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 second part of a two part interview. Read the first part here.
MAYTT: Did that experience change your perspective of aikido, if at all?
NL: It’s the classic thing of you don’t know what you know until you try to teach it. It’s amazing how when you have to absorb information and metabolize it within yourself and then you have to express it, how it completes some kind of circuit that, otherwise, doesn’t get completed. I think there is a special quality to teaching that fills in the gaps in your understanding and your transmission. To this day, I will sit around most of the time in my life without an aikido, judo, or jodo thought in my head, like I don’t know nothing. Just don’t seem to have it in my consciousness or my awareness at all; I have a sense of narrative that I did a bunch of that and it’s in the background somewhere, but until someone asks a question, I don’t know what the hell I know. And then, suddenly, they ask me a question and then it’s, “Holy shit. I know a lot.” But I don’t know it until I do it. It’s pretty weird that way.
I think that’s what develops over time is your unconscious takes over teaching it. It’s not your conscious mind anymore. Your conscious mind can still do some cool creative things – “If I do this this way, how would that turn out?” But generally, the unconscious does it. That boundary of consciousness and unconscious touches on.
MAYTT: That is an interesting way to look at teaching. When did you assume leadership of Windsong Dojo? What was that experience like for you?
NL: Chuck started heading up to moving to Colorado in 1998 or 1999. By this time, I had drifted off, tried to run a dojo, come back, started back into the dojo with Chuck, completed my higher education with a master’s degree, and started teaching English at university. As opportunities developed to teach more at the dojo and basically act as his chief assistant and help keep things going as it grew, it was far more gratifying teaching at the dojo than it was teaching college composition and literature. The kids coming to learn writing were not there to learn much other than to get the grade, to get the degree, to get the job, to get the money. That was their mindset. While the students coming into the dojo had a vital interest in really learning this powerful, cool stuff. There was a completely different culture that was far more satisfying teaching in the dojo, at that point. So that would have been the early 1990s when I really went full-time teaching at the dojo with Chuck. I started volunteering my time and being at every class that I could.
In 1997 or 1998, Chuck’s wife, Vicki, who had been supporting him living his dream of living in the dojo and running this big school for many years and at a certain point, she was saying it was getting to be her turn; “I want to go live in Colorado in the mountains and let’s go!” He agreed. He had been supported for a long time by her and what she would put up with him and now it was his turn to turn around and give back, so he did. So, as they prepared to go take off and live up in the high country, I approached him and purchased the business from him. I said, “I’ll keep it going as long as I can, Chuck.” And that’s what I did. So that would be 1998 into 1999.
MAYTT: Once you officially and legally took over Windsong Dojo, what was that experience like for you?
NL: It felt okay, largely because I’d been doing the volunteer work up until that point. The one funny thing that I noticed was that when I was just volunteering my time for Chuck and the dojo and being there all I could that way, it was not an expectation automatically. It was something I was offering. There were things that were fun, like going to the martial arts store, going to century martial arts, and buying gis and all the junk. That was fun. I would just go drive over there and do that and I was doing a favor for Chuck and the dojo. When it became something I had to do because we’re out of gis and we need more gis for students, the fun went away! [Laughs] It became a damn chore. But by this time, I was more adaptable to learning basic business principles and saying that I need to learn how to run this thing. My sense was that, in terms of a technical system of what I was inheriting from Chuck and this dojo was that it was world class- it was amazing. I was inheriting the people and the cadre of seniors and folks training, that was world class too.
But the facility needed help. The facility had always been just barebones marginal. There was no heat, no air, no running walker in 1983; by the time we get to 1998. Well, we did have heat and we had running water, but we still had no air, but we had the biggest mat in the state – fifty-foot by fifty-foot, huge sprung floor. Chuck would invest in the things that were most important. But in terms of physical plant, it didn’t have a great frame. After I took it over, I started looking for a place that could be a permanent home and we could really bring it up to the quality of the people and the material. That became one of my driving things over the next few years after taking over.
MAYTT: It seemed like you were more prepared compared to your first outing of running your own school.
NL: I’ve had a longer view and a much more mature view with a wider variety of people with a wider variety of circumstances. Running a place and teaching a place at the age forty-five was pretty good. We had a hell of a ride, and it worked out pretty well. It was much better than my initial attempt that failed in the late 1980s.
MAYTT: In 1996, you published a book Aikido: Principles of Kata and Randori. What inspired you to put your thoughts to paper and share them with the world?
NL: I was always a notetaker. I always took notes at every seminar and every clinic and a lot of classes. I had voluminous amounts of notes with details from senior teachers and from Karl. Early on, I always thought that we should have little handouts for folks that have the names of everything, and we should have little write ups of history and explanations – student handbook type things. I have been involved with those over the years with Chuck.
In late 1995, I had a problem with my left big toe, and I was only thirty-four or thirty-five at the time, but I would be taping up my toe all the time. I’d go to judo class, and I would tape it up all the time. It just kept getting worse and worse; I kept taping it up and figuring it would go away but it never did. I finally went to the doctor, and they said, “Shit, you got gout.” I’m thirty-five years old and I have gout in my big toe? That was remarkable. So, they did a surgery, and they fused that joint and they said, “Don’t do dumb shit that gives you gout anymore.” Good luck with that. I was recovering from that surgery. They give you the pain meds; I’d take those, and they knock me the hell out, but then I would wake at two or three in the morning, and I just can’t get back to sleep. So, I’m in this weird, zombie state. I didn’t want to wake my wife up and make any noise, so I just started pulling my notebooks out, saying, “Well, maybe I can spend this time where I can’t be dancing around on this dumb toe, maybe I can make something out of it.” That’s what inspired it. I started scribbling it down and wrote the first draft in a week or two and took another six months or so polishing it and working with my buddy Shawn to do the artwork. Kitty Sullivan, one of the seniors to me, kindly read through it all and made suggestions on stuff to fix. That was that.
It was self-published because I didn’t figure that it’s on a topic that wouldn’t be so interesting to the aikido world at large or any big publishing house at large, but at least it’ll exist for the crowd that I was hanging around with. If they wanted it, they could have it – great. It went that route and got it in print. Print on demand is amazing. Anybody can write books now; just shoot it out to the machine.
MAYTT: How did writing your book help you understand aikido better, if at all?
NL: It forced me to look at bigger pictures. It forced me to question assumptions that I hadn’t questioned as easily before. It forced me to try to put it in a broader context.
At the time, I thought I was writing a general aikido book. Looking back, I was writing a book that was very specific to the crowd that I was with. In my mind, spending six or eight months writing a book, if you’re going to put that time and energy into it, you might as well write to the whole damn aikido world because that’s a good size crowd. You’ll sell a lot more copies potentially. That wasn’t even in my head. I didn’t really recognize how insular that world was that I had written it for. Looking back, it’s obvious, but at the time, that was not obvious. If I was going to write another aikido, I’ll write it for the whole damn slew. [Laughs] If you could get it on Oprah, that would be great; maybe some tie into Human Potential. Eat. Pray. Love. Aikido. Some kind of bigger message thing to get people turned on.
Market wise, for the same amount of work, what’s your potential upside? If it’s a labor of love, then it doesn’t matter. Your upside is that you’re nuts and enjoy; more power to you. [Laughs] But in terms of actual labor and time and the all-consuming craziness that writing a book takes, I could’ve been smarter about that. If I’ve had a wide swath of experience with aikido and the larger martial arts community, I would’ve written a different book.
MAYTT: In 2009, you established your Kaze Uta Budo Kai. What factors led you to create your own organization? Have you achieved the goals you set out of reach when you first began Kaze Uta Budo Kai?
NL: I never thought of doing it; I never dreamed of that. It was never an aspiration of mine. In the late 1990s, probably by 1998 or 1999, Karl was having private conversations with me about becoming the successor to his system. He didn’t make that public to the rest of the world until around the mid-2000s, like 2004 or 2005. So, the sense was that I was going to be taking over the Fugakukai, the system he had developed for aikido. I thought that’s what it was going to be and that’s what it looked like it was going to be. But as things came to pass, Karl became more difficult to work with as the years went on. He was a very demanding teacher and a very demanding friend to have, frankly. But as long as I felt like I could put up with that just because, “Well, my students are getting the benefit of learning from this dude who’s one of the best in the world at what he’s talking about. Fine, I’ll take the hits”. The students get the goodies; it’s worth it. At the point where my students were starting to take the hits, it had made me step back and go, “Whoa. This ain’t part of the deal.” I have been inculcated in a quasi-abusive relationship here and I have learned to accept it, but I am not willing to accept it on their behalf; I’m not willing to watch them take that. That came to a head in late 2008. I was in a weird position because he had already put me forward as being this potential successor dude. So, it was like, “Well, I either have to try to kick Karl out of his organization – ha ha – or I gotta kick me out of his organization.” So, I picked me, and I just hoped that there would be folks that would still want to do what I was doing. And then I had to figure out what the hell I wanted to do from that point forward.
The main thing I wanted to do, once I did separate from Geis Sensei, was to take a lesson from how he had done things that I would do differently and give myself the space to do them that way. The technical requirements didn’t change but the financial side changed because I wouldn’t charge for ranks. He had a ranking structure with fees attached to each diploma; I got rid of all of that. I didn’t want to be in any way shape or form to be involved in anything that looked, felt, or smelled like selling rank. It was not in me. I wanted something that would teach us as freely as possible and support all the other students and schools that wanted to hang around with it in any way they needed without exacting the tolls that I had paid. I tried to create an organizational structure that was more egalitarian, seamless, and easier on the local senseis, teachers, and club leaders, and not quite as burdensome.
I wanted to get the material out far and wide. That was just a sense of wanting to pass it on – the old Japanese obligation thing; your teachers have gone through these great privations in order to bring this to you and now it’s your job to pass it on. I wanted to discharge that obligation as thoroughly as I could; I chose to publish online and make it widely available for whoever wanted it. That also served to be messaging towards all the folks that I stepped away from when I walked away from Karl, to let them know what I was doing and how I was doing and make it all transparent to them so they weren’t completely dependent on whatever story Karl was going to spin at them. [Laughs] I did this because I’d watched Karl deal with losing other seniors– when Chuck Clark left, when Dennis Dorris left, when LF Wilkinson left, and different departures over the years and I’ve seen, up close, and heard exactly how that went, in terms of the political, the narrative, and the storytelling, and the crap. I was going to put out a countermeasure saying, “Hey! This is what I’m doing. You can listen to whatever stories the old man wants to spin – that’s cool. But here’s what I’m actually doing. You can see it for yourself.” That allowed me to have an even playing field, so to speak, in the market. At least to the people that gave a shit. [Laughs]
MAYTT: After you left, since you were the heir apparent, who took your place and how did events play out on Karl’s side?
NL: In Karl’s system, he didn’t have anybody else quite like me. He had George Webber and George Webber had been the fellow that had done the massive amount of recording of all of Karl’s video tape work for publication. George became the titular new head dude, the grand old man to go to after Karl passed. His own dojo was run by a cadre of his top seniors there at the time. But they had a falling out amongst each other and they lost the real judo people, which is tragic in my mind because the heart of that school had always been this really powerful judo program. I don’t know what’s become between the Karl Geis Legacy Dojo people and George; I’m not sure what shook out with that and who became the new fearless leader; I don’t know if there is one.
I would’ve looked to some of the senior judo guys because they had the deep end knowledge of that touch like nobody else. With their departure, there’s a senior named David Witt, who is the top dude in aikido in Houston for Karl’s dojo. At least, the last I saw was in 2016, I’m way out of date. I don’t know what’s going on these days. There’s some other senior aikido, but judo is gone; jodo with David Lusk. Oh, there’s another old timer, BG Smith, and he’s a master old dude and senior to everybody, but I don’t know how interested he is in administrating or teaching that much. So, I can’t really say what exactly has become of that. It was sad to see it go the way it went up to the time that I kept following and paying attention to it. David Witt, maybe; BG Smith, maybe. There’s other names and they might have the ego for it, but from what I could tell they don’t have the technical qualification for it, so they could step up and pretend but they couldn’t actually do what had to be done and replicate where they’re coming from. [Laughs]
MAYTT: What was the reaction when you left Karl’s Fugakukai and began your own organization? Was it a positive result with you leaving to form your own organization?
NL: It was more positive than I could imagine. I didn’t really imagine that it would be as positive as it was. I maintained a strong relationship with a wide variety of people that, in previous iterations of the departure of the senior dude thing scenarios of the past, they would become an anathema – they would be cast out and everybody would just ignore and shun them. When Chuck Clark left, we didn’t even talk about Chuck Clark anymore. Nobody even kept up with him; same with LF; same with Dennis. It was unusual, to me, that seniors like my teachers Chuck Caldwell and old judo guys like Cliff Norgaard, and senior dudes from Karl’s own schools like Bob Rea and Rick Pollard, particularly the judo guys would all keep coming around and still be friends. I was still friends with George Webber; I would see him about once a month.
That was all unusual, because, normally, when there was a split with Karl, then you were just cast off and nobody was going to have anything to do with you. In this case, they still interacted with me – I was amazed. Karl was flaming mad, crazy pissed and I’m sure spun everything he could; At one point, I heard that he’d said, “Nick’s just a carbon copy of what I do. Why would anybody go to Nick if they could get it from me?” and that struck home – it was a legitimate criticism –when word got back to me, that was one of the things he was saying, I was like, “Yeah, I need to do my own thing. I need to have my own interpretation. I need to have my own language for it. I can’t keep espousing what Karl kept espousing.” I needed to give something of myself to it. And that was legitimate, and I followed through with that. It prompted some growth in me that way.
It was remarkable that there was so much support from the old timers that I did not expect to happen.
In terms of the local scene, I didn’t lose a soul. I remember calling up all of the senior folks and telling them what I was doing, thinking, “Well, they can just decide to turn around and make their own dojo and keep with Karl. I could understand why people would do that.” And nobody did; they all stuck around. It surprised me, frankly; I thought I was going to lose the whole kit and kaboodle.
It was difficult; it was like a bad divorce. You have the gut clench feeling with terrible days of divorce feelings. It had a strong emotional impact on me and several around us. Just because Karl’s personality was so overwhelmingly strong, the imprint of being around him was right in your guts, that’s for sure.
MAYTT: Final question; Geis helped pioneer aikido, judo, and jodo in the United States with his Fugakukai. In your opinion, what is his legacy in each of these arts?
NL: Karl did a great job in transmitting the Tomiki system into a modern context that was relevant to the time and culture. He divorced it from the sport application and took on an ethos of self-defense as the final reason for it to exist in aikido. He carried through with that in a way that was masterful and powerful, and easily transmissible. I think that the clarity that he brought, in terms of transmitting aikido, I’ve never seen anybody quite rival it.
In terms of judo, if there is really high quality ashi waza in this country, it is largely owing to the influence of the Karl Geis judo school in Houston, Texas. His work in terms of understanding the dynamics of footwork and light kuzushi and the awesome power that comes with that specific body of the judo technique – unrivaled. His grappling work was equally badass, although in today’s world of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the ongoing milieu of ground grappling, Karl was way out ahead of that from the 1950s on and had, again, some of the very best teachers in the world. Tatsukuma Ushijima, Mr. Shirai, and a handful of others, that in their generation, were the top in the world and he was one of that top as well.
Karl would always buck the trends of the dominant organizations. For instance, in judo, I think he was one of the ones that drove the foundation of having more than one judo organization in this country, because, at the time, they had a monopoly. He said that wasn’t fair; “You can’t just have one ranking organization and one governing organization for judo. You gotta have at least two.” And it was his raising hell about it that forced them to do it basically. I don’t know if that helped looking back on judo from this perspective, [Laughs] but it had a strong impact. But he had some powerful impacts politically as well as technically.
Jodo, I have more mixed feelings about jodo because he treated it like it was the all and everything of jodo. Until Miyake came and taught a seminar dealing with some of the chudan material from the classical system, and he would have none of it. “No. We gotta go back and work on the first twelve.” He had the system down that he wanted and that’s what we did. He always did a much smaller, more concise form and never really allowed us to branch out into the broader from to the degree that when I first started putting videos out saying, “Hey, this is Shinto Muso-ryu jodo.” I got repproached by actual Shinto Muso-ryu jodo people who said, “You’re full of shit.” I had to step back and ask why. They said, “’ like you’re advertising this bubbly wine and calling it champagne but it ain’t from Champagne, France, man. You’re not doing the whole deal; you’re doing this thing. You’re doing the Seitei kata; you’re doing the smaller system that was developed for police.” It was eyeopening. “Oh, you’re right. I haven’t thought of it that way.”
I always assumed that we’re getting it from Karl, and he was getting it from Miyake Sensei, so its Shinto Muso-ryu jodo; that’s what it is. Looking back, it really deserved to be called, “Karl’s Jodo.” [Laughs] “Karl’s Jodo that had the same kind of kuzushi in it that his judo and aikido had,” because nobody else has quite that either. Renaming it to something more appropriate makes a lot of sense to me. He did a great job of what he did with it, but he did not transmit the bigger picture of jodo – I don’t think he was interested. I think he felt like the more elaborate system convoluted his nice, German, precise, well-honed, well-crafted set of things to cover all circumstances. They don’t, but it covered enough, why so even bother with Takaji Shimizu’s entire system. Just stick with the modern stuff and that’s what he did. So, what he did with it, he did well, but he didn’t necessarily do what he said he was doing in terms of the actual Japanese nomenclature.
Karl came up in the 1950s and 1960s when you could get away with certain things; no one spoke Japanese. You didn’t have that many people coming and going from over there. You could say anything in any kind of language you wanted to. I knew old guys that had judo schools and karate would get popular, so they would put a karate sign up on the wall and invite people in and sell them judo lessons, because, hell, no one knew the damn difference. It was really a different world and I think, as time moved on and you started having more interplay with students actually going to Japan and coming back and learning language skills, and actually knowing what’s going on and knowing what people are saying for real. That was uncomfortable for Karl because he came from a time that had a lot of slack that way.
I feel this way that these days that when a question comes up, we could all just Google it, like what happened in Puerto Rico in 1943, well we could just Google it. In the old days, my generation, people would just make shit up. They would just make shit up and pass it on as a good story and nobody would know the difference because nobody would dig up the encyclopedia, go to the library, and dig it up, look it up and find out. People just spouted shit and that was just normal. [Laughs] We talk about misinformation or fake news, but it’s always been a bunch of who-ha. And that, I think, was pretty uncomfortable as time went on for Karl, that it became more difficult to continue doing what he did the more the language barrier broke down and he wasn’t the gatekeeper for that.
A wider and wider degree of information about the Tomiki system came out or other books about jodo were published. When I started jodo, there was only Michael Finn’s jodo book in English, which was tiny, and it only had the same material we were doing. That really worked well, because we got a book! And it’s the same stuff we’re doing. He didn’t really talk about the much bigger picture – we didn’t get Pascal Krieger’s jodo book until twenty years later, then it’s like, “Holy shit. There’s a whole lot more to this thing than what we’ve been doing. It’s kind of uncomfortable. We’ve been working from this tiny textbook over here and here’s this giant thing.” So, I think as time went on, it became tougher for him because he liked to have his own tight little fix on the world and have it his way and nobody to ask about it. [Laughs]
MAYTT: Thank you again for joining us to talk about your time in aikido and Geis’ legacy!
NL: Thank you for having me.
This is the second part of a two part interview. Read the first part here.
To learn more about aikido and its history in America, click here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 