It was time to get in touch with James Lee, KL’s resident Budo teacher. I had emailed an English student of his Johnathon, about training while there, but he was out of town on business so he gave me James’ phonenumber. I rang many times, checked the website for other contact numbers, tried them and got nowhere... fast. I decided to head to Chinatown anyway, where I was told that there was a dojo, thinking that the martial winds should blow me in the right direction. There was no street address on the website but I figured I’d find some sign of Bujinkan .....somehow.
When we got there Chinatown was a bigger hawk-market than the golden triangle. It was big with all sorts of animals, alive and dead being cooked, chopped, roasted, boiled, fed, eaten on the streets. People ate beside sewers, outside shops and in every doorway you could see.
I found an international call center - i.e. some bloke with a phone in a little stall - and rang James again. Bingo, I got through and because of a bad line/accent/street-noise I got the phone guy to tell James I was opposite a pretty spectacular Indian temple and he said he’d be there in 10 mins.
I rejoined Niall on the street and found him chatting to a very colourfull chap indeed. He was a 60+ leathery skinned fellow who seemed to me to represent all I read about Malaysia. He was half Portugese, half Malaysian… a Christian with one eye firmly trained on the decades recent upsurge in Muslim control. He reckoned the Muslims were fine but it was the extreme ones, that he worried about. He said he expected tighter control in the coming years but also mentioned how they’d never really take full control like in Middle-Eastern states because the secular Chinese were too powerfull in the country. They were the backbone he said and that was fine with him. Checks and balances. He said he’s been all around the world and experienced many cultures. He concluded that the West, the Europeans had the best of it all because they were free to do what they wanted – he was both fearful and excited about the future of Malaysia.
My immediate future involved meeting the excited mr. Lee - a namesake of that other martial artist from over the South China Sea perhaps? Maybe…. Anyway we hit it off straight away and he walked us to the room he rents to practice and teach budo. I couldn’t tell you where it was but it was hidden somewhere amongst the maze of Chinatown and it turned out to be a very spacious dance studio – now where have I seen this sort of dojo before?!
Niall was with us of course and he was happy to take a seat under on of the big ceilings fans and if he could take a few snaps that’d be great! Lee insisted that I teach something after I mentioned I had recently come back from Japan. He was hungry for budo taijutsu as he hadn’t as much acces to it as us in Ireland. It was doubtfull whether he was able to get the means to enter Japan for direct training and so took whatever he could from travelers passing through. He had been to a few seminars before and had some germans and english pss through over the years. His own teacher is a Dutch fellow living in Japan who now and then makes it back to KL to teach him.
I was happy then to show him what I learned in Japan and he showed himself to be of the right spirit when he jumped at the prospect of learning some basics as I was shown by master teacher Someya Sensei in Japan in January. The basics are so important in this art but can get very diluted and changed by time passing without correction from experienced teachers. So I started the class with these bascis and after an hour we naturally flowed into more advanced ideas as present by the grandmaster this year in Japan.
By "class" I mean that there was James who I let experience receiving the techniques as he was the teacher there and i others. I don’t know their names but over 2 hours got to know that they were excellent students and certainly would not be out of place in Alex's dojo in Ireland. There was the half Hindu half American trash metal fan, Adrian. He wasn’t studying long but was defo an eager beaver. There were 2 other junior students who were Chinese, by some way or another. The senior students were: a very friendly Chinese fellow who’s name i can’t recall but who was built like a brickhouse besides being a foot smaler than me. He had studied judo bef6re but was well able to hold his power in check and use natural movement instead. Then there was the curious Japanese fellow – a quiet chap of about 60 I’d say who turned out to be a Kendo 4th dan and had been through many other arts himself, Japanese and Asian. He found what i had to show particularily interesting and was very attentive at the Japanese that I used, politely nodding I agreement at my dodgy pronouciation of locks and throws.
After class and a mini photo-shoot – the most important thing at these sorts of things - we went for a bite at one of those street-level tables and got served a load of rice, vegtables, pork stock and soy-sauce. It was delicious and you soon forgot the traffic zooming past 2 inches from your back or the little old man washing dishes or clothes or dead anaimals at the next table.
James plugged me for lots of Bujinkan knowledge but we also chatted about Malaysia, world politics, Ireland, women and anything that could come under the umbrella of "the craic".
He also said soemthing interesting and the Japanese guy was nodding at this.... that Westerners take more interests in Martial Arts these days than the Asians and that he felt they were becoming good guardians of these traditions while most Asian countries plunged headlong into capitalism forgetting these old traditions in the race to catch up with the market place.
It turned out to be his birthday. The guy is an amazing 41……. Must be a friend of Rex’s…. and he had to ruch off to join his family as there was a party for him and his son who shared the same birthday as him. The others scattered too after many handshakes, bows and hugs and we were left with Adrian, the trash metaler who said he’d love to bring us around the place at it was the most excitement he had had in a long few weeks of hard work in KL as a graphics designer. Turns out he was part of a project to sell the new suburbia to KL city-dwellers and rural Malaysian…. The sort of american-dream marketing strategy that we had seen clues of around the city - big buildboards saying things like "Come to Valley Falls where dreams are made for the future ".. and hundreds of construction sites and new roads. It was all quite creepy but
this is how Malysia is going - a weird mixture of Muslim orthodoxy, subtle Chinese influence and Western consumersm.
So we went for coffee somewhere off Chinatown – Adrian was a pacifist hindu vegan tee-totaler – and chatted about music, American military imperialsim – as you do - KL, and of course Bujinkan. He missed his last train home amongst all this banter so we had a bite to eat and a few beers – him more coffee – I can’t imagine what state he was in at the end of the nite! We watched Bill Hicks and other comedy shows on his impressive video iPod. It all ended late into the evening and we went our seperate ways. Somehow it felt like a bizarre day of channel-hopping across one too many cultural TV channels. A carnival of mulinationalism in a slowly homogenised world. I was happy to have found familiarity in the dojo earlier.. a strange sort of kinship in this hodge podge twilight-zoned city!
