JKA of San Francisco Bay

New schedule starts September 1.

New fall schedule! We sublet from a ballet school that takes over both studios on Friday nights in the autumn to prepare for a performance of the Nutcracker.

Starting in September and running through December, our Friday class is replaced by a Thursday class. Same time, 7:00 to 8:30 PM, in the smaller room.

Our compassion goes out to the people of Japan who suffered in the recent earthquake. 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/28/world/japan-earthquake-kumamoto-tsunami

Map: 6.8-Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Japan View the location of the quake’s epicenter and shake area.

Congratulations to our students Eugene and his senpai Liyou on their wedding! They brought cake to share at the dojo.

I've now spent twenty years of my life—a third—in California. That's as much time as I spent in New York, my hometown of choice. A big reason I went to New York on the cusp of adulthood was to train with Mori Sensei, who was famous (one might say notorious) for being fiercely traditional, and just plain fierce.

Before I met him, I thought a sensei was someone who taught you technique—who helped you perform better. Mori Sensei did that for me, but it was not his goal to simply speed your technical improvement. Possibly I may have gotten better at karate faster—in a physical sense—if I had gone elsewhere, say if I studied in Japan. But my twenty years in his dojo were a gift. I experienced a long-term apprenticeship with a sensei who believed that karate was a path to training the heart, that it made you a different and better person through tears and sweat. He often made himself an obstacle that we had to overcome, so we could learn to push ourselves to do more.

I'm grateful to my other teachers—the nidan who taught my high-school club in a small farm town, Robert Fusaro in Minneapolis, his son Michael, who taught my club at Carleton College. I learned a lot from them. I have learned much from the various instructors whom I've visited or who came and taught camps, many of the leading lights of the JKA of the last forty years. But Mori Sensei didn't just teach me, he changed me. I remained his student for another twelve years, at a distance, until he passed away in 2018 as a 9th dan of the JKA. He teaches me still in my heart. As he wrote, "Spirit first; techniques second."

The photo is from my going-away party in the old New York dojo in 2006.

T.J. Stiles
Chief Instructor
Japan Karate Association of San Francisco Bay
Berkeley, CA