It’s been a while since our last episode, but in today’s episode we share part 1 of an interview we did with Noonan Sensei some time ago, sharing a bit about his journey and perspectives as the most senior ranked teacher of Chito-Ryu Karate-Do in Australia.
—- Transcript —-
Martin: Hey everyone, and today we’d love to share the first part of an interview we did with Noonan Sensei. A five-part series this one.
Sandra: This is going to be so good, Martin.
For those who don’t know Noonan Sensei, he’s currently the most senior-ranked Chito-Ryu Karate instructor in Australia, with the rank of 7th Dan, Kyoshi.
Martin: And Noonan Sensei is based in Sydney and he runs a successful karate dojo?
Sandra: Yes, he does.
And so let’s now hear from Noonan Sensei as he shares his recollections of his early years in the dojo.
Martin: We’ve noticed everybody faces challenges in life, some big and some small, but not everyone has a way to navigate these problems.
Sandra: It’s not always easy, but we’ve found that we always keep coming back to what we’ve learned from our years in the dojo.
Martin: And that’s what this podcast is all about.
Sandra: Helping us all find the solutions to last problems, or even better yet, to remove the problems before they arise.
Martin: This is Martin and Sandra Phillips and welcome to the Karate4Life Podcast.
Sandra: Okay, Noonan Sensei, thank you for joining us today.
Noonan Sensei: Thank you.
Sandra: And I guess I’m going to get straight into this, okay. So when I first met you, you would not remember. I was a green belt at a tournament in Newcastle and I remember you coming up to me and acknowledging my kata performance.
You loved it.
Noonan Sensei: Yeah, I think I do remember that, to be honest with you. I actually do remember that.
Sandra: You’re just so enthusiastic and I thought, whoa, who is this guy? And I remember that to this day. And it’s funny how, you know, you get that feedback from your own teacher, but when somebody else comes to you and does that, it’s like, that’s extra special, right?
And my second time.
Noonan Sensei: Well, just to interrupt you, I don’t do that. I don’t do that lightly. I never give praise easily.
If I thought your kata wasn’t very good, I wouldn’t have said anything, or I would have told you it wasn’t very good, but it must have been very good because I do remember, and I may not have remembered that it was you, but I do remember doing that. Now that you’ve jogged my memory, yes, it was you.
Sandra: Yeah, no, thank you. And I guess the second one I remember, which is an absolute massive highlight for me when I was training for one of my Soke Cup events, my husband, Martin, shared with me a video of you doing kumite in 1992 at the Soke Cup. And I could not believe the intensity and the timing.
It was just incredible. I’ve been around sport karate for only a short time, but to see someone fight in that way, it was just mind-blowing. And to this day, I still refer to that video to this day and say, go and check it out.
The timing’s incredible.
Noonan Sensei: Well, thank you. I had a good tournament that year. I didn’t always have good tournaments, but that year I felt particularly good.
And I think we still had the old Ippon and Wazaari those days. And I remember I particularly got a lot of Ippons that tournament, so I felt pretty good about things, to be honest.
Sandra: That’s really cool. So I guess I was reflecting on those things, right? And it’s only two events in my life, but they’re obviously very profound for me.
But when I go and talk to my students about you, I don’t think it’s right just to share those two things. And I can share some more recent stories, fair enough, but it’s like, well, who is this man? And I don’t really know you that well when I think about it as far as your training history.
I’ve learned a lot this week with you. It’s been wonderful to learn about that. But I think it’d be wonderful to be able to share with our students, share with them about who you are, because you weren’t always Kyoshi, you know, you’ve had an incredible journey.
So maybe if we started off with your current level, if that’s okay. And also, how long have you been training for, please?
Noonan Sensei: Right. I’ve been training since 1980, I started. And I wasn’t very committed when I started.
I was kind of one of those kids that were, yeah, I went, I didn’t turn up, I went again. But somewhere in that, probably first six to nine months, something clicked, and I got a passion for it. And I ended up, you know, going a bit karate crazy, and leaving a lot of other things in my life to the side when I, probably that wasn’t the wisest decision at the time, but I was only a kid.
Currently, I am a 7th Dan, and the title of Kyoshi. So that’s where I am at the moment.
Sandra: That’s fantastic. So can we ask what motivated you to start karate? So why did you start karate?
Noonan Sensei: People ask me that, and I suppose they’re expecting a philosophical response to that. But I won’t say I grew up in a real tough neighbourhood, but it was tough enough, right? It wasn’t a walk in the park.
And all the guys that I hung out with, they were all doing karate because everyone wanted to know how to fight. So I thought, well, I’d better do that too, you know, if everyone’s learning. So that’s why I started.
It’s that simple. I just started because I wanted to learn how to fight. And then, of course, another wave of Bruce Lee mania hit our group and our area and everyone.
Of course, we were up at the local cinema watching Bruce Lee, and I guess it all went on from there.
Sandra: I love it. That’s so cool. So if you can paint a picture for us, your first time going into the dojo, what was it like?
Noonan Sensei: Well, Botany Dojo, I can still remember the smell, you know, because those old church halls and the dust and we would pile all the pews up in the corner and, you know, get everything out of the way and had a dark wooden floor. The first time, of course, was scary. And I think that’s, I think I know here, even in this dojo, when kids come in their first class is a bit, they’re a bit worried.
And adults as well. It’s not just kids or little kids. It’s adults and teens.
They also get a bit nervous. And I don’t remember how exactly I felt, to be honest with you. But I’m sure knowing my personality at the time that I would have been quite, you know, a bit afraid and a bit concerned.
I didn’t know what was going to happen. And we had some pretty serious karate people in that dojo. So let’s say it wasn’t as welcoming as we probably are today.
If that makes sense.
Sandra: Yeah, yeah. So I know one of your teachers, Kerr Sensei, not well, but just, you know, very, very small amount. Can you share more about your teachers?
Noonan Sensei: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was only thinking about that this morning. And, you know, I’ll probably get teary and I never cry, but I probably gonna be teary thinking about him.
So Bill Kerr, Bill Sensei, as he’s, you know, very affectionately known, run the Botany Dojo. And he’s still around. He’s up in Queensland and he’s still training.
And I believe he’d definitely be in his 80s. We stay in contact. I sent him up a new gi the other day and he sent me some photos.
I’m actually just going to put a couple of photos up of all these people when I get a chance. So I got some nice photos of him there. Look, he was a very encouraging man.
He was very fit. He trained hard. I don’t think it’s any secret that we had less knowledge those days.
That’s the knowledge we have today. It’s only because we’ve been able to stand on the shoulders of others. Travel was very difficult, obviously.
Travel was very expensive. And to get to Japan and to organise that and people have to work. And so it wasn’t, there wasn’t as much knowledge coming out of Japan.
It was maybe dribs and drabs. So he was, he ran the dojo and certainly he was my teacher and he was very inspirational. And then there was another couple of very, there was another senior person there named Steve Davison.
God rest his soul. Steve’s passed away now. And he was, he was a really hard training, tough guy.
I don’t know what else to say about him, but he was also a very caring person. But he just looked so scary that nobody, all the young fellas like me were too afraid to talk to him, you know, just be training hard and sweating and grunting and so on. And people would just be too afraid to even speak to him.
But when I was about 15, I think, maybe a little older, I plucked up the courage to approach him and say, would you, would you mind if you, you know, gave me some extra lessons and, and that kind of thing. And so we used to train from 6pm to 8pm Monday, Wednesday. That was the normal hours.
It wasn’t this, it wasn’t a 40 or 45 or an hour, an hour and a half lesson. It was always two hours. And we did a whole range of things.
But after class, then I would train with Steve for another two hours, maybe sometimes longer. And, you know, I’d either had walked to Karate or caught a bus or something as a couple of kilometres away, maybe if I’d ridden my bike, or else he would, I’d drive my bike home if I’d ridden it to Karate. But if I hadn’t, he’d chuck, you know, I’d jump in his van and he’d, he’d drop me off, and off I’d go.
But they were, he was, you know, he was, he expected you to train hard. There was, there was that expectation upon you. And as many of my, if they’re listening to this, and many of my friends and, you know, who, very few of them are doing Karate today.
In fact, I don’t think any of them doing it really. But they will attest to the number of bruises that I would have on my body, I would be black and blue, literally. You know, I’d never get punched in the face or lose a tooth or a broken nose or nothing like that.
But, you know, we used to do a lot of sparring after class, and it wasn’t tournament sparring, it was really type of dojo sparring. And so, you know, he, for lack of a better term, he really hardened me up, and showed me a real, almost like a Spartan side of Karate, which there is, there is that side of Karate. And then the third person to have a lot of influence, of course, we’re talking about Australian people now, at Botany, was Charlie Kudlic, Charlie Sensei.
And Charlie went to Japan, it was either 83 or 84 for the first time. I know he was there in 84, because he was present when O Sensei passed away, and he was at his funeral. And he met Yamamoto Sensei and some other guys that had come in for the funeral.
But he was a, well, he is a great guy, and he’s still, he’s still, I mean, Bill Sensei is still a very good personal friend. I consider him that, and of course, so is Charlie. But Charlie would take me, you know, come over, pick me up on the weekend, and we’d go training for three or four hours.
And he just, I mean, they were good enough to put a lot of time into me. They did, they gave me a lot of their time, which I didn’t deserve necessarily, or I couldn’t afford in, there’s no way I could ever pay them for that. But they were just kind enough and generous enough to give me their time.
And, and I’m certain that, you know, the reason that, you know, if I’ve reached, if I’ve reached some level of competence, I believe that the reason would be because their effort and time that they put into me. But, and Charlie was, of course, the guy that really encouraged me to go to Japan. So Steve said, you should, you’ve got to go to Japan.
And Charlie said, yeah, you’ve got to go, go to Japan, you know. And it was a year, it was 85 when I first went. So he, he was going that year.
And he kind of mapped out how to get there, because if you want to go into it later on, I can give you some of that story. But it wasn’t a, it wasn’t as easy as it is today. And there was no Google Maps and Google Translate or anything else.
So it was, I see a husband there smiling because he’s been through exactly that. So it was, it was a little more difficult, the logistics of getting to Japan those days. But he really encouraged me to go and kind of kept his eye on me while we were there together for a portion of time.
And he kept his eye on me and attempted to keep me on the straight and narrow while I was there. So those, those three guys, I would say played a very important role, those three gentlemen, and I still have a great deal of respect for all of them. And I consider them close, close friends.
Sandra: It sounds amazing. They sound like wonderful men.
Noonan Sensei: Yes, they were.
Sandra: I got to say, it got me curious, like the training. You got to share some stories from, I mean, there’s going to be some young people watching, some old people watching, they’re going to want to hear, well, what did you do? I mean, I’ve seen photos of Kerr Sensei with these jumping kicks.
And yeah, I know it sounds insane. But can you share a little bit?
Noonan Sensei: Well, I have that photo somewhere. So we can put it on, on, on this interview of him way up in the air. And he was, he is, he’s a very, he doesn’t have a huge frame.
He’s very light and very fast, but he’s very strong too. But he, I remember him kicking Steve Davison with his legendary knee dungarees, double front kick, double jumping front kick. And he kicked him and he hit him in the chest and he drove him through the walls, the fibro walls of the toilet.
So we had to, there was some old, you know, the Churchill and there’s a couple of old toilets there in the back and they were of some type of material. Obviously it was like a fibro material or something. And of course we had that, Steve and Bill and all that, they had to replace that because Steve smashed through that.
It was not uncommon to have blood on the dojo floor regularly. That was certainly the case. It was not uncommon that people got broken ribs.
We used to spar without virtually any equipment. And then as it progressed a little more, people were wearing gloves and shin pads. That was about it.
And I mean, we didn’t have a lot of money those days and it wasn’t a wealthy area by any means. So nobody had the top line equipment or anything like that. It was a pair of bag gloves or something that you picked up somewhere.
It was things like that. So there was no standard for what type of equipment you wore. Even if you wore equipment or not, whatever it was.
And again, if there’s people that were in that dojo at that time, they would remember Bill Sensei, you know, yelling out, form a circle. And then when he said that, we all knew, oh, here we go. And everyone had to sit down in a big circle.
And we usually just crossed our legs and we sat down in a big circle. And then he’d just pick out two people and put you in the middle and then you’d have to go at it. And that’s true.
That’s what we did. And because of his military background of being a clearance diver, which is a very, very high level in the Navy, he also had a lot of self defence. He’d done judo as a young man.
So he would include those kind of judo throws and things that he knew. So the class would start with a lot of basics and then kata. Of course, no, warm-up, I should say.
I apologise. There was always a warm-up, always a stretch, always physical push-ups, sit-ups, whatever it was. And then the kata, sometimes you’d be fighting or one and two-step sparring, and then some self defence sometimes.
It just really depended on what the mood was, I think, what he felt like he wanted to do. And so it was pretty tough. And I believe, so I don’t want to overstep my knowledge, but I know that previous to Bill Sensei being there, Vance Prince had been there.
And I never met Vance at all. I didn’t know him as a person. I didn’t train under him, so I’ll just make that very clear.
But I know that it was very extreme in some of his training. And they used to do, before my time, they used to do a lot of Zenkutsu Dachi, and then that changed once we had more contact with Japan. I believe that was a throwover from Tsuruoka Sensei in Canada, where he had introduced Zenkutsu Dachi and a more Shotokan-ish approach.
Again, I don’t want to be criticised for those comments because I don’t know exactly. That’s what I’ve been told. But Steve told me, he said, we used to stand in Zenkutsu Dachi and he’d come along and he wouldn’t hit you with a shinai, he’d have a bow.
And he said, I remember him breaking the bow across my thigh, snap, cracking the bow across my thigh. So there was maybe a little bit too extreme. But I think all dojos were similar to that back in the day.
I don’t think we were, rarely, I think everyone was going to train like that. And we used to do these little small circles. I don’t know what the use was for them, and I don’t know why we ever did them.
But we used to do a lot of them until the ache in your shoulders was horrendous. And I know that some people even their, you know, blood vessels burst, little blood capillaries and that burst in there. Again, pardon me for my, I’m not a medical professional, but yeah, so it was, nobody was, nobody that I knew really, there probably was a couple of nasty guys in the dojo, but nobody really was a nasty type of character and wanted to go and hurt other people.
But everyone just went hard and injuries occurred because everyone was going hard and we lacked, we lacked technique in many ways, and we lacked probably a bit of control too. Um, and we lacked the right equipment to practice correctly. So, but having said that, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t change it.
I’m happy. I’m happy going through that. I wouldn’t change a bit of it.
Um, um, I’m very happy to have met the people that I have and, and trained, uh, where we did.
Sandra: That’s wonderful. So, I mean, from what you’re sharing, I’m sure there would have been a lot of people who couldn’t have stand, like stood that test of, you know, challenging training.
Noonan Sensei: That’s true.
Sandra: So, I mean, for people who are training now, it might not be that extreme, but I guess in our dojos, there are still, you know, time to get out of that comfort zone. We have to, to grow. Um, what’s your advice to people?
I mean, as a young person going through that toughening up, how did you keep going when it was tough? Were there examples?
Noonan Sensei: Well, well, we lived in a, um, we lived in a different world in, in a sense, um, probably philosophically a different world. Uh, and young men and young boys didn’t want to be seen as weak, at least where I grew up. Nobody wanted to be seen to give up.
Nobody wanted to see them to have a sook or a cry in the corner for something. And, um, so there was no need for any, nobody encouraged you to keep going. No one patted you on the back and said, you’ll be right.
It wasn’t, that was, that didn’t exist. It just, uh, everyone just, I think it was, we just expected this, this, this is what karate is. And so if you’re going to do karate, you better do it or else don’t do karate.
That’s what it was. Um, today, uh, you know, it’s different. It really is different.
Um, and I mean, what’s my advice? What do I tell people? What do I seriously say to kids?
I say, suck it up, stop being a princess, harden up. And, uh, I don’t mind if you cry because we do get quite a few kids here who cry occasionally. And not cause I’m beating them with a stick or anything, just to make sure that’s, um, but because they’re training hard or they’re stretching, we’re stretching hurts to a point where, you know, I try and push them along and stretching hurt a fair bit, or we’re training hard and they’re going beyond their limits.
So I just say, look, I don’t care if you cry, but just don’t give up. That’s my advice. Um, and I know I, I, I half jokingly because they know that and you can’t see there, but up there, we’ve got a blank wall, just so you people on the video know it was a blank, big blank wall.
And I, the kids know now, but I say to them, you know, read the invisible sign. What’s it say? No whinging, no sooking, uh, you know, no slack in and off, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, uh, you know, they get it then. And kids, uh, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of change in, uh, young people’s lives. Uh, but genuinely today, uh, the girls now, maybe they were always tougher.
Don’t get me wrong. Probably they were, we just had less girls training, less ladies training, less females training back in the day. Um, but today I would say definitely the girls are a lot mentally stronger than the boys when it comes to pushing through and not giving up.
Um, I’m not, you, uh, you have run a dojo for a large professional dojo even longer than I have. So I’m not sure what your opinion is on that, but that’s, that’s what we tend to find here.
Sandra: No, that’s great.
Martin: Thanks for listening to today’s episode on the Karate for Life podcast.
Sandra: If you found this episode useful, please comment on our website, karate4life.com.
Martin: Share it with your friend via social media and don’t forget to tag us, hashtag Karate for Life podcast. And if you’ve got a topic that you’d like us to cover in future episodes or a question you’d like to ask about karate or life…
Sandra: …please send us a message. We’d be more than happy to share our thoughts.
Martin: Thanks again for joining us and stay tuned for the next episode where Noonan-sensei shares some of his personal karate history. And here’s a few brief highlights of what’s to come.
Sandra: I guess for you, I, I’m sure there were some really tough days in the dojo growing up, going from white belt to black belt.
So has there been any times when you wanted to quit karate?
Noonan Sensei: Sometimes you say, I feel like quitting, but you don’t really feel like quitting. I think we all experienced that. We all know what that feels like.
When I first went to Japan, I, you know, I had a big head and I felt I was a big shot. And it was very early on that I just realised that I’m way, way, way, way, way off the mark here. Technically, it was a different world and I felt I just didn’t understand any of this.