Month: April 2021

1982. I hated teaching English, so I got an idea. I searched the Tokyo yellow-pages, and found “Private Detectives.” There were four or five Japanese names, and then: Torrance Investigations. So I called and arranged to meet the man himself in a Tokyo Station restaurant at 7:30, Saturday evening. We exchanged brief descriptions and hung up. I got there at 7:15.  I figured if I was going to get a new job, I shouldn’t be late.

The restaurant was a run-down place in a sub-basement floor. You bought meal tickets at the front, taken by white-jacketed snot-nosed young waiters with curly permanents, and three maître’d: little old Japanese men in tuxedos with brilliantined hair. It looked like an old, very neglected hotel restaurant.

I scanned the place, and there was no Jack Torrance. He said on the phone he was 6 feet, 190 pounds, fit, slightly balding. “You’ll know me.” I’m rather nearsighted, and could see in blurry vision a white man on the other side of the room. Didn’t seem to fit the description, but who knows. So, I went across the room and I could see he was a seedy badly-shaven little guy, balding with a fringe of white hair. He looked up at me with a sneer.  “Yeah?”

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When Milton A. “Hank” Gowdey, 67, was seven years old, some tough boys at Webster Ave School, Providence, called him a sissy and beat him up – until he began to study jiujitsu. [1] Gowdey sensei, born in 1919, would recall that he was bullied, because he was the only Scottish kid in a mostly Italian neighborhood. The other kids thought he was rich because he had a football. He began studying Yabe-ryu jiujitsu in 1926, at the age of seven. [2]

Tired of being bullied as a boy, he went to the dojo, or school, taught by Master Sesu Quan Setsu, a Buddhist monk, at the Biltmore Hotel. [3] “When I began [4] studies with the master, training sessions were after school three days a week, $7 for five lessons” he said. “Basic training was to serve the Sensei, or teacher. We students cleaned the dojo, cooked his rice and tea, never to his satisfaction – for at all times he was testing our humility. My parents allowed me to stay from Friday after school until Sunday evening. Sleeping was on the tatami (a straw mat). I came to conceive not just by words, but mostly by osmosis, an understanding of the way.”

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