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Portraits Bill Kossen

Gary Imanishi / Carries a big stick while bringing an ancient art into the mainstream

What a difference a couple of generations can make.

On Jan. 13, 1963, this magazine (then known as the Sunday Pictorial) ran a four-page story and photos on kendo, the ancient Japanese martial art of fencing.

The students and instructors pictured were all tough-looking men, charging and swinging at each other with their bamboo swords in the gym at the Seattle Buddhist Church on South Main Street.

It looked like some scary old secret society of supermen.

The sensei (head teacher) was 79-year-old Umajiro Imanishi, described in the article as someone who "could take on five younger men in succession and still keep up."

A grandson of that local legend, Gary Imanishi, was only 7 at the time the story came out. He admired his grandfather, but the prospect of putting on chest armor and skirt-like trousers, and running around yelling and carrying a big stick held little appeal. No kendo for this Seattle kid.

"It was foreign. I was used to baseball and basketball," Imanishi recently explained — moments after teaching his own kendo class at Mercer Island's community center.

His attitude slowly changed while he was attending the University of Washington in the 1970s and a friend who was taking a kendo class would routinely drop by Imanishi's dorm room, asking him to give it a shot.

"He knocked on the door. Sometimes I answered it. And sometimes I didn't."

Imanishi eventually went to a class and got hooked. Now 52 years old and employed as a financial officer for King County, Imanishi has been competing in or teaching kendo for more than 30 years. (In 1979 he competed in the World Kendo Championships in Sapporo, Japan.)

And while Imanishi can speak eloquently about kendo's time-honored character-building virtues, he says the "Star Wars" look and the rise of the Internet are fueling its growth today.

Twenty-four students were in his beginners' class the other night, a mix of boys and girls and men and women of various ethnic backgrounds. They all seemed to be having fun, dancing around the gym floor and gently thwacking each other with their bamboo shinais.

It was a scene that would please his grandfather, who worked hard to bring kendo into the mainstream, Imanishi said, referring to the old magazine article as an example. "He wanted it to be shared throughout American society."