04/26/2026
The kanji for Rentatsu (Mastery)
Looking back over my time as a direct student of Hayawo Kiyama Shihan, I often find myself thinking about the moments of teaching that happened off the tatami.
For more than 25 years, I was his ride to the dojo, and we talked on the way there and on the way back. There were also times I worked alongside him, helping with his landscape maintenance business, as many of his students had done, mowing lawns and pulling weeds when he traveled to Japan. I lived less than a mile from him, and there were many, many visits to his home. Some of the most meaningful lessons didn’t happen during class, but during the ride to the dojo, working alongside him, and sitting together on his couch, just the two of us talking.
During those conversations we would discuss the deeper concepts behind training. Not just how to apply technique, but the values he felt were essential to truly understanding and transmitting the art. Concepts like nintai, shugyo, gaman…things that weren’t just about enduring training, but about how to live. We would often pull Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries off his shelf, doing our best to understand what these words really meant. I came to realize that Japanese doesn’t always translate cleanly. It often points to a feeling, something lived, something experienced, that words alone don’t quite capture.
As I’ve shared some of those concepts before, I want to speak about another one he discussed with me…練達 (Rentatsu). When Kiyama Shihan explained this to me, he didn’t just say “mastery.” He used the word “veteran,” and that always stayed with me. At the time I didn’t fully understand it, but over the years, and through training, I began to see what he meant. A veteran isn’t just someone who has spent years doing something. It’s someone who has been shaped by experience…real experience, tested through that experience, and whose ability has been forged through it. Not theory, not assumption, but something proven through what they can actually do. What I’ve come to understand as jitsuroku, “real ability”…another concept from Kiyama Shihan that I’ll delve into more deeply another time.
I saw that in him constantly. Nothing he did felt forced, there was no extra movement, no wasted effort, no need to prove anything. What he showed wasn’t something he was trying to do in the moment, it was something that had been lived through and refined over decades of honest training. Success through failure, experience built one repetition at a time. He would often say you need to do a technique 10,000 times, and sometimes, in class, he would tell me I understand a little bit…9,999 more to go. He would say the same thing to other students as well. At the time I took that as a correction, but looking back now, I see it differently. It wasn’t about counting repetitions, it was about staying with something long enough for it to actually change you.
I was reminded of that again during my last visit with him earlier this year. Sensei, now 89 years old, and though his mental acuity has been slipping for some time, still has moments where something comes through clearly. On that day, he motioned for me to grab his wrist, and as I did, he connected to my center and, sitting there beside the couch, effortlessly applied technique and my body rose up onto my toes. No strain, no effort, it was just there. That moment stayed with me, because even as other things begin to fade, what had been ingrained through years of training remained. The body still knew, the feeling was still there.
When I think back on those many, many visits, sitting there talking and trying to understand what he was really trying to show me, I realize now that this is what he was pointing toward all along. That’s where the meaning of rentatsu really comes through for me. It’s not just experience, and it’s not just time, it’s what happens when that experience is refined. When the unnecessary starts to fall away, when you stop relying on strength, speed, or trying to make something work, and instead begin to feel what is actually there. There’s a steadiness that comes with that, a kind of calm, not just physically but mentally as well. That, to me, is just as much a part of it as the technique itself.
I should also say that I myself am far from mastery of the concepts taught in Daito-ryu. I am still learning, still evolving, and much of that comes through my own failures. There is still much for me to understand, and in many ways that is the very nature of continuing training. The concept of mastery, and at the same time never being content with where you are in your training, always continuing to pursue the art because of the depth that it has. Kiyama Sensei always told me to beware of the person who claims to have all the answers, because that person has stopped learning.
Now, as I sit here with my own dojo, Daito-ryu of Cedar Rapids, I feel a responsibility to pass these lessons on to my students. Not just the technical aspects of the art, but the deeper lessons that were passed on to me through my teacher. The things that don’t always show up in technique, but shape how we train, how we think, and how we carry ourselves both on and off the mat. This, as it was conveyed to me, is part of the path in Daito-ryu, not the accumulation of techniques, but the steady, honest process of training, correction, and refinement. Over time, if one stays on that path, something begins to change.
That is what I believe Kiyama Shihan was pointing me toward when he spoke about rentatsu.
