Steve Fasen found aikido almost by accident. After training in karate for a number of years before coming to the Orlando area, he wandered into an aikido class when his kids’ gymnastics class ran over. A few weeks later, Fasen met Dennis Hooker and proceeded to follow his teachings and later became friends with his newfound instructor. Today, Fasen met up with us to talk about his time under Hooker and his contributions to the larger aikido community. All Images provided by Steve Fasen. This is the second part of a two part interview. View the first part here.
MAYTT: When did Hooker establish his Shindai Aikikai? What factors led him to take such a step in opening his own dojo and what do you think his primary goal was with setting up a school? Were others involved in getting things started in the early days of Shindai Aikikai, and if so, who were they and what role did they play?
SF: He established Shindai under that name, I believe, around 1986. When I met Hooker Sensei, he had an advanced student who was probably up around shodan, who had a gymnastic studio and that was where the dojo was. He had a few yudansha from other teachers, like Dan Vacarro. That was back in 1986 to maybe the early 1990s. He had had a couple of small dojos before, one up in the panhandle, offshoots of which lasted for a number of decades. Once he got established in Orlando around 1986, it stayed here. He went to Saotome Sensei and basically told him that he was starting a permanent dojo here, and asked him to name it. Saotome Sensei was the one who gave him the name “Shindai” for the dojo. There were a couple of physical locations after that before we wound up in the place we are right now since 1996. I think he started the dojo because Saotome Sensei told him, “You teach.”
There were other people who taught, but they were not Hooker Sensei. Like I said, he usually taught Monday and Friday. If you wanted a Wednesday class, he’d asked someone to teach it. One teacher was the now retired Eric Stein. Another I told you about initially, Danny Vacarro, had trained with Doc Walker, then later began teaching with Hooker Sensei. Later on, we had a university professor, Dr. David Jones, who became the senior instructor at Shindai for several decades. He was a Rhode Scholar, philosopher, author, Social Anthropology professor, musician. A brilliant individual who expanded the spectrum that was Shindai. Eventually then, their senior students began to take a roll. So, there were other people that were there, other classes that we went to, but they weren’t Hooker Sensei. At that point, and until Hooker Sensei passed, he was Shindai Dojo.
MAYTT: When did you take over teaching duties at Shindai Aikikai? What was that experience like and how did the new responsibilities change your perception of aikido?
SF: It’s interesting because I was having this conversation the other night with someone else. [Laughs] Probably the mid-1990s he instructed some of us to begin teaching. It was part of Shu-ha-ri. There was a point, if you trained consistently with determination, discipline, and the kind of passion Hooker Sensei wanted to see, you were required to teach. Teaching is a humbling experience. He would pick somebody if he was out of town or if he had a meeting to teach his class, so they could listen to their own (“bullshit”). It took a long time for him to trust individuals to teach full time classes. Since we had Dr. Jones teaching, it was quite a while before any of us were given the onus to teach a regular class under our own name, so to speak. I probably didn’t start teaching regular classes until sandan/yondan – somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Again, going back to Shu-ha-ri, I learned this from Sensei, it is something I now insist on at Shindai Dojo. There’s a point at which your ability to learn aikido must include seeing yourself in the reactions of your students, hearing your own voice in that process. The artform requires that perspective, an ability to see, an ability to find empathy and your own expression. Again, anybody can do kotegaeshi, but teaching is very important to the learning process, at any given point. Hooker Sensei, without verbalizing it all that much, would put other individuals in that position. It was saying to them, “So you think you got this?” When you get out there and open your mouth and have to demonstrate what you think you know, it’s a real come to Jesus moment for most people. So, he would feed their ego the rope. Everybody thinks they can fly without wings and the humility usually sets in during that process. It’s a good thing – it’s a very good thing. Being given teaching responsibilities we were accountable to the gift he had given us, which included taking our knowledge outside the dojo. We represented him and our dojo in the world. I know that all of us that were put into that position started to train more around the United States to further test ourselves. We started to train with everybody that we could lay our hands on; that was our crucible. I’d say his gift of teaching was the biggest thing that gave us a mature perspective.
He formally requested I take over the dojo as chief instructor in 2013. He was not well by then, so he may not have been in his right mind. [Laughs]
MAYTT: I was thinking about my first time teaching. I was at a loss for words on how to explain things because I was used to doing it and not explaining it.
SF: Exactly! [Laughs] It is such an important part of the training process. We’ve gone through quite a number of our yudansha teaching at our dojo in the past three years. It is my insistance that they have an opportunity to teach. It is not always met positively by the other senior yudansha, but it’s necessary if we are going to generate the teachers of the future – the next generation. Rank, unfortunately, is often misinterpreted as teaching capability, which is far from the truth. The process, however, is necessarily illuminating. We have to create accountability, not just performance. I came to appreciate that under Hooker sensei’s tutelage.
MAYTT: Hooker wrote a popular article on Aikiweb, entitled Polishing the Mirror and Grinding the Stone. How do you feel that article reflected his own personal training and in turn, how he chose to train his own students?
SF: You should know that writing for him was difficult. He was profoundly dyslexic. Another thing that did not hold him back. Saotome Sensei insisted that he write.
His theories on grinding the stone and polishing the mirror were analogized in many, many ways in his teaching. So, to put it very simply, he might do sumi otoshi and he would have somebody attack any way they wished, and the uke would come in like the freight train looking to “touch” him if they could. He would meet that force with an appropriate vector and an appropriate amount of force that would send the person across the room. You’d hear a response from the person before you hear their mass hit the ground. Then he would talk about, “That’s grinding the stone.” And we’d do that over and over and over again until we understood the mechanics of force, or couldn’t get up. Then he would polish the mirror and have the same attack and it would look like he was laying a feather on the person’s shoulder. They would still go to the floor as if they’d been hit by a truck! It was just very soft, excellent timing, and beautiful connection. Then he might go into all of this requiring no more weight than the weight of your arm. We would do that to exhaustion. He vacillated between those two – that was his pendulum. There were times when we’d have class and there was a general announcement that for the next week, we were going to grind the stone. It would be a long week. Then we would take some time off and polish the mirror. Over a while, it would seep into our brains of granite that polishing the mirror was not a matter of doing something soft with your partner but rather finding the control within yourself to do that – finding that place where you can control. That was truly making your energy and your partner’s energy the foundation of how your center’s interacted. It’s very complex because, as you see in that article, with this pendulum, grinding the stone and polishing the mirror, there is this huge difference and yet none. Yin/Yang. There’s such an amazing spectrum of places that you could be and study the same thing on all of those different positions on the spectrum, if you will. It’s something that he narrated in his teaching all the time.
Grinding the stone and polishing the mirror is something that he took to a lot of seminars as well. From that, I took my favorite analogy, where the jo is an excellent metaphor for what we do in aikido. It only has two ends, yet what makes it work is between the two ends. Balance is a point between relative to what’s going on. Hooker Sensei’s grinding the stone and polishing the mirror, there was a whole infinite range between life and death, the white and black. The “huge safe place (to be)” in order to be connected to everything around in balance. He would practice this way, so some of his classes would be very hard, and then not. If you wanted to play koshinage, for example. If you wanted to get thrown hard, get thrown high, and thrown over the hip, that’s fine. And then he would polish the mirror and say that all we needed to do is understand the energy and just get the hip in the way enough so the person can convince themselves that they had to take ukemi. There’s no throw necessarily involved. Same result, but not like grabbing somebody in a judo throw and launching them over your shoulder. He taught like that all the time. He had his poetic moments.
MAYTT: That’s amazing. A lot has been said about aikido in recent years, much in the way of harsh criticism, especially regarding its training and effectiveness. How do you feel Hooker would respond to such critiques and how did he address effectiveness within his own training and teaching?
SF: This is nothing new. He didn’t like some of what was happening, but he accepted the inevitable evolution of the art to our contemporary cultural circumstance. He was a gruff warrior type; destroying something and harsh training was something he felt was necessary. Tactical technique expedient at times, but times change. Like most, he started to see students that were not incapable, but unwilling to do the hard training. So he did what he did. If you did not appreciate what he had to offer and how he offered it, he wasn’t wasting time trying to change you. He set the buffet. If you didn’t like what was there – the door to the dojo swung both ways. I think though that Hooker Sensei did leave behind a legacy of individuals that feel that if you don’t understand the bunkai, that there’s a certain facet that’s missing. You hear what you want to hear and stop learning when you stop listening. He led people to the ramifications of their own demons. Some people try to train what they call that hard aikido, but its just mechanical force. That is not what he taught. Again, I go back to my comment with Saotome Sensei’s aiki. Saotome Sensei does things, and he certainly can grind the stone, in the vernacular, of the warrior. Bring it if you want to play that game. Hooker Sensei trained that way and taught that way. But he always trained and aspired to interact and find a resolution in ways that (like his teacher) people had no idea what he just did to them, leaving it for them to figure out how he did it. Where it was easier for us combat guys – former karate and judo type of people – where physical force was part of our pablum some stop and stick with that. Not all of any few students reach peer level with, much less surpass their teachers. Some of us were coming up recognizing that Saotome Sensei was doing things that Hooker Sensei did not. Hooker Sensei pointed us to that, yet we never reached his level. He was a hard ass, but made appropriate comments that this was easier if you are young, strong, and testosterone ladden. It does not mean, however, that it is more effective training, or being the hard ass required it. So near the end Hooker Sensei polished the stone more.
I saw a great transition in him between fifth dan and seventh dan. He came to me at one point and said, “Now I’m going to stop teaching. I’m going to come to the dojo, and I’ll be up in front of class, but I’ll be using you guys to learn, to do my training.” Still searching for the truth of his aikido. That was because he had gotten to a point and realized that there was a great amount that he didn’t have conversancy with. There was a time when he would kind of denigrate other instructors because they did not seem to have the force and the power. Then he went to a couple of seminars and had an opportunity to train with these guys and would come back into the dojo and basically say, “We’ve (I’ve) got to figure this out.” I think that’s quite natural with individuals that continue to train for life. He was closer to Saotome Sensei in those years. As he got a little bit older and progressed in rank and knowledge, there was more and more the ability to accomplish what we wanted to with just the weight of the hand or just the weight of the arm. He grew like everybody else that continues to train.
MAYTT: It seemed like that Hooker took more of an individualized approach to what is effective and how his training reflected that.
SF: I think that he saw himself in that. He lived and trained a warrior mythos, but he was budoka. He recognized a lot of what we see as capability is allowed, but it is also greatly limited by a person’s individuality, so he kept growing. He came to a point where he accepted his limitations more, but was never satisfied with where he was. The state of aikido, where we are right now, and I think we are only on a plateau with Covid and the direction of the world, he would accept. I think he would’ve also believed that – in some cases, some people and dojos have lost their way because of no personal identity. They don’t have the ability to teach on a very wide spectrum, but are just fine going through regurgitative motions. It bothered him over the years, because of the popularity of aikido, that aikido dojos were started and run by nidans. They got to be Sensei, but stopped learning at that point to become the limitation of their dojo. That’s Darwinian. I don’t think he would damn them for it – it just is. But I think everybody in aikido today talks about the good ol’ days back “when men were men.” When you talk about O-Sensei prewar and after the war, you saw great changes in his execution, philosophies, and I think that’s been a natural evolution that has continued. I believe Hooker Sensei agreed that aikido was meant to change, but he was old school and preferred that the good old days continue. We’ve lost the Saitos, the Chibas, the Toheis, the Hookers; we’re losing so many of the people that had a direct association with O-Sensei – Saotome Sensei is one of the only ones that’s left. Once that’s gone, we have a functional legacy of memories and interpretations, Aikido will become something else. He was pragmatic about that. At the same time, Hooker Sensei continued to teach the way he taught. That was him as an individual.
MAYTT: What do you think Hooker would say about the current state of aikido today, pandemic and all? Would he be pleasantly surprised on how the art has made its way through such challenges, or would he offer some constructive criticism on how things should be looking to move forward?
SF: I really don’t know. I think the scale of Covid’s pandemic disruption would have made him a bit nuts. I think he would be dumbfounded that we have survived thus far as we have. I am not sure the change in the culture would have been good for him. [Laughs] He had his own ways of coping though. His dojo is still here and just fine.
He became accustomed to the unexpected over the years. For example, for a while I had arranged at Shindai Dojo something we called the East Coast Bridge. I reached out to top second generation instructors who were probably in the process of making their names as the people that we consider iconic in aikido in the United States. Different organizations and regions, all great teachers, absolutely magnificent aikidoka, most of whom had never met each other. This was probably ten years ago and most of these people are sixth and seventh dans now. We brought them in to teach and train together. No agenda. No expectations. Little remuneration. They just came in to teach, to meet one another, and to listen and learn because generally these people don’t get a chance to train in that way. They’re always asked to be headliners at seminars. Hooker Sensei thought I was nuts, a same sized fish in his own pond. This was well out of his comfort zone. One year where we had some really amazing instructors: Todd Jones, Kayla Feder, Greg O’Connor, Mary Heiny, Michael Fiedle and others, and they had dropped a day’s worth of absolutely brilliant aikido classes. When it was Hooker Sensei’s turn he walked onto the floor; I knew Hooker Sensei and I looked at the tanto in his obi and I went, “Uh oh. This can’t be good.” He addressed everybody and he said, “Listen. Everybody has been teaching marvelous aikido – marvelous aiki. I’m going to teach you what it’s for. The part that isn’t pretty,” or something to that effect. He took that tanto out, when his uke attacked, he cut the guy four times, stab the guy three times in the liver, and smiled as he walked away. By comparison to the other classes, it was almost offensive. But he made a statement: “Don’t forget that’s there.” Bunkai. All the teachers still talk about that. I think he would continue to teach in that fashion even in a pandemic as our world finds a new shape. Don’t forget. I think he would continue to teach to remind people that what you know is marvelous, but question what you don’t know and can’t anticipate. Be confident but don’t be comfortable. Be happy but never be satisfied. Use the principles to stay safe in what life has to challenge you with. In the end, I believe he would say, “None of this happens unless you train. None of this happens unless you train with everybody you can lay your hands on, and that includes me, but wear a mask. Self-defense is your responsibility.” He would teach to maintain a basic integrity to the fabric of what he had grown up believing aikido to be.
MAYTT: Final question. In your opinion, what are some of the major contributions that Hooker provided not only to the ASU but to the larger aikido community?
SF: Well, I’m talking to you. So, somewhere along the line, you heard about Hooker Sensei. His voice is out there. I think he made a very significant impact on aikido and on people’s desire to train aikido. I think he set indelible expectations. I’m not too sure if he knew that he did that, but in retrospect, now that he’s been gone since 2014, I see that all the time. Shindai Dojo trains that way every day. We had a temple bell created by one of the people that trained with him over the years as remembrance and metaphor. every class period, that bell is rung. That is our mokuso. We sit in contemplation for the entire time that bell reverberates, which is about a minute and thirteen seconds. Every day, every class, that bell is rung. It calls us to his voice and supporting his legacy. His contributions in time may be forgotten and fade in time. But while we, and people like you writing about him, are here doing this, his legacy, his teachings will reverberate. In places he visited all across this country, dojos in California, Oregon, in Colorado, Washington, and Florida; Tennessee, in Texas, and San Juan. People that trained with him still talk about the fact they were Hooker Sensei’s students. As long those things are said, as long those memories are there, and as long as those efforts are made, his legacy will continue. What did he leave? I think that’s it. I think it’s a belief that you can, if you put enough into it. His Shindai is a testament. It’s proof that it’s not going to get done if you don’t do it. I think he left that for everybody. And in that, I think he was just an outstanding instructor.
Hooker Sensei was a unique human being, that satisfying meal that put something on your bones. There will never, in my opinion, be another individual like him. I’m everlastingly grateful that I had an opportunity to train under him. I’m humbled that Hooker Sensei will always be my sensei. I am proud that my sensei affected as many people as he did around this country.
MAYTT: Thank you again for taking the time to talk about Hooker and his contributions to the aikido community!
SF: It was my pleasure!
This is the second part of a two part interview. View the first part here.
To learn more about aikido and it’s history in America, click here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 