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How/why did you first get involved in ninjutsu? By Highland Ninja - Mon, 03 Sep 2007 08:09:14 GMT

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In an effort to generate more friendly threads, I figured I'd start one about how and/or why we all got involved in ninjutsu. I'll go first.

I was always interested in martial arts as a kid. Bruce Lee movies were always amongst my favorites, and I always wanted to learn "karate" (my generic term for "martial arts" back then). One day I was at the neighborhood library and found a book called Asian Fighting Arts by Donn Draeger. In it, I saw for the first time a picture of a historical ninja (it's where I got my avatar scanned from). I was both fascinated and intrigued by what I read there, and I don't know how to word it, but it somehow felt familiar - as if I had found something I had been looking for but did not yet know what that "something" was.

Shortly after that, I saw the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, and I had my heart set on learning ninjutsu. Unfortunately, there was no ninjutsu training in America at the time. So I studied karate and eventually met people like Dan Inosanto, Bob Duggan, etc and studied other martial arts.

I then came across a book called Ninja: Invisible Assassin by Andrew Adams, and I was even more enthused about ninjutsu. Still, there was no training to be found.

Shortly after that I heard the name Stephen K. Hayes and discovered that he had not only trained with Soke Hatsumi in Japan, but was back in America teaching. He had a few seminars at the Degerberg Academy in Chicago and I attended. During the second seminar he conducted, I ran into some other guys my age who had a similar introduction to ninjutsu and they in turn ran into a man named Rick Hansen from Highland Indiana. Rick had a very tiny group that had just started studying ninjutsu at the time (outside of his hapkido classes), but they had also met Stephen Hayes and were looking for more regular training. Suddenly the group had 4 or 5 new members (me, my brother, the other guys who joined) and Rick asked Steve for a regular teacher. We got lucky, because Steve had Roger Stebelton sponsor us. So Roger was our full time teacher.

We ended up spending all day on Saturdays driving from Chicago into Highland and training (after the "official class" was over, the core group did additional training). We soon met some other guys from Evanston and the group grew. Tuesday nights were special outdoor training in stealth, tracking, and other useful skills (emergency medical training, rappelling, etc). Eventually I met Soke Hatsumi, Shihan Nagato, and others at the Ninja Festivals or at various special training events that took place in and around Dayton. We'd often drive into Germantown, Ohio to visit (read: train with) Roger and sometimes Larry Turner or Dan Johnson.

That was in the early through late 80's. I then travelled all over the country and long story short, I am back in training and looking forward to finally visiting Japan. Funny how finding that tiny picture and few pages of info all those long years ago would one day lead me to Japan.

So, who's next? :)


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