yamashita Sensei was there,
    of course. He drifted along the edges of the room, silent and
    contained, but you could feel him and sense his energy. Martial
    artists at a certain level of training can pick up the psycho-
    kinetic energy called ki . We all emit ki , but it viscerally pulses
    off someone like my teacher. You can suppress it somewhat or,
    if you’re really good (and Yamashita is) you can ramp up the
    energy projection until even the dimmest pupil can feel it.
    He was doing it on purpose.
    As the men and women here today trained, they felt the
    pulse of Yamashita’s ki, his energy, washing over them. Yet he
    stayed in the background, content to let me run the class. And
    what did they sense from me? I’m not sure. Most of them were
    probably too caught up in trying to master what I was showing
    them, in trying to look good in front of Yamashita. That kind
    of thing tends to dim peripheral awareness. In any event, they
    were glancing occasionally between the two of us as if com-
    paring. Average looking white guy versus Asian master whose
    energy field was pinging off them like sonar. Who would you
    watch?
    Eventually, Yamashita looked at me and