After spending his teenage years participating in competitive stick fighting, Nick Lowry found aikido by reading a magazine and finding a local dojo. Upon his first watch, he was hooked and quickly became uchi deshi to Chuck Caldwell. He later learned from Caldwell’s instructor, Karl Geis not only aikido but judo and jodo as well. In 2009, Lowry left Geis’ organization to form his own Kaze Uta Budo Kai and continues to help guide the organization on an advisory level. Today, Lowry took some time to discuss his early training, Geis’ approach to martial arts training and his legacy, and writing his book, Aikido: Principles of Kata and Randori. This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Hello and welcome Lowry Sensei! Thank you for taking the time to be here!
Nick Lowry: The pleasure is all mine.
MAYTT: As a youth, you trained in competitive stick fighting, but then at eighteen, you began studying aikido, judo, and jodo. Which of these three arts served as the gateway art to the budo arts?
NL: Oh, definitely aikido. I was eighteen. It was 1982. I walked in the dojo. I had only read a brief article in Psychology Today Magazine about aikido. I was fascinated by it. I came in and watched a class, and it was love at first sight. I was smitten. I couldn’t think of doing anything else at that point. [Laughs] That was it.
MAYTT: What was it about aikido that drew you to it?
NL: I started with the competitive stick fighting paradigm, and I was doing that in my teenage years. I was pretty salty with it. I looked around; I had seen hard style arts and people breaking stuff, I’d say, “Yeah. I can understand breaking stuff. I can hit stuff really hard. That’s cool.” But man, the first time I saw aikido in action – they were just demonstrating some basic Tomiki katas in the dojo that evening – the visceral power, the absolute sense of, “Yeah, this shit works,” this is the real deal, and wow! the displacement of bodies through the air. The entire program of it, I could relate to the sensations and the movement, from the impact that I already understood, seeing the impact that was being delivered through aikido was radically powerful.
MAYTT: What has kept your interest in aikido all these years?
NL: Well, initially, – this is the early 1980s. We’re all children of Star Wars, that was the dominant theme of my early life for those years. Here was this route to jedi powers. I mean, damn, it was like you could become superman; you could do superhero things. Not only could I see it, but I also felt it and I felt it in my own body, and it was unassailable. The technique and the mastery that I experienced in the seniors that I had the privilege to train with was spooky good and it really made a deep impression on my eighteen-year-old mind.
I remember, I was probably a green belt or so within the first year or two of training, and I had an opportunity to do toshu randori with my sensei’s sensei, Karl Geis. He was just tossing me around like nothing and I was a good size, bulky, strong nineteen-year-old dude and I was a toy to be played with – it was ridiculous. I remember he threw me – I did a rolling break fall – and as I was coming back to standing and I looked at him, he made just a gesture and we were probably ten feet away, and I felt the entire right side of my body freeze on the spot as he did that. And my interpretation at the time was, “Holy shit, he hit me with a bolt of ki power from his fingers.” It had an internal sensation. My interpretation at the time was not very sophisticated. Later, I understood the mechanics and what was going on there on a subtler level, but at the moment, it felt like fucking magic. It was like, “Wow. I don’t know how he did that, but I want a piece of that.” There was a definite hunger in my young, late adolescent mind for that kind of power.
Later, other skill sets would impress me. Eventually, I think I became really addicted to the impact. That was both my glory and my downfall. [Laughs] Just the fact of that visceral impact of ukemi, the positions and situations of being off balanced, kuzushi, and the consequent ukemi became what was satisfying on a very physical level to me and was a large part of what drove me. I just had to get another dose of that. It’s addictive. It’s like you watch a bunch of rugby players and ask yourself, “Man, why do those guys beat on each other like that?” Well, because they love that fucking impact; it makes you feel like a Viking! Rahh! “I’m alive and testosterone is racing through your system, and you survive again.” It builds a resilience, and it builds an intensity. It allowed parts of me to come alive that hadn’t been expressed in regular growing up Oklahoma life, if you will.
MAYTT: You might be one of the few aikidoka that really enjoyed ukemi and that was one of the main aspects that drove you to keep coming back. Many people talked about throwing people in the air, but not many people have said that the ukemi was really fun.
NL: Well, for me, I think it was more than just really fun because it was an addictive property. There’s something about in judo where you’ll get in there, grapple your ass off with a partner for half an hour, and you come away for it that is just a bunch of sweaty guys in gis rolling around on the floor trying to rip each other’s arms and heads off and hold each other down, and afterwards, it’s like, “Shit! That’s better than sex.” There’s something almost that satisfying with great ukemi that something in my body responded to that and said, “Yes! More of that. As much as possible. Right now.” That’s a great thing. I didn’t have it within myself to temper that as I got older and that became problematic. It was fun, but it was more than fun; it was satisfying some unconscious part of my make up.
MAYTT: Around that time, you began training under Chuck Caldwell at his Windsong Dojo. What was he like as an instructor and how would you describe the training you experienced with him?
NL: I got to be uchi deshi with him for a little while. I lived right there in the dojo and slept on the couch. Chuck is a strange and wonderful character. He’s both masterful in technique but he’s also one of these gifts of gab guys that would tell tall tales and half the time you don’t know what’s what. Magnificent performer that way; a musician and a really cool older dude and I love him to death. He really inspired me more than anything or anybody. The top takeaway from Chuck, more than technical coolness that he transmitted, is just that he had a dedication, come hell or high water, to keep the doors open for that dojo and to keep on teaching. And because of the situations and conditions in the 1980s with the oil bust in Oklahoma and the economy went to crap, money dried up and people disappeared, and it was really lean times. He would be out doing odd jobs or selling his blood at the plasma place, or whatever the hell it took to just keep the doors open for another month.
These were extremely primitive conditions. The dojo itself at the time had no heat, no air, no running water. The heat in the winter was a little kerosene heater which would stink up the whole place and only warm you about five feet away. If you had to use the restroom, you had to go across the street to the convenience store or out in the gravel parking lot in the back. It was a really urban, primitive life. [Laughs] It was not modernity in any sense.
He was willing to live in that – he lived in the dojo – he accepted me in the dojo, and I was just as nuts as he was. He inspired me with his absolute commitment. The biggest takeaway from him was whatever it takes to do it another seven years. And if it kills me, that’s fine. He would do it in seven-year increments and would just amazingly keep on doing it year after year. So that’s what Chuck was like.
He is technically very competent, very clear. The coolest thing in my mind about not only Chuck’s program, because he was going by the methods and ways and means from Karl. About ninety-five percent of what he was laying out was just straight from Karl. Now Karl’s system as a didactic form is amazing in the fact that it reduces things down to its constituent physical units and concepts. It’s a reduction of the vastness of what is aikido into a small set of heuristic devices to transmit very clearly, very concretely, piece by piece, how the whole thing works.
Now, also, as you go twenty or thirty years into it, you realize, “Oh, it doesn’t really cover everything.” [Laughs] What it really is is a great system for transmitting and teaching and instilling a foundation of basics and a great platform for building more advanced skills. Karl’s great line was, “Follow all the principles all the time, and the exceptions will make themselves known to you over time.” Looking back, they weren’t really principles; they were more axioms of teaching. That statement was sort of his “get outta jail free card” for everything else in aikido that wasn’t explicitly dealt with within his system. And because he didn’t get into subtleties of proprioception exactly or explicitly get down to that level of it, he had a very simple system of transmitting the large swath of basic ideas to transmit a sophisticated approach to aikido. It was technically, carefully laid out, and consistent. You could get into it and feel like you knew it, and this goes from that to this to that, and it’s all very clear. There was no haziness about it. The technical requirements were all laid out, so you had a clear understanding of where you’re at and where you’re heading to next. The fundamental principles, as he described them – like I say, more axioms – they were not esoteric at all. Karl avoided the esoteric pretty thoroughly. Maybe, sometimes to a fault. But his method did have this power of transmitting technical detail to you and maybe over teaching, in a sense. People were really excited to lay it out for you and give you all the keys to the kingdom and that was an exciting place to grow up.
The downside of that, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that if you’re overly taught, you don’t get to discover as much on your own. You’re kept in a narrow field for a long time. You feel very ego gratified that you know all this cool stuff, and this is the right way to do it. And you look around to everybody else in the world doing aikido and you say, “Ah, well…They’re all doing it wrong.” [Laughs] Well…no. That’s not quite it, but that’s sort of the mindset you wind up with when you’re in a system like that. That was the downside. The upside was it was very gratifying, and I did learn a hell of a lot in a short period of time.
What was it like training back then? It was day in, day out, three times a day; that’s what I was doing. When I picked up jodo and judo on top, it just made it crazier for a good long while. Simply put: I was a fanatic.
MAYTT: It seemed like he was a notable teacher. In addition to training under Caldwell, you trained under his instructor, Karl Geis. How did he compare to Caldwell in terms of instructional method and training experience?
NL: Karl brought a certain intensity; he brought a certain clarity; he brought a certain forcefulness of personality unlike anybody that I had seen in my life, and a very rare few times after and since his passing in 2014. The quality and the clarity of the material of how he transmitted it, regardless of what he was teaching, the pragmatic basis that he always brought it back to was head and shoulders above, not only Chuck Caldwell Sensei, but all of the other seniors. At this time, this early 1980s, you’d walk into the dojo and there would be this one dude wearing a red and white belt and everybody else was a bunch of black belts, brown belts, and green belts. He was the only dude with one of those special belts. It’s a judo tradition to wear the Kohaku belt above rokudan, and he was the only one around that I’d ever seen in my life. There was this prestige, obviously. I mean, everyone could have walked in there, stripped down to their shorts and it’d be really clear, really obvious in a very short amount of time who the teacher was and who had the real mojo, and who could dance the dance and lay it on you. So yeah, I wouldn’t compare Karl to Chuck because Chuck was one of a cadre of people – I think when I first ran into Chuck Caldwell, he was a nidan. He was a pretty competent nidan and a very creative nidan. One of Chuck’s great capacities is his amazing quality of creativity. He would get a hold of a piece of technical something and just play with it. And the way his mind would play with it was just stunning on what he would come up with sometimes. He had remarkable creativity. I’ve never been that creative. Karl wasn’t creative in that sense. Karl was great at taking vast, complex things and reducing them down to really simple terms and making it explicit that way.
So, I would say Karl’s forte would be in his explanatory power. Chuck’s forte was in his creativity, and the fact that he was impressed enough with what Karl was laying down and that he could do an adequate job keeping that same current flowing into what he was teaching.
MAYTT: What brought you into judo and jodo after you began training in aikido?
NL: Well, when I first saw the judo that Chuck was teaching (he had not trained extensively in judo with Karl at that point) while the majority of his aikido had been done with Karl. But his judo had been from judo he’d picked up from when he was a kid in the 1960s from local teachers in the area. It was not impressive at all. It looked like a bunch of nasty wrestling around, and hard work, and like, “Well, yeah. If you want to go wrestle, that’s a great place to go.” I did not see or witness or see the finesse of judo until Karl came and gave a judo seminar – he called them clinics – in Oklahoma City in 1983 or 1984. Because he could transmit judo with even more finesse than he did with the aikido – Karl was first and foremost a judo man – it was breathtaking. It was amazing and it was easy to fall in love with that too, once I had encountered the more sophisticated version of it.
Jodo was a hard sell for me because of the stick work that I had already done. When I first looked at jodo, and this is not the whole system of Shinto Muso-ryu – this is really only the Seitei kata, the smaller set of forms that were taught to the Tokyo Riot Police, which was Takaji Shimizu’s main contribution to the art. That was the body of jodo we were concentrating on, the first twelve katas, the kihons, not the big ass system. It was a hard sell because I had done so much stick swinging. I thought, “Oh, they’re just taking turns. This is just goofy.” I couldn’t really relate to it until I felt it with somebody like Karl acting as the stick side and me swinging my sword around the way I knew how to swing swords around; I quickly became a believer. But I had to feel it from the inside because from the outside it didn’t look like anything but goofy. That was the last thing I got into. And I was wrong – it was real.
The thing about what Karl Geis would do is whatever martial art system or technique, or whatever he got a hold of, is that he always did it with the same sense of randori he had from judo and with the randori he had with aikido. It had to be following those same sets of basic premises and controls. And it had to work that way; he had to have that dominance and control in whatever the fuck he was doing with it. [Laughs] He could have been doing karate and it would have come out the same; he’d still be dancing on a string. [Laughs] whether he had a stick in his hand or up close and personal with grips on your gi or out there on the edge of your fingertips, it all felt the same. It was seamless. No other teachers I ever ran into had that. Also, with everyone else, the judo would feel a little different from the aikido and the jodo would have its own power and control, but it didn’t have the same off-balance you would have, the kuzushi. Karl would express kuzushi across the board in whatever the hell he did, and that’s where the Jedi mind tricks happened, that’s where all the mojo was. It would just be more expressions of the same body of work.
MAYTT: That is amazing how he took three different art and expressed them in the only way he knew how, but he did that consistently throughout each art.
NL: He was extremely fortunate after World War II, to have tutelage in very competent people at the Kodokan, for his judo tutelage. He was a direct student of Yoshimi Osawa, and he was a close student with Tsuneko Miyake Sensei. He got to train with Toshiro Daigo. These were the people that wound up being the next echelons of the tenth dans. I think Osawa just passed recently [October 21, 2022] if I’m not mistaken. And Daigo’s passed too in 2021. And they were legitimately high tenth dans. I mean, there’s a lot of goofiness in ranking in the martial arts, but the upper end of judo at the Kodokan, that’s real shit. [Laughs] That’s all been really proven with sweat, motion, and impact, and they don’t give those ranks away.
Karl had opportunities with that quality of teacher that most people in the judo world did not have and he took those lessons where he’s always working at the lowest threshold of pressure possible to do what is required to be done, which can be just a damn feather touch for many parts. That’s really the essence of where he developed his seamless feel I was just talking about; that quality of touch was instilled by Osawa Sensei from his judo.
When he first got into Tomiki Aikido, they were all still caught up in competitive Tomiki forms with Mr. Hideo Ohba, Tetsuro Nariyama, and whatnot, all very powerful, but it was pretty cranky. It was slam-bang; it didn’t have that same light touch.
Karl tells a story about a senior student from Minoru Mochizuki’s system who comes in, a guy by the name of Henry Copeland and Henry Copeland was a physical giant as well a very accomplished martial artist from Yoseikai. He trained up there with Mochizuki in Canada and Japan. So, Henry came in, and he’s not only a skilled badass, but he’s a giant, skilled badass. He’s another six inches taller than me and is big everywhere. He gets to do some hand randori with Karl and Karl could handle him. But he said afterwards, “I could handle him, but it wasn’t easy like I told everybody it ought to be.” That created a dilemma, since he’d been teaching smaller women that with aikido, they could be able to handle a guy twice their size. And now he comes off the floor feeling like a fraud because he’s been teaching this shit and oh no, it’s not as easy as he’s telling people it ought to be. It touched his conscience and he decided to take the entire system of aikido as he had received it from Mr. Tomiki and Ms. Miyake and other seniors and apply the soft touch paradigm to it across the board – Osawa’s touch basically – and see if it still worked. And if it didn’t, he would just scrap it and just teach judo because he felt ethically clear that with what he was teaching in judo, he knew where he was standing. But at that moment he didn’t know where he was standing in aikido. [Laughs] So this would probably be before I joined; this would probably be in 1978.
He trained his ass off and went through the entire kata system and the entire repertoire of aikido that he understood at the time and applied this finesseful approach that really grows out of the more Kito-ryu side of things than the Daito-ryu, or at least the Daito-ryu as people had experienced back then. Lo and behold, the next time Henry showed up, Karl could play with him like a puppy; it was not a big deal. It was what he was telling people what they should be able to do. That was the sea change for Karl, in terms of aggregating that touch into the aikido itself.
MAYTT: I see. During your initial training years, how much contact or interaction did you have with other aikidoka and judoka? Were they open to you and your art or were there some hostilities?
NL: Oh, both. [Laughs] There was not a lot of contact with other forms of aikido. There was a prevalent sense of elitism; “Well, we have the best shit in the world, why would we go mess around with anybody else?” This was something that Karl generated around himself with his absolute self-confidence that he projected into himself and into the world around him, and that just became, “We’re just doing our thing. Why even bother with that goofiness.”
I did have some good training time, though, with an aikido practitioner from Vietnam; a man by the name of Quang van Tran, who shared the dojo space for a couple of years at Windsong. He would do the morning class. Quang was a boat person, escaping Vietnam in the early 1980s – refugee. And he had been displaced and came over to this country and was getting his life together. But he had been training in aikido and teaching aikido over there. So, when Quang appeared on the doorstep, asking, “Hey, can I share your mat?” Chuck said, “Sure. Take the early morning class.” So, at six in the morning training started with Quang and I’d be in there rocking along with his program. It was pretty different. It was vigorous; it was very aerobic; it was not technically explicated. It was a show and tell thing; he would show, and I would try to replicate. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about the details. It was a lot of sweat and motion. And looking back, that’s as valuable as anything, but to my mind at the time, it was like night and day. I was getting a hell of a workout with Quang, but I wasn’t feeling like I was learning very much. That part of my brain that was, “I gotta figure out the next five techniques for the katas;” that wasn’t addressed at all with his kind of work. He had a more traditional style. You just get up and do what you’re doing, and that’s aikido and you don’t worry about all of these gobbledygook katas and stuff. [Laughs] So I did have some exposure with Quang. Not much exposure outside of that. There weren’t a lot of crossovers. Occasionally, there would be people from other systems. In aikido especially.
Judo is different because judo dojos, if you have the guts to put up a sign that says you teach judo to the world, judo people will show up; they’ll wander in and see what you got. And in some ways, that’s a beautiful thing and in some ways, that’s a treacherous and scary thing because you never know what’s going to walk through the dojo. You gotta be prepared for the ball on Sunday. So, there was quite a bit of overlap with judo.
But in terms of aikido and jodo specifically, those were pretty insular. Those remained more insular and later, I would think they were kind of ghetto-ized; we hid in our own little bubble universe in that stuff mostly. [Laughs] Years later, there would be big events, like friendship festivals in Oklahoma City. You got to go visit and see and participate some and look around and you get to feel a little bit of what people were doing and by and large, I got the impression, in those early years, “Yeah. They got something that looks a lot like what we’re doing. Sort of, but they crank a lot, and we don’t do that.” In our system, you always have the ability to make more pain if you want, but it should not be the primary training device – that’s a weak tool to rely on under pressure.
MAYTT: When did you first start teaching?
NL: Karl’s system is designed to build teachers. The technical requirements go up and are explicated in what your training material is up through about sandan. Beyond that, it’s really what kind of students you’re producing. So, it’s geared around developing yourself as a teacher if you want to progress into higher ranking. How you’re judged for, say, yondan, is what quality of shodans are you producing. If you’re up for rokudan, then we want to see what kinds of sandans you’re producing. That sort of thing. So, it’s a system that’s really geared towards producing more teachers and having that dissemination built into it.
I started training in 1982 and I attempted to open my first dojo in 1987. So not many years; I was still a young whippersnapper and had no idea how to run a business. I was just excited and had the opportunity. “Okay, I’ll open up a storefront and I’ll put some mats down and I’ll just do like what my crazy teacher Chuck did and live in the dojo, and it’ll be great!” It was great, sort of, but I also didn’t know what the hell I was doing, business wise. I wasn’t truly prepared to be an entrepreneur in any sense. I was just a madman in love with his art, teaching with it, and doing all I could with it. That led me in that direction. Looking back, I probably should have waited another ten years or so. That early entry into teaching, in an attempt to start propagating, I wasn’t alone; there were a number of people. A lot of people would set up clubs at universities and be teaching university classes early on, or moving out of the area. One buddy, Art Spearman, was just a shodan. He moved to New Mexico and set up a university club and he taught for thirty years. It’s an easy system to replicate and transmit and so it’s easy to teach if you have the mind for that sort of thing. And teaching was part of the deal. As soon as you were a brown belt, you were to help instruct the green belts. As soon as you’re shodan, you’re helping out with the sankyus, nikyus, and ikkyus – the brown belt grades. That just carried forward.
This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
To learn more about aikido and its history in America, click here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 